Italo Calvino Quotes

The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.

Hitchcock makes it very clear to us. There's an objective and a subjective camera, like there's a third- and a first-person narrator in literature.

I think from an early age I was aware of how a camera can tell a story, how a movie camera can affect how the narrative is told.

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

In a thriller, the camera's an active narrator, or can be.

A special effect is a tool, a means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing.

A shot is only as every as good as how well it tells the story.

There's two aspects of film crafting that I'm very strict about, and that's how I move my camera and where I cut the film.

It's kind of the filmmaker's job to use visual, cinematic language in a way possible to tell a story that reaches and touches as many people as possible.

I try and let the film do the talking.

I see my role as a translator, telling the story that's in the book using the more visual language of film.

The essence of cinema is editing.

That sort of detailed filmmaking is one, hard to do and not have it be pretentious, and two, have it tell the story, which is what you're taught, that cinema is the language of images and you really should be able to make a film with no dialogue and tell a story.

Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds.

I'm older and wiser. So and now having segued into filmmaking I'm looking at [Ridley Scott ] and what he does in an entirely different way and I have respect for what he does and how he composes shots. So that was what was completely fascinating.

Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.

There is visual illiteracy with text-oriented films like bloody 'Harry Potter' and 'Lord of the Rings.'.

That's the miracle of telling a story in film: You can express something inside someone's mind.

The major difference frequently is in time. The motion picture, for example, gives you considerably more freedom of expression than does the confined thirty-minute television show. But in essence, they're not that dissimilar.

It is true that language and forward movement in the cinema are jolly hard to reconcile. It's a very, very, difficult thing to do. […] There is still a place in the cinema for movies that are driven by the human face, and not by explosions and cars and guns and action sequences…there's such a thing as action and speed within thought rather than within a ceaseless milkshake of images.

Employing women as my primary protagonists has allowed me to step outside of myself, to distance myself from my own personality, far more easily than were I to look at events from a masculine perspective.

I always say writing is like dreaming, shooting is like living, and editing is like murder, because you take all these gifts that actors give you, and you cut them.

I think my leap into TV and movies and comics is in a way natural because I'm a visual storyteller. If you look at any one of my short stories or novels, they sort of unscroll cinematically. Every scene is concrete in my mind. I can walk around the room and pick things up. I can describe at length every feature on the character, though I might only supply a glimpse of this on the page. So if I'm writing color into that I'm also writing texture, I'm pushing the image more than anything else.

It's good filmmaking when you don't have to say anything and you can still tell the story.

The ability to get inside your character's head in a graphic novel is really fun and useful because one, you can really define the character's voice and two, it's a way easier way to convey what the character's thinking by actually laying out what he's thinking.