Callum Keith Rennie Quotes

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

I made several short films with very little dialogue. I'm still not a fan of talking heads. My stories are told with images as much as possible.

When you see a silent movie, you understand everything that's going on from the images because the images are so strong.

I'm going to make a film where not one word is really important. I'm going to make it all action.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

Actually, I met a lot of directors and most of them have that fantasy to make a silent movie because for directors it's the purest way to tell a story. It's about creating images that tell a story and you don't need dialogue for that.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

As I started to develop as a director, I wanted to do projects that were inherently more cinematic, where the freight was not so much in the dialogue, where it would be carried more by the camera.

I've never made a film using dialogue or speech.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

I try and let the film do the talking.

We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.

I supply a presence. There are never any long dialogue scenes to establish a character.

I didn't quite realise until we started to put together our first cut of 'Wonderstruck' how much time is spent with no words spoken whatsoever.

Film is anti-language.

The best cartoons have no words at all - just the image pops out.

You don't get to hand footnotes to the audience or explain what you were trying to do and what it's supposed to be. Everything has to be on the screen, and it has to be clear.

As a cinematographer, I was always attracted to stories that have the potential to be told with as few words as possible.

I love dialogue, but I'm also terrified of it. In all my movies, I've done my best to cut out as much dialogue as possible. I love the spaces in those silences. Even in 'Pete's Dragon,' I was so happy that the first twenty minutes have about five or six lines of dialogue.

'Khamoshi' gave me the chance to prove that expressions can also say what dialogue could.

My position was that the film begins with the first frame and that the film should be doing a job at that point.

In 'Tom and Jerry,' there was hardly any dialogue at all. It was all action. It required a great many drawings to make.

If action scenes just happen decontextualized, they lose their weight and the viewer can feel they don't make sense and that they wouldn't have happened that way.