James Lafferty Quotes

The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.

There's a certain visual grammar you've got to stick in. For example, if a character has just woken up, draw him in his pajamas with the bed a bit rumpled. Or if he's ill, draw little bottles with red crosses on that immediately communicate medicine, and a box of tissues.

Some of the most important stories don't lend themselves to television treatment.

Objects let you tell a narrative that encompasses everybody. Texts don't.

It's too bad for us 'literary' enthusiasts, but it's the truth nevertheless - pictures tell any story more effectively than words.

I've always been a 'write first' artist: the drawings are always in service of the writing.

Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience.

I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.

A sketch is just a mini movie.

Sometimes, what's not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.

Silence is argument carried out by other means.

The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

I think there's a connection with 'Nightcrawler' and 'Blowup' and other films where visual imagery is integral to the story. It allows you to play with images.

What I can't tell with a photo I will tell with a painting, and what I can't tell with a painting I will tell with a video or text sometimes, et cetera.

My job is to take the pictures, communicate a message, to bring those images to the greater public through whatever publication I'm working for. My job is really to be a messenger, and that's what I've been doing.

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters.

For me, nudity and strong language have never been huge loadbearing elements of how I like to tell a story. Graphic images certainly are.

That night image had replaced the written word as the natural language of politics.

“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.

I understand the visual media very well, as I used to write comic books for Walt Disney, and I've written a graphic novel. How you carry a story in pictures is different than how you do it in text.

I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.

If I really believe that visual representation and narrative are ways to convey important, complex ideas, and if the world is gravitating toward this form, then geez, I better do it myself. I want to do it myself.

We all identify with the people we see, and in a good documentary, we are not just reading an account of the world, we're seeing and hearing our world.

Image-making, along with storytelling and music, is the stuff that culture is made out of.