Thomas Newman Quotes

There's always so much more that can be conveyed on screen visually in the expressions of people's faces, in their bodies, in their body language. And also with sound design, with music.

The atmosphere defines the environment of sound.

I love to hear a cool ambient sound at runway shows. It creates a good energy.

There is a tendency to underestimate the power of what we can do without words. Sometimes you can make a scene even more powerful and precise without dialogue.

I discovered that silent film is almost an advantage. You just have to think of the feeling for it to show. No lines pollute it. It doesn't take much - a gaze, an eyelash flutter - for the emotion to be vivid.

Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.

You have to make an audience experience with the ears as well as their eyes.

There are certain sounds that I've found work well in nearly any context. Their function is not so much musical as spatial: they define the edges of the territory of the music.

The best way to show an emotion is not through a character's words, but their smallest expressions - to take what an actor would visually do and try putting that down on the page for the reader to 'see.'

My favorite sounds are the high, spacey ones that are very ambient.

Sometimes, scenes are great without any music at all.

As much as movies are about the words that you're saying, they're also about what's not said, the silent moments.

It's a good challenge as an actor to express feelings without saying too many words.

'Piku' was driven by subtleties. Most films come with the padding of the sound, the visual, the drama.

Certain things work on paper held together with staples. Comics use bright colors to make things leap off the page, but movies are a different medium.

I wanted there to be something to fill the space and to catch the listener's ear, but I didn't want there to be any 'Virtual Self' songs that had a clearly defined vocal with lyrics and top line. If you do hear any lyrics, it's just your brain filling in the gap, because those moments are just various syllables combined.

With 'Midnight Special,' the sound was used as a narrative construct. The audience is looking in one direction when a sound suddenly erupts from the other direction.

I wanted to hear sounds of everyday objects - even musical instruments - as things.

There are certain things that I will do viscerally to affect people emotionally, with speed changes and sound, and various other things. Sure there are links; the same kind of sensibilities went into it and I worked on writing that script as well so there was an emphasis on a minimalisation of dialogue as far as possible, to focus on the visual and to put it in another language, of course.

One of the most telling things about film school is you've got a lot of students wandering around saying, "Oh, I wish I could make a movie. I wish I could make a movie."

One of the reasons that metaphor and symbolism are important in books is because they are also important to life. Like, for example say you're in high school and you're a boy and you say to a girl: "Do you like anyone right now?" - that's not the question you're asking. The question you're asking is, "do you like me right now."

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

We knew how important it was to have a DP, because most web videos are horrible, because they shoot against a white apartment wall with no directional mic, you know? Those simple things, like knowing you have to have a sound guy, and that a YouTube video needs as much color as possible.

Body language is so important, as is composition. You can not say something, and then the body reacts, and it says a lot of things dialogue can also say.

There's no such thing as silence. Something is always happening that makes a sound.