Michel Hazanavicius Quotes

Singing is about telling a story. When you are onstage, you get to be your own self... When acting, you're someone else.

One of my favorite things to do is not to speak on screen. In theater it's different because there's a lot of emphasis on language - it's a different medium. But that is one of the most wonderful things about film. A person's face can say so much more than their voice can.

Dancing is the personification of music, and music is an abstract expression of the human spirit. But still it's the act of communication, of making one feel. Otherwise it would just be gymnastics.

When you are modelling, you are creating a picture, a still life, perhaps something like a silent film. You convey emotion but you are only using your body.

The experience of reading a book is always unique. I believe that you render a version of the story, when you read a book, in a way that is unique and special to each person who reads it.

Acting isn't necessarily pretending. It's storytelling. It's giving someone your perspective on something.

What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.

The most important thing in the face is the eyes, and if you can make the eyes talk, you're halfway there.

With most of the songs and music that I've composed, irrespective of the myriad videos made, I was always careful not to overly define the experience, leaving room for people to internalize things for themselves, making their experience more integral.

Different people get different things out of the images. It doesn't matter what it's about, all that matters is how it makes you feel.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

I understand why people went nuts for 'The Artist.' We use words so much, it's nice to be able to explore a different way of communication, to be able to express silently what someone - or something - is thinking or feeling.

There are times when the power of language is not the power that is needed.

I read things and imagine them and then kind of start trying to kind of take what I imagine and make it visual for everybody else to see. It just happens to be my personal vision, and every person's is going to be different, every book reader.

I think there's a great deal of information you can convey with looks or silence.

When a story is told really well and is real, even if it's not about their own lives, people can apply it to themselves.

With silent films, you're better off avoiding irony, because the spectator is your accomplice. It's this pact that leads to emotion being created.

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.

When someone is on the phone telling me a story, I'm hearing the soundtrack that goes with it.

Because the beauty of songs, I think, is if you do it right a lot of people can relate to it in their own way and make their own meaning out of things.

Art, when done well, creates empathy.

I think acting, for me, is about play. It's about time, and it's about feeling, like there's a story to tell and I can tell it through my body and my voice.

If you're singing, you're telling a story. So to tell it and tell it right, that's it.

It's not enough to play a song: you have to inhabit it.

To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.