Alan Rudolph Quotes

The movies that influenced me were movies that told their stories through pictures more than words.

A close-up on screen can say all a song can.

The photographic image... is a message without a code.

Mirrors are the essence of movies.

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.

One picture is worth a thousand words.

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

Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.

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.

It's a risk, but I'm sort of ready to let go of thinking of movies as books that you can watch. The notion of, 'If I put the narrative blocks in the right order, this will solve all of my storytelling problems.' No, it won't, and you end up with little more than books on film.

Film is not literature - the image on screen is the information you get.

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

I think of images as an immune system and a transit system.

When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'

I draw on a lot of cinematic influences like Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders, artists who let a story take its time. Comics are a visual medium, and visuals should be allowed to tell some of that story.

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.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

For each movie that I do, I like to find a specific language to tell the specific story.

I can use movie as a language. Not only could it send a good message, I could let people know about my thinking and how I see the world, how I see the colour, how I see the music, how I see everything.

We do not need a text-based cinema... we need an image-based cinema.

For me, I'm not a great wordsmith, and so maybe from lack of great dialogue writing, I thought it's easier and better to express a story through visuals.

Most screenplays, most motion pictures, owe much more to the screenplay. Ingmar Bergman has such an economy of language, so little language in his piece, it is so visual, his moods are introduced and buttressed by camera rather than by word or character. But again, that's unique.

Television is a visual medium. You have to create some kind of visual interest. And it's entertainment for your eyes.

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.