Gavin Hood Quotes

A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.

I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.

In Hitchcock's eyes the movement was dramatic, not the acting. When he wanted the audience to be moved, he moved the camera. He was a subtle human being, and he was also the best director I have ever worked with.

Photographs speak to me, and I obey.

French photography was basically poetic, and mine was vulgar and brash and violent, except that there's never any violence in the photographs: it's only in the photographic style.

Images have a unique power to impart that which is beyond words.

The camera can be the most deadly weapon since the assassin's bullet. Or it can be the lotion of the heart.

Opera tells stories through the pure emotion of music. An exhibition has to tell a story purely visually. I've tried to incorporate both of those things - pure emotion and being more visual - into my writing.

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.

My photography changed from being more documentary-like to arranging things more, and that came into being partly because I started doing music videos, and I incorporated some things from the music videos into my photography again, by arranging things more.

I always say I make pictures rather than take pictures.

I don't like gimmicky pictures; I've always hated them. I like pictures that are very clear and clean, whether you're a great street photographer - somebody like Friedlander or Winogrand or Cartier-Bresson - or whether you're a portraitist, like Irving Penn.

For me, the perfect film has no dialogue at all. It's purely a visual, emotional, visceral kind of experience. And I think one can create wonderful depth and meaning and communication without using words. I started out as an illustrator and a cartoonist and caricature artist, so for me the visual is primary.

Nothing speaks louder than an evocative photograph that stirs the imagination, tugs at the heart strings and engages the mind.

I never think about my style but just try and make the pictures look believable.

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

I love telling stories with images. But I think there's more to just saying a movie is great visually.

It's far better to shoot a good picture than a good-looking picture.

Not all paintings are abstract; they're not all Jackson Pollock. There's value in a photograph of a man alone on a boat at sea, and there is value in painting of a man alone on a boat at sea. In the painting, the painting has more freedom to express an idea, more latitude in being able to elicit certain emotion.

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

I can tell you what I personally use a camera for. Basically, it is to record a moment. A moment that is vital to give the viewer a sensation of liveliness, sadness, joy and so on.

Increasingly, the work I'm doing is in service to an idea rather than just to see what something looks like photographed. I'm trying to explore how I feel about something through photography.

We're really interested in more visual storytelling, figuring out a way to blend our level of observation with a bigger visual scope.

Establishing mood through pictorial means is the director Ridley Scott's most notable talent. There may be no working director more accomplished at wringing texture out of the color blue than the prodigious and now prolific Mr. Scott; you'd swear that with his dazzling washes of blues and sand tones, he was inventing additional hues on the spot.

When I take a black-and-white portrait, it's not particularly meant to please you. It's meant to talk to you; it's meant to shame you. It's meant to scream out at you, and it has a message.