Sebastian Faulks Quotes

Every character, when it comes to a cinematic representation, gets complicated and layered. You are given a lot of dimensions than a single dimension to an individual. That's the main difference between seeing something out of the window and seeing something on screen.

I have only recently got interested in film, and it is a strange way of working in many ways. But actually, when it is at its best, it's quite an extraordinary way of working between a director and an actor, to really explore an inner life.

Artists forget than the first purpose of a comic character is to convey emotion. Everything else, like realism, or other kinds of virtuosity, is an optional extra. If you sacrifice expression for the sake of other concerns, you're putting the cart before the horse.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

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.

I discovered you can get closer to a character's thoughts and feelings in a book than in a film.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

The novel succeeds on terms exclusive to literature. A good film succeeds on terms exclusive to the cinema. That's why so many bad novels can become good movies, like 'Jaws' or 'The Godfather.'

Well, the medium of film is so different than a book that just by bringing it into visual storytelling is to change it up. I think in a book, in any book, you can have a reactive character. Some of the great novels of all time have had that, but in a film you can't do that.

Don't forget to let your reader feel the emotions of the scene. If you get all tied up with the mechanics of where the hero's hands are and not about how they make the heroine feel, then the scene will read flat.

I watched season four of 'The Wire.' They have subtle performances that they do through their eyes. You could watch season four with the audio off and still understand what's happening through their eyes.

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.'

All those little acting rules you get, one of the interesting ones is, 'Play the opposite. Don't play 'victim.'

When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.

Representation is actually when the character doesn't have lines, but the camera is lingering on them in their thoughts after something happened, and then we get to see them walk to their car. You really need to follow a character in order to understand what they're going through.

'Oppam' is more of a director's movie, especially because I play a visually-challenged hero in it. The character doesn't have a perspective, and so cameras aren't placed like how they are usually done in other movies. The angles and the way the scenes are captured are different.

I don't know acting, but I choose good stories and portray emotions according to the story.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

Good acting is confused with good dialogue delivery. Acting is about all about performance, and the way we interpret and understand the character that we bring alive onscreen.

I really want to work on characters that have a lot of complexity and you don't always get that in comic book movies because they're not character explorations. I have nothing against movies like that, but I do see them as kind of like a cheeseburger.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

I'm interested in characters and relationships.

I've often been asked why my shot-taking is not stylish, why I don't think about visual statements. The truth is, style is irrelevant. I never think of the shot as much as I think of the characters and what they are saying and doing.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

There is an art to acting, and there are techniques that are acquired. You can be as emotional as you'd like, as a person, but figuring out ways that you can bring specific emotions at specific times and have them be true, and relating to someone as someone that they're not, is a lot.