Peter Stormare Quotes

Your internal dialogue has got to be different from what you say. And, you know, in film, hopefully that registers and speaks volumes. It's always the unspoken word and what's happening behind someone's eyes that makes it so rich.

A lot of people tend to chew up the scenery. I'm a firm believer in less is more, especially on the big screen.

I'm an enemy of exposition. I feel there's no need to overstate.

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

I supply a presence. There are never any long dialogue scenes to establish a character.

I purposely adopted a style in my storytelling wherein I don't have to explain everything or why the story is moving in a particular way.

I'm a huge fan of not doing world-building or exposition. My eyes glaze over when I see it.

Anytime I feel like I am beginning to explain the plot or characters too much my stomach churns. I like stories that let the characters speak for themselves and don't give you all the information.

Then they started pulling me in and I was very resistant. All the other actors would be saying write more, more dialogue for me, and I'd always be saying 'No, less, less'.

Symbolism perhaps is a bit in your face, and I've tried my best to control that as best I can as I've grown older and thought that one could approach something with a little more subtlety.

What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers.

The script will point you in certain directions and I go the opposite if I can. I try do do one thing and tell a different story with my eyes. I believe what's more interesting is always what's not being said.

For me, the game would be to assume a very intelligent reader who can extrapolate a lot from a little. And that's become my definition of art; to get that pitch just right, where I can put a hint on page three, and the reader's ears go up a bit, as opposed to dropping it all on the first page.

As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.

I'm an instinctive actor. I just see the part and play it. I'm more interested in what isn't said - the silences.

In a Western, you talk more with your eyes and your actions than you do with big speeches. I love that.

I do not wish to produce prose that draws attention to itself, rather than the world it describes.

There are people who've told me cinema is a visual medium and you don't need to say so much. When I write the script, all these lines of what the characters are thinking are written. Once the film is shot and the lines are dubbed, I tone it down in postproduction if I feel it gets heavy.

I kind of hate over-explanation in comics.

Basically, less is more when it comes to film.

To make 'Sound of My Voice,' we had to conceive the entire world and understand it holistically. If you want to show less in a movie, you've got to figure out more.

I don't necessarily set out to teach or say anything in particular in my writing. Morals and themes come out as I'm telling the tale.

You don't want to have a character say what's bothering him; you want to define characters by action.

I feel, in drama, you don't need to be fed everything. Even though sometimes when you watch, you want to know what happened and you want to see it, I feel like sometimes it's so much stronger to see the effects that those actions have had.

So much of writing is about what characters don't say, and in the early drafts, sometimes things get overwritten.