Dee Rees Quotes

There are some long silences in Scandinavian and some Japanese films, when the audience knows action is taking place, but the audience hears no action.

I love scenes with minimal dialogue.

When you do not have the dialogue to explain things, you will use everything to show and to tell the story. I think that this is what makes you believe that it is impeccable.

The less lines, the better. I am the silent film actor, but not in a slapstick sort of way. Film is an image-based medium, so whatever you can say without the words is far more provocative and punctuating. If the lines are not funny or if they don't advance the story, sometimes it's hard. I hate talk in movies.

Sometimes we misunderstand what films can do. We just throw a whole book in there, with people just talking, talking, and talking. The picture can tell, the frame can tell.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

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

I found in making and directing films that the less you have voiceover, the better it is.

In Tim's films, more than most, if you miss the tone, you don't get the film.

I'm going to make a film where not one word is really important. I'm going to make it all action.

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

Of course I want my films to look really good, but every single element is chosen for a reason. It's telling something in the story.

If it's a good movie, the sound could go off and the audience would still have a perfectly clear idea of what was going on.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

The greatest filmmakers are not the ones who put everything in; they're the ones who can figure things to leave out, and in doing so, invite your participation.

A movie will do in one second, with one image, what it will take a novelist at least a page to describe.

Film is really the one art form that can effectively use silence. Music and theater can play with silence, but they can't sustain silence without losing energy, whereas film can go into a silent mode and stay there for minutes at a time.

I think if you watch most of my films with the sound off, you could still tell what's going on.

I don't need dialogue to convey emotion or thoughts to my audience.

I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life - they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing - which was redundant.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

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.

It really just gives you a sense of when you need to have dialogue and when you don't, and if your pictures are telling the story, you don't need to have all this talking.

Film fixes a precise visual image in the viewer's head. In fiction, you just hope you're precise enough to convey the intended effect.

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