Non-Verbal Storytelling Quotes

I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive.

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've been making films with almost no dialogue (laughs), so sound and music become a very powerful character to tell the story. It's almost like with sound and music and images, it's your tool to tell the story, especially when I decide to structure the film in a way that usually goes against the conventions of the three-act structure which most films are made out of.

Printed prose is historically a most peculiar, almost an aberrant way of telling stories, and by far the most inherently anesthetic: It is the only medium of art I can think of which appeals directly to none of our five senses. The oral and folk tradition in narrative made use of verse or live-voice dynamics, embellished by gesture and expression--a kind of rudimentary theater--as do the best raconteurs of all times. Commonly there was musical accompaniment as well: a kind of one-man theater-of-mixed-means.

If you try to make a silent movie with a normal script and you just pull out the dialogue, you will have big problems with the actors because you will ask them to tell a story that you don't know.

I've stopped showing actors what to actually do. I rather just talk to them about it. Then I usually play music. That's a great way to convey inner emotion, bring the power of style and acting together. That's really what it is, very good acting without talking.

The music is an important and crucial part to an animated film. You don't think about it, but you can watch Tom and Jerry with no words, for hours, and the music dictates the emotion and where the story is going and how you're supposed to feel. Everything is in the music.

Ever since I made the short film 'Black And White,' which had almost no dialogues, the idea of making a silent feature film fascinated me.