Subtextual Meaning Quotes

'Night of the Living Dead,' then 'Dawn of the Dead' is a few weeks later, 'Day of the Dead' months later, and 'Land of the Dead' is three years later. Each one spoke about a different decade and was stylistically different.

I'm attracted to playing people who aren't necessarily straightforward.

What I dislike about movie culture is that it often presents a parable of our problems - but the issues are all straightforward and the people are either nice or they're not. In real life, everyone falls between those perimeters, but not many American films operate in that grey area.

It's easy in a novel to be completely unambiguous about the relationship between animal and daemon simply by stating it outright; whereas you get very few opportunities to do this in an elegant way in a film.

I would say that all my films have more content than a 'content-driven film.' It is not easy to make such films.

'Barton Fink' owed something to Roman Polanski. As a director, he always goes beyond the obvious narrative drift.

I think I am more attracted to characters with a subtext, whatever that is and they don't necessarily have to be virtuous, but they have to at least be human.

I hate even the idea of a synopsis. When stories are really working, when you're providing subtextual exploration and things that are deeply layered, you're obligated to not say things out loud.

Kubrick has a divining rod for the concealed, alienating secrets of characters.

Sometimes a scene may be about one thing, and it may end up still being about that, but the emotionality of it comes from somewhere else, or the humor of it comes from somewhere else, and it gives it that real-life quality.

I do seem to have a lot of family secrets in my novels. I guess I'm one of those writers who is often writing about the same sort of themes, but taking different angles on them.

In film you can use images exclusively and narrate a whole story very quickly, but you don't always so easily find the form in cinema to dig deeper into human thoughts and emotions. And in a novel you can much more easily express a character's inner thoughts and feelings.

Improvisation has to do with exploring something like two brothers in a room together. You find out things about situations by discovering the things that they aren't saying. It's a way to explore scenes. Sometimes it's more useful than others, but it's always there to see if there's anything that you might improve.

You can't be a passive recipient of images, you have to engage with images and read their subtexts. These are critical things that will be taught to the students by a film club.

I like it when a script shows you something new, and you can learn something through the journey of a film rather than being told things you already know.

Tone can be as important as text.

I think Direct Cinema's trying to be insightful by looking at reality in a very close way while, in fact, much more is staged than we like to think. In cinema verite, it's about trying to make something invisible visible - the role of fantasy and imagination in everyday life.

The whole world knows, that, when a wrong stings a man, making him fierce and loud, his direct expressions have often small value; but that his parenthetical expressions often have great value. This is one of the simplest principles in homely every-day-criticism, serving truth-seekers, wherever wordy war rages, whether among statesmen or hackmen.

My favorite filmmakers are in the Kubrick, Polanski kind of mold. I just like that world. I think it's more cinematic and gets under your skin more.

I've found that good dialogue tells you not only what people are saying or how they're communicating but it tells you a great deal - by dialect and tone, content and circumstance - about the quality of the character.

In fiction, a reaction shot is a brief portrayal of how your character reacts to something that someone else has done. In contrast to more direct character building, your guy doesn't initiate the sequence; he completes it. Exactly how he completes it can tell readers a lot about him.

To look for some kind of insight or meaning in pop songs is not really - well there's plenty of other places where you should probably look first before you start looking for it in a pop song.

The thing that fiction can do is look from the inside out rather than from the outside in. Even memoir leaves me somewhat frustrated. I think now we need a poet to uncover what isn't on the surface.

Great visual effects serve story and character and in doing so, are, by their very definition, invisible.

I think noir is an immensely powerful - and elastic - lens through which to look at narrative and character. It seems to access something dark and true in us that other modes of fiction are often a bit prissy about touching. But the key to making it work as time and culture moves on is to use the elasticity, not just the power.