Visual Engagement Quotes

There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness.

I connect better with music when I see the people singing it.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it...my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.

A still image attracts the viewer with an overall impact, then reveals smaller details upon further study.

Asymmetric balance creates greater reader interest. Pleasure derived from observing asymmetrical arrangements lies partly in overcoming resistances, which, consciously or not, the spectator adjusts in his own mind.

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

The space between the young reader’s eyeballs and the printed page is a holy place and officialdom should trample all over it at their peril.’

I believe in advancing the story with the cover so that the audience gets taken in immediately with that cover.

You can have a movie with hardly any cuts, or very few cuts, that is fascinating, you can't take your eyes away from it... Look at some of the long takes in Citizen Kane.

The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way it moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events.

If you look at a photograph, and you think, 'My isn't that a beautiful photograph,' and you go on to the next one, or 'Isn't that nice light?' so what? I mean what does it do to you or what's the real value in the long run? What do you walk away from it with? I mean, I'd much rather show you a photograph that makes demands on you, that you might become involved in on your own terms or be perplexed by.

To be quite honest. I have seen a few things in 3D, and it didn't involve me anymore than when I saw something in 2D.

I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity.

You come to the photograph as an aesthetic object with no context... Then you step in and read the text and then out again to revisit the image in a completely different way. I'm interested in that space between text and image. The piece becomes the negative space between the two.

Our sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our senses. It fills the mind with the largest variety of ideas, converses with its objects at the greatest distance, and continues the longest in action without being tired or satiated with its proper enjoyments.

I don't know what people like to see.

I have always wanted to make paintings that are impossible to walk past, paintings that grab and hold your attention. The more you look at them, the more satisfying they become for the viewer. The more time you give to the painting, the more you get back.

I can pick up a screenplay and flip through the pages. If all I see is dialog, dialog, dialog, I won't even read it. I don't care how good the dialog is - it's a moving picture. It has to move all the time... It's not the stage. A movie audience doesn't have the patience to sit and learn a lesson. Their eyes need to be dazzled. The writer is the most important element in the entire film because if it ain't on the page it ain't going to be on the screen.

Few people can look at a painting longer than it takes to peel an orange and eat it.

I never read, I just look at pictures.

If the regular length of a shot is increased, one becomes bored, but if you keep on making it longer, it piques your interest, and if you make it even longer, a new quality emerges, a special intensity of attention.

I definitely think an on-screen experience is universal, in a way.

When you make a movie like 'Straw Dogs,' your goal is to have people's eyes remain glued to the screen. It serves you no purpose to turn away from the screen.

My forms are not abstractions of things in the real world. They're also not symbols. I would say that my job is to invent these forms and to put them together in a way that keeps your interest, to give the forms a quirky identity so you can engage with them, so you realize there's an inner intelligence or logic. If you stop asking what they mean, or what they remind you of, and just look at them for 29 seconds, you find that they want to explain themselves and show you how much every tiniest detail is related to the whole.