American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.
Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
I've always been so surprised by how people interpret my photos in context.
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.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
I find movies rely upon dialogue too much sometimes, and you lose the power of what really the most basic cinematic language is, which is the visual language.
Black is not sad. Bright colours are what depress me. They're so... empty. Black is poetic. How do you imagine a poet? In a bright yellow jacket? Probably not.
I've always been a color person, whether that's through my clothes, hair, or music.
There are universal shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.
Images are ... a kind of emotional shorthand.
The photographic image... is a message without a code.
“One picture is worth a thousand words,” said an ancient Chinese; but it may take ten thousand words to validate it.
I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful.
I like both antireligious and traditional Catholic imagery.
It will in the end, be admitted that everything, in effect is an image and that the least object which has no symbolic role assigned to it is capable of standing for absolutely anything.
The thing that interested me, there are so many filmmakers I admire - like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino - they have these themes where there's not much going on, but they were suspenseful.
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.
The 'Doom' thing is to be able to come at things with a different point of view. I decided the mask would just add to the mystique of the character as well as make Doom stand out. I though it'd be an easy way for people to see and differentiate between characters, sorta like when an actor gains weight for a role.
I want to paint men and women with that something of the external which the halo used to symbolize, and which we now seek to give by the actual radiance and vibrancy of our colorings.
When I work on a book, I usually start with a question. And I don't sit around and go 'I need to write a book. What's a good question?' It will be a question that's just clanging around in my head. So for 'What It Is,' it was this idea of 'What is an image?'
I don't have anything to say in any picture. But you do, from your experience, surmise something. You do give a photograph symbolic content, narrative content... But it's nothing to worry about!
Style is the image of character.
Hitchcock had a very strange mind.
There's more to a picture than meets the eye.
The building's identity resided in the ornament.
