A Quote by Willem Dafoe

Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work. — © Willem Dafoe
Turn off the sound in a movie, and if you can tell what's going on, the movie should work.
I think, even a lot of people that make movies forget is that, in my mind, a movie should work with the sound off. You should be able to watch a movie without the sound and understand what's going on. That's your job, to build a series of chronological images that tell the story.
I tell everybody on the first day of making a movie that if anyone's here to further their career, they should leave. I'm gonna make the movie in such a way that we won't have a career when this movie comes out. Because the people who hold the moneybags are not going to want to share any of that money with us to make the next movie!
Every movie you're going to forget that it's 3D whether it's widescreen or whatever it is, you're going to forget everything if the movie is working. If the movie doesn't work or if the movie generically doesn't work then immediately you start to pick apart whatever has contributed to that.
The movie is in my head and that's the movie. But I'd be crazy to not be flexible. I think because I have the movie in my head, I can be flexible. I know what's going to work and not work and I know, generally, what I can change and bend and have the movie still work.
I don't want to tell them what to take away from a movie, I think a movie should tell that.
I like the idea of sitting in a theater with a bunch of people. With technology now, people are getting more and more isolated. I like the community coming around the story. You don't have that with a DVD. People go home, they're tired from work, they can turn it off. It doesn't make you commit the same way, if you can control the movie. More difficult movies, it's too easy to turn them off. All the time, I see movies I know if I had seen it on DVD, I wouldn't have hung with it. If you see it on the screen, you hang with it and it pays off better than a movie you can easily sit through on DVD.
If the film isn't suspenseful, i.e. the pressure cooker situation of what's going on in the movie, if that's not part of it, if the threat of violence and the temperature isn't always going up a notch every scene or so, then the movie is going to be boring. It's not going to work.
Making a movie is a network of decisions that keep multiplying as you go. You leave a trail of decisions behind you, and that's how you start to see the shape of what you've done. When you get far enough, you turn around and say, 'Ha, that's the movie.' It's only then that you find out if it's going to work or not.
There's nothing more disheartening than seeing a movie and going oh, that doesn't work, or it didn't inspire us. Versus seeing a movie that is 'this is so awesome!'. Oftentimes, a really good movie just inspired you to go and make movies!
Making a movie is a collaborative effort and sometimes all the ingredients don't work out. I know that every now and again I am going to make a movie that won't work.
My most enjoyable movie going experiences have always been going to a movie theater, sitting there and the lights go down and a film comes on the screen that you don't know everything about, and you don't know every plot turn and every character movement that's going to happen.
When you go from movie to movie, it's like going from family to family. You work with people for really intense hours on really long days and a bond happens. So even when a movie is terrible, you love it.
Watching a movie a couple of weeks ago. An American movie. I can't remember the name, but it wasn't even a sad movie. It caught me off guard. I was on an airplane.
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.
I’m prepared to take risks. And every movie that I do is a risk. No one knows what the movie is going out turn out like.
I'm prepared to take risks. And every movie that I do is a risk. No one knows what the movie is going out turn out like.
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