Kevin Lima Quotes

I think I can speak with a degree of authority... today, the biggest driving force of movies is pace; God help you if you try to put in a scene that is about character and not plot.

Movie characters rarely get to think out loud or talk very much about their emotions. Instead they have to, very briefly, show their feelings through their action or through dialog.

Film is so much to do with perfection and how differently you can feel about someone at the beginning of the film and the end of the film.

I like films to be complete in their written form.

I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.

In television writing, you want to hear what the characters say as opposed to giving them something to say. It's the same with the cartoons.

I can always tell when a filmmaker doesn't care about his or her characters; they just care about setting them up to kill them off.

I was always cutting dialogue out when we were rehearsing, and when I produced movies, too. I felt that people don't say things in life - they act, they do things. I always wanted my characters doing, rather than saying what they were doing - which was redundant.

You'd be surprised how hard it is getting the human emotional arc in a script to work. Ultimately a director stands and falls by their ability to do that.

When you get into a film, it is one story and one set development of a character, and you are able to delve into one character for a short period of time and discover everything about them.

I've had the opportunity to work with so many great directors. Different styles, as well, like Gus Van Sant. He just does the casting and the milieu and let's you do your thing, quietly. Bertolucci, who can talk to you about your internal world in quite a creative way or just say, 'Well, put your hand over here.'

I've dropped myself into straightforward character pieces in order to explore that form and reap its values. But you are sort of restricted visually when your first requirement is to tell a fairly straightforward story.

I hate the analyzing thing. People say, 'Why do you think your character did that? I don't know. I'm not an analyst, and they're not in psychotherapy. Unless it's a film where they're in therapy.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

For me, with a character, you start with the shoes.

I don't use recurring characters. I do get very interested in my characters while I'm working with them, and I find the process of fitting them into a story, and allowing them to create the story around themselves, fascinating. But no, I don't imagine they have a life outside of what I make for them.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

I put heavy emphasis on the characters.

When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.

I'm not a big fan of there being voiceovers in movies. I really prefer it when the film tells it story.

For me, it's first about the characters. I look for a character who is intriguing and challenging and different from what I've done before.

I think the danger in trying to set too many things up or do too much world-building in a movie so soon is you forget to actually make a movie.

It's much better to write a book and stick to the research - that's history. In cinema, emotional truth and psychological truth is much more important.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

'Oppam' is more of a director's movie, especially because I play a visually-challenged hero in it. The character doesn't have a perspective, and so cameras aren't placed like how they are usually done in other movies. The angles and the way the scenes are captured are different.