Damien Chazelle Quotes

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

I think, ultimately, if you create characters that people like and can relate to, your characters are grounded on a human level even if your cars are not.

Whether it was 'Gangs Of Wasseypur' or whether it's 'LSTCK,' the characters are real, and when you see them on screen, you can identify with them.

If the human story in 'STM' is relatable, it will work.

It's always exciting to create a character that people can relate to, where people are like, 'Oh, I know this dude,' but maybe you've never actually seen this type of character on TV.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

I think it's very easy to disgust the reader with violence on the page - that's incredibly easy - but it's far harder to make a reader care about a character.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

And that's what people want to see when they go to the theater. I believe at the end of the day, they want to see themselves - parts of their lives they can recognize. And I feel if I can achieve that, it's pretty spectacular.

In terms of the characters I think are really fun to play, a lot of times it's someone in my head saying 'I know that woman.'

The hardest thing is to write about people. First and foremost, you have to encounter their humanity. That is the only way you can make them live as characters on the page.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human.

But there's the paradox of fiction - why do you cry when a fake character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

What we're doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They're not just mythic heroes.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

I'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.

You know, it's recently come into focus for me why I want to be an actor: It's because of the connection I feel to people.

As a viewer, I care about people, I care about characters, I care about perspective.

I've always believed in populating my films with characters who we like, who we have some warmth for, who have warmth for each other, who we would like to hang out with, who we emulate in one way or another.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

I don't care about sympathy. I care about playing a character who's understandable and clear.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.