Jeff Nichols Quotes

As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I think my sensibilities about storytelling and character just automatically come into play when I'm trying to work on any kind of narrative. For me, it doesn't really matter what the source of the narrative is. I will be looking for ways to make it into an intriguing story with empathetic characters.

Dialogues and emotion based movies don't always work.

As a writer, every time I create a character, I try to go for something to captivate the audience in some way. It's also an extension of how the audience would like to see themselves.

When I go for a project, I wonder what underpinning a project will have that's going to give the audience some emotional access to it.

A whole film is just about arriving at a moment where you hopefully transfer some feeling to the audience.

If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material.

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

If you create a good story that has a lot of story value... I think audiences like that. It's why they stick with the same TV show over and over.

I don't have a favorite genre. I love to work and live vicariously through every character. It's all about trying to bring the character to life and get the story across in a way that resonates with the audience. It's always interesting and challenging in a gratifying and unique way.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

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.

Humanizing good people is kind of boring and I don't really see the value in it... humanizing tricky characters is exhilarating, and making audience films out of indie subjects excites me.

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.

What can I say: I'm a writer - I enjoy forcing pain and suffering on my characters!

The basic quality that any great story must have is a story that illustrates the human condition.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

At the heart of any successful film is a powerful story. And a story should be just that: a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, powerful protagonists that audiences can identify with, and a dramatic arc that is able to capture and hold viewers' intellectual and emotional attention.

I want readers turning pages until three o'clock in the morning. I want the themes of books to stick around for a reader. I'm always trying to find a way to balance characters and theme.

'Cause movies are human drama, that's it.

The idea behind a dish - the delight and the surprise - makes a difference. Great literature surprises and delights, and provokes us. It isn't just 'Here's the facts - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl.' It's how you tell it.