Ekta Kapoor Quotes

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

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

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

If people don't connect to Eric Carter's struggles, I'm sure they'll find a character in this series to connect to. That's ultimately what it's about for me.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

Besides, most of the books I like involve people I could never play in a million years.

The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.

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

In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

You need to be able to climb into a narrative and zip it up under your chin. You need to be able to see through the eyes of the hero, smell what he's smelling, hear what he's hearing.

If you are writing a story and trying to draw an audience to come and hear you tell it, it's got to in some way relate to them. Who wants to come and hear about your specific problems? It's not therapy - it's supposed to be a communal piece of entertainment.

The story is a machine for empathy. In contrast to logic or reason, a story is about emotion that gets staged over a sequence of dramatic moments, so you empathize with the characters without really thinking about it too much. It is a really powerful tool for imagining yourself in other people's situations.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

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.

I always have a contract with a character. Even when he's unappealing. The contract is to give him his due. To tell his story. And to keep his secrets.

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.

I think the key divide between the interactive media and the narrative media is the difficulty in opening up an empathic pathway between the gamer and the character, as differentiated from the audience and the characters in a movie or a television show.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

When I approach any script, I always try to find what I would relate to most in it.

Novels attempt to render human experience; that's really all they are. They are meant to convey empathy for the character.