Impact on Audience Quotes

We don't have any rules about how we depict violence, or how much violence is in a movie. It's a calibration on a case-by-case basis.

The use of violence in movies is a subject that's worth addressing. I'm not standing on a soapbox or wagging a finger, but I'm interested in those subjects for sure.

There was a point in my teenage years, when we were starting to play bigger shows and females were running after tour buses and all that, and my mom - and I remember this like it was yesterday - said: 'Look, I want you to know that I couldn't be prouder of you. You are extraordinary. You move people. But it doesn't make you better than them. You still put your pants on the same way as them, one leg at a time every morning.' I thought about learning to jump right into them, just to mess with her. But what she said stuck with me, and I think it's true.

A movie that gets a PG-13 rating can show someone running down a street killing 27 people. And there are no repercussions.

When we use the word domestic [terrorism], we discount its actual impact as political terrorism, which is, of course, political violence meant to impact an audience outside of the immediate victims.

I’ve always believed that the way you affect your audience is more important than how many of them are there.

Violence in film and television is an ongoing conversation, and I like eavesdropping on it, but I'm never sure what my opinion is. I like watching creative violence, but I don't know.

It's always interesting to play characters who are vulnerable and how you display that vulnerability and what it's going to mean to people who watch it.

What keeps me motivated is that I'm going to do a bunch of projects with dancers, and the people who compel me and make me love dance again are the ones I want to hire because they'll do that for others who are watching the thing. So yeah, it is difficult to crush dream sometimes, but they're all professional and they know what the deal is.

The bottom line is, when it comes to an actor and his performance, whether nominated or not, it simply has to do with whether that character had enough resonance with the audience. You know, to the filmgoers. And that something that you can't control.

Once you do something violent in a film, you don't have to do too much. You do it once and the feeling of violence just stays there, do you know what I'm saying?

When I'm in the process of making a movie I'm not thinking about the finished result, and whether people have to see it once or more than once, and what the reaction to it will be. I just make it, and then I live with the consequences, some of which may not be as pleasant as I'd like! I know one thing, however. Many viewers may come out of the theater not satisfied, but they won't be able to forget the movie. I know they'll be talking about it during their next dinner. I want them to be a little restless about my movies, and keep trying to find something in them.

What I find interesting is this ricochet effect, that the audience perceives the work and then does something with it, throws it back to the world, and there's an ongoing interaction between work and audience, which doesn't belong to the artist anymore - from the moment you release it, it doesn't belong to anybody.

I can't figure out how they decide on those things. So I don't have any regrets about anything that I did that didn't get a lot of people to see it.