Darren Aronofsky Quotes

I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.

I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.

The thing I always guard against when I'm talking to people I'm working with about a script is that there's a thing I don't like and it's called "talk story." It's when you're talking about the story; the characters are tasked with talking about the story instead of allowing the audience to experience the story.

The music's job is to get the audience so involved that they forget how the movie turns out.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

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.

For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It's not just visual, it's audio as well. It's emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.

As a viewer, I love watching movies. There has to be an emotional connection.

When I watch a film I get swept away. I don't really watch the camera.

There are all kinds of ways that people present their films, but that's kind of a good feeling, if you can make it seem like the characters are really there.

The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to.

The most important thing about being in wrestling is that you have to connect with the crowd, connect with the fans, and you either want them to love you, or to hate you. Either way, so long as they're reacting to what you're doing.

There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.

Movies aren't machines. They interact with our brains.

I've always been interested in giving the audience a first-person experience in my movies.

Historically, stop-motion animation has had a jerky-jerky quality, which is a constant reminder to audiences that they're looking at artificial objects. It creates a barrier between the audience having an emotional experience and what they're looking at. We're working hard to get past that.

As a reader and as a viewer, usually when I watch a movie, I'm caught up enough in the movie that I'm not breaking it down to the details anyway.

It's interesting, for me sappy means sentimental and something that gets you in your heart, gets you emotional. That's what I mean. Also, of course, it means that I'm slightly setting up the audience that there's a bit of fun involved, as well.

I've made movies on every part of the spectrum, and you do understand when you go into certain movies that you're trying to elicit a certain kind of response from the audience, and people get a real sense of satisfaction when they're rooting for a character and the character pulls it off.

Show the reader what the character thinks about, and then the reader will think about it too.

Everything we do is about the emotion of the characters. We believe the better the emotion, the better the movie.

I want to go and have a real experience and it's just lovely to sit and watch a movie and just be really transported by a story and care about the characters. That's always what I'm looking for.

Narrative and characters have always interested me. I never tried to alienate an audience. Of course, gradually, I wanted a bigger and bigger space to draw people in, so it's very organic [growth].