David Cage Quotes

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.

Filmmaking is a language where you empathise with human situations. Unless you have empathy for characters, you shouldn't be a filmmaker.

I'm not very particular about the commercial angle in my films, but entertainment is very important.

Film is a very intimate medium.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

At least I want to be making films that are somehow born out of me that are stories I want to tell. The challenge is figuring out how to do it where you can make them personal, yet still deliver to an audience a film experience that is satisfying and emotional, and that's what I'm trying to do.

If a show is good, it helps people learn about themselves in some way and in some function. Whatever the genre is, if it's executed well, audiences grow and learn from it, and that's where their passion and enthusiasm comes from.

A message I've been telling myself: the cinema is very conservative, and unless you have a story that satisfies you, that is within the unchallenging zone, but you love it, you can't do it as cinema. Otherwise, you better go do it for television, which is more daring now.

Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.

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

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

I've never fallen into what I consider to be a trap of trying to figure out something analytically that could be a very popular film. I would hope my enthusiasm could match up with something with that potential.

A great director is someone who makes you feel like you're moving forward.

I like making people feel things. Acting doesn't seem like lying but like storytelling.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

The best way to make a show that's going to resonate is to make a show that you'd love.

It could be sci-fi, love story, historical drama what counts for me is the fact that they're made by great directors with a great point of view who bring the audience to be elevated and at the same time entertained. That's what cinema is.

The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.

Content films necessary don't go by the content, they go by the emotions. Content films are about content whether you want to portray the content or sell it through humour, through seriousness, is a choice of the filmmaker.

I want to create films that will speak to different parts of our hearts and brains, stories told from a different angle.

I know that I put a lot into 'Hereditary', and I'm proud of what it is. Beyond the fact that the film takes its time and asks for a certain amount of patience from the audience - and I hope it rewards that patience by the end - I know that I'm something of an aesthete. I care about aesthetics, and I love filmmaking.

I want to make the movies that move people in a way they've never been moved before.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

I thought, "If I could bring these characters [Wonder Boys] to life and lead the audience to react the same way I did, this could be a really special picture." Then I read Michael's [Chabon] novel and got even more enthusiastic about it.

If you watched a movie about a guy who wanted a Volvo and worked for years to get it, you wouldn’t cry at the end when he drove off the lot, testing the windshield wipers. You wouldn’t tell your friends you saw a beautiful movie or go home and put a record on to think about the story you’d seen. The truth is, you wouldn’t remember that movie a week later, except you’d feel robbed and want your money back. Nobody cries at the end of a movie about a guy who wants a Volvo.