James Newton Howard Quotes

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.

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.

Once you get into a feature, whether it's a sequel or an original one, you have to start all over again, and you're creating a world, creating new characters. You're also tracking emotions. You're trying to create emotion and create a character that you can fall in love with for two hours.

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.

Television is about identifying with the characters.

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.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

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.

Acting and singing are actually very similar because they're both telling a story.

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.

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.

I usually start from the most general to the more specific. I'll get an emotional overview for the film as a whole, trying to pinpoint what the musical identity is and come up with thematic ideas - any ideas that identify as succinctly as possible what the film is.

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.

I read little nonfiction, but I have no boundaries about the fiction I relish. The only unfailing criterion is that I can hitch my heart to the imagined world and read on.

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

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

You start as an audience member and create a world you're interested in, and then you move into the telling of those stories, bringing what has interested you as an audience member.

One of the things that writing has taught me is that fiction has a life of its own. Fictional places are sometimes more real than the view from our bedroom window. Fictional people can sometimes become as close to us as our loved ones.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you've lost human scale.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

Sometimes a movie knows you're watching it. It knows how to hold and keep you, how, when it's over, to make you want it all over again.