Ron Livingston Quotes

You can film the most exciting car chase and the most exciting stunts, but if you don't care about the person inside the car, and you don't care about their predicament, you're not really going to care about the action, either.

When you have a set of characters, you have to fall in love with them and care about them as each individual character.

The greatest story commandment is: Make me care.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

When you create those characters that people love and care about and put them in a dark hallway, already the audience is on edge, and they feel empathy for that character. Then it's up to me to decide what jumps out in that hallway. So I think laying that foundation of strong characters and strong story is the most important thing in a horror film.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

You want the audience to be in the character's shoes. The more deeply into the character's shoes the audience is, the more they're going to care about what's going on.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

We are Disney, in a sense. When you've been there for 20 years, there's a certain heart and soul to one of those films, and you inhabit that to a certain degree. So if it feels true to you, then your audience will hopefully go for it.

I always want to make sure I'm telling a story about people that I care about.

Whatever kind of movie it is, you're going to be more into it when you care more about the drama, or you'll have a better laugh if you feel like you know the people better.

I think TV is all about caring, and if you don't care about a character in a drama or a person when they get voted out of a reality show, it's bad TV. I wouldn't care if you dropped a bomb on the 'Big Brother' house.

If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.

I've spoken before on how the art of storytelling has been lost a bit. I definitely feel 'Empire' is helping to reprogram us back to that place where we pay attention and invest emotionally in the records and the artists.

I can't help slightly falling in love with every character I write about. And I quite like writing about people who are vilified.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

One result of moviemaking - and a side effect of moviegoing - is familiarity. If an actor is particularly good, familiarity opens into something deeper: care, concern, identification, empathy. Yet even those concepts can feel inadequate for some actors.

You always hope that people will fall in love with the characters you play, the way you do yourself.

As an actor, you don't really have a say or a voice in what the conversation of the show is going to be. So, as an actor, I'm just trying to make sense of why the character is making these choices, and somehow, in that way, you can sympathize or root, at least not detest, what this person is doing. That's, at least, my job in telling that story.

When a family film is done well, there's a character that every member of the audience can relate to. I want to be one of those guys.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

I think people are getting into these 'Empire' songs because of the emotional investment they have in the characters. You kind of feel like you know the songs already because you just watched them play out in front of you with these characters.

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.