Terry Gilliam Quotes

I prefer to make a film that people have a really intense reaction to than have a film that people feel ambivalent about.

I think the audience know which films are aimed at their pocket, and which films are aimed at their soul. There are a lot of films out there made by people who are genuinely trying to make a change.

I want to make people feel something - that's really cool.

It's all about the audience and the people who support your work and respond to it. So, anytime I hear that 'Next to Normal' is affecting people, it goes beyond my wildest dreams of what I set out to do when I started to write 'Next to Normal.'

I don't care if people like my character. I just want them to think about the movie's message.

A man who strains himself on the stage is bound, if he is any good, to strain all the people sitting in the stalls.

I make music to touch the souls of people as it's a language we all can speak.

You can do a good movie, or you can do a good movie that can help people to feel the idea of what it is like to live. It can be good in an artificial way; it can be also a good movie for your own existence. You don't know that when you do a movie. You don't know if you succeeded, which is the most difficult thing.

I think that music is still a mystery to most people. It kind of goes through most people without a specific thought. They feel the music, which is what's supposed to happen. They're not supposed to be curious about who wrote the music; they're supposed to feel what the show is trying to get them to feel. So if I help get that feeling across, that's good enough for me.

'Ragtime' was the most magical show that I've done. I had an incredible experience with that, with the show itself, with the cast, with the audience. The response to that show - my God, it really blew me away, the reactions to that show, the way it changed their lives and altered their thinking, their own self-discovery.

People have cried at a couple of shows. To think that someone could do that for me... Jesus Christ. That's a crazy sign.

No one knows why a film does well or not. The reasons for this are not important. What is important is the intention you start the film with and the final state when the film releases on a Friday - whether people liked it or not.

The theatrical experience is also a communal one. When people saw 'Fruitvale' in the theater, there was not a dry eye at the end of the movie, and you would look to your neighbor and have this shared moment together that had a real weight behind it.

I discovered that my drag really does speak to people on an emotional level. I also discovered that people are sometimes put off by an intellectual approach to drag.

In the end, you don't want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.

I'm just focused on getting to the end of each show and feeling like we've done a good job when we walk off stage. And a perfect show isn't necessarily about making the audience feel good. I know I've done my job well if I've made people feel... interesting. I like to leave them a little stunned.

My stated goal as a filmmaker is to feel something. Is to have a palpable emotion in my life, carry it through the gauntlet of the filmmaking process and try and have it land for an audience at some point during the viewing experience. That to me is successful filmmaking.

Filmmaking is essentially about entertainment, but it's amazing to realize that it has this other muscle that could actually help. Do you know what I mean? People permit entertainment to wash over them, but every once and a while, entertainment - and this is entertaining - also galvanizes something else and that would be a really good thing to have happen in this case.

I simply find that as a songwriter, my goal is to try to move people. And I feel that before I can move other people, I have to genuinely be able to move myself.

I find it difficult to breathe when l'm in the space. There seems to be no oxygen. I want to put people into a situation where they're sensitive to themselves watching the piece.

Every movement of the theater by a skilful poet is communicated, as it were, by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions which actuate the several personages of the drama.

Condense some daily experience into a glowing symbol and an audience is electrified.

Too often in the theatre people can't wait for intermission to get some chocolate or something. But with Come Back, Little Sheba I just hope people leave feeling like they've spent a really good two-hours in that house with us.

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded.

You may be sure that if you succeed in bringing your audience into the presence of something that affects them, they will not care by what road you brought them there; and they will never reproach you for having excited their emotions in spite of dramatic rules.