Gabriel Mann Quotes

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.

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.

I like it when I go into a cinema and I'm not aware that I'm there; I'm totally involved in the film for two hours.

We all do that thing which is the best in movies - we relate.

My favorite films are the ones that I walk away from and I know I saw a story.

I like a film that makes the audience feel like they are in the middle of life as it is moving, and in a way, they are catching up. They are thrown into things.

So, when the special effects are at the service of the story and draw you into it, that is really the magic.

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

Why movies are so powerful is because you are right in there and you stay in there until they want you to come out, and then you've really gone somewhere.

When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it's a good film.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

If the reader doesn't care or relate to the characters, all that visual spectacle is pretty but feels empty.

I want characters I can live for in a setting that makes me feel like I'm there.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.

One of the reasons wrestling works is because it allows people to suspend their disbelief. They may know it's not real, but if it's done well enough, they get sucked into it emotionally. And that's why they watch.

I think people go to the movies to be entertained, to have an experience, to disappear from their own reality for a couple of hours. If the film truly succeeds in everything the filmmaker sets out for it to be, then it's elevated to art. It's elevated to something special, because it gives people a visceral feeling of something they're experiencing as a collective group. You feel something and that's what turns it into what you may call art.

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

My own idea about 3D is that it is there to enhance the viewing experience but I don't think that you have to use it in a tricky way, I think that the minute you sacrifice story and character for something coming out of the screen, I think you've lost it.

To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong.

I like stories that begin with characters. I like to be engaged and moved by the characters in the story. I want to be moved. I want to leave the cinema and think about what I've seen. My sensibility is quite eclectic and it doesn't matter if they are small or large films, I just want to make good films.

No matter how tight the shot is, if I'm narrating it too much, there's a barrier between you and the experience, because the process of reading a book, or watching a movie, or watching a play is that you're watching a dream.

A comic book is the opposite of a cartoon. In a cartoon, you want to simplify the idea, so when they look at it at a glance, they get it. Boom. Simple. Direct to the point. But when you're drawing Groo, now it's a narrative, a story. You want the viewer to get involved in the story. You want him to feel like he's in the town to follow your main character. So I love to add lots and lots of things in it. Things that people will enjoy going back to and say, "Oh yeah, that's how a market must have looked in this fantasy world, with people selling meat here and dishes here."

I want the look of a movie to be secondary. I really want people to be engaged in the story and the characters and not think about a style or think about me or think about the director of photography and what a great job he's doing. I never feel like that should be there.

I don’t feel that I’m making movies for iPhones. If someone wants to watch it on an iPhone, I’m not going to stop them, especially if they’re paying for it, but I don’t recommend it. I think it’s dumb, when you have characters that are so small in the frame that they’re not visible. I’m trying to make an epic.

You need to keep everyone wanting more. Every character has so much depth, and there was so much thought that went into it, but it would've taken away at some point from the main story, and everything I think kind of was woven together really beautifully, so that you cared about everyone, and everyone had their own story, but everything helped the main plotline.