Jonathan Levine Quotes

The key is to constantly keep the audience surprised. If they feel like something is going to happen, or they think from an educational standpoint that something is about to happen because of all the moving parts, it is your job to break that expectation and show the audience something different.

Breaking expectations, even as an audience member, is something that I have enjoyed.

I try to mix the characters up and not be second guessed by the audience.

Whenever I've surprised my audience, I've gained something out of it.

I've always challenged myself and the people who work with me to take new approaches to traditional business challenges, to push the envelope and constantly ask whether our sacred cows are still producing great milk.

For good or bad, there is a certain level of generalisation when it comes to my work. I want to break that perception. My decision to direct 'Bombay Talkies' or to present 'The Lunchbox' is an attempt to do that. These are the films that gel well with my sensibility, and it's unfortunate, it's not the perception out there.

If you're playing a good guy, you show some darkness. If you're playing a dark guy, you show something different, like humor, that will mix it up and hopefully surpass the audience's expectations. What I'm battling all the time is complacency in the audience. I try to bring a little mystery to what might happen because that engages people more.

Good twists are enormously hard to come by, and I think the best ones are earned ones. The idea that a story can take a left turn on you, it's easy to do, but it has to be done very, very carefully, or else you risk losing the audience's trust.

I always like playing with some sort of typical convention or idea and turning it over.

We need the disruption of categories that lead us to abandon the difficult, the disagreeable, and the least likely to go very far.

If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.

All my career, I've said this: Critics and producers think audiences want actors that only present the silhouette and hit the points in the silhouette. What I do is too dangerous.

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

For whatever reason, we relate to anything godlike with an English accent. The English are very proud of that. And with anything Roman or gladiators, they have an English accent. For an audience, it is an easy trick to hook people in.

In all my science fiction movies, I try to blend the familiar with the futuristic so as not to be too off-putting to the audience. There is always something familiar they can grab onto.

We give you characters we'd feel very comfortable judging, and then go: 'Oh yeah? Watch this'.

When I brought 'Sex and the City' to HBO, I wanted to do something independent, where I could be like, 'I don't care if anybody watches this thing. Just let me do something that I would love to see.' Honestly, the success of 'Sex and the City' was what was most surprising to me. It was sort of like the anti-TV-show in my mind.

I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

Part of the beauty of Silicon Valley is that people generally encourage you to think crazy. It's the hypothesis that there's nothing sacred that can't be changed.

People expect your behavior to conform to known patterns and conventions. Your task as a strategist is to upset their expectations.

I always feel that a viewer has an expectation about every moment of the film and where it's going, so if I act against that, I've created a twist. In fact, it becomes a kind of game with the expectations of the viewer. This is the superficial appearance. In the layer beneath, there is a hidden theme.

I like antagonizing the audience, poking at them.

You have to be aware of what the audience's expectations are, and then you have to pervert them, basically, and hit them upside the head from a direction they weren't looking.

If you look at most mainstream filmmaking, to be honest, some of these films aren't even asking questions anymore at all.