Noah Baumbach Quotes

Audiences are very willing to be taken somewhere, and to ask an audience beforehand what it wants is probably, I think, a mistake. Much better you should tell them what you want and hope they agree with it.

One can never anticipate how audiences will respond. One of the lessons that I've learned over the years is to that no matter what my feeling or opinion might be about a given film, once you give it to the audience, they own it.

In movies, you don't get reactions: Live, when you do a joke, you know in a second whether it's good or bad. But in a movie, since no one is allowed to laugh or do anything, when you're done with a scene, you're left asking, 'Was that funny?'

The one thing I'm proud of as a filmmaker is that people are entitled not to like my films - that's the privilege of the public - but I think I have my own imprint.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them, but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

When you do comedy, you can't please the world, although I'd like to think that most of my audiences were on my side.

You can't control how an audience responds to something. It's up to them.

Just because you're laughing, it doesn't mean the audience will, necessarily.

The major caveat in all of comedy is that it's all instinctive. There's no true criteria. There is no right or wrong. Ultimately, often I'm surprised at what an audience will or will not laugh at. I have to stay very, very open to an audiences first exposure to that material and how they react to it.

But with 'Newsrevue' I started doing some characters, and I just loved how you were in control. You could write something that day and go and do it that night, rather than waiting for a job that involves other people. So I did character stand-up, and then proper stand-up, and I loved it; I got addicted.

Live action movies are someone else's story. With animation, audiences can't think that. Their guards are down.

Every single performance of 'Fleabag,' I would learn so much from the audience reaction or how you could change it all the time, and I loved that sense that the performance is ever-growing and changing and could be affected by the audience.

When we were doing 'Viva Variety,' we knew, 'Boy, this really cracks us up, but this is not for everybody. This is a little weird.'

I don't make films for critics, and I'm not particularly interested in what they have to say, and they don't have a bearing on my audiences.

I have always believed that facilitating good, unusual content should be one of my prerogatives as someone who has spent half his life in cinema.

The audience is so important. Because there's something that I might think is super funny, but if it's just not getting the feedback, I have to let it go.

The beauty of 'The OA' or 'Stranger Things' is that they are both made by Netflix for Netflix. And so there was a freedom all of a sudden that matched our intention.

You always hope an audience will respond to something you've done, but there's no way of knowing whether or not they will.

It definitely feels different to perform to people who know your music. Because people's feedback is not just, 'Oh my God, that was amazing. Who are you?'

I want to make movies that I would want to watch as a fan.

I always wanted to make a show that had everything I wanted to watch, as opposed to just one or two things.

In MMA, you're trained to tune the audience out. In sports entertainment, you're trained to feed off what the audience is thinking and feeling.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

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.