Jennifer Lee Quotes

I believe in characters that can be tangible, and that you can actually relate to.

I love to make even villains people you can relate to. When you find out who did it, I think you almost like the person, which is not easy to do.

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.

When it comes to your hero, what the readers really fall in love with are his flaws. No one ever falls in love with a perfect hero.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

You play the honesty of the characters and show a side of them that people can relate to and want to get to know.

If the human story in 'STM' is relatable, it will work.

If you have a character that seems to be all perfect, it's hard to relate to him because when you read a story you really want to empathize with the character that you are reading about. And it's hard to empathize with someone who is flawless and who has no problems.

I'm not saying I have to write a book that's ten times better than my counterparts, but I do think that I have to concentrate my efforts on writing something that will really engage people's humanity and will tie readers to my characters regardless of race. I have to prove that I can connect with a wider audience.

You couple that with how I looked when I was younger, and growing up... The voice is not quite breaking. It's awful. No, I don't enjoy that at all. But that's one of the things people love and find so endearing about the Harry Potter series, and why they've lasted so long. Because people have grown up with us, and they care about the characters. They're not just some characters in the film, they're people you can relate to, and you care about, and you grew up with, and when they die in this film, people feel it!

if an author would have us feel a strong degree of compassion, his characters must not be too perfect.

Television series always have a lot of characters because you want people to identify with someone on the show, who will be your eyes.

Even if the character is something that seems ridiculous on paper, there's a human element to everything. Otherwise, we don't connect with it.

I always want the audience to identify with my character in some way. I mean, sometimes you'll get characters that aren't very identifiable. Sometimes you can't relate to your character at all.

I've always believed in populating my films with characters who we like, who we have some warmth for, who have warmth for each other, who we would like to hang out with, who we emulate in one way or another. It's not that they all get along, or that there aren't bad people or people we make fun of. But at the core, there's a kind of sweetness.

I enjoy bringing humanity to complex characters.

I think the universal themes of "American Pie" are what make it attractive to everybody. How to people relate to these characters? It's because these five male characters in this movie wouldn't ordinarily be in the same friend group and they each have their own part to play in the whole thing. There's a character for everybody in this movie that they can relate to... that they either were or knew someone that was. To cover the range like that is pretty unique to our franchise.

Horror movies often work better when we have a stake in the game. The more we care about the characters, the more human they are to us, the more appealing they are to us and the more effective the horror tends to be.

I try to make my characters kind of ordinary, somebody that anybody could be. Because we've all had loves, perhaps love and loss, people can relate to my characters.

Anyone could identify with the human aspect of the characters.

Comedy and drama are different sides of the same coin. And the thing about comedy and drama is about likability. It's about character first. It's about story. And for me, it's about empathy, and I think the realer someone is, the further you can go either way with them.

Get too conceptual, too cute and remote, and your characters die on the page.

A character on a page has to feel real, and for me the greatest fun is if you could gender-swap the role.

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters.

Character, I think, is the single most important thing in fiction. You might read a book once for its interesting plot—but not twice.