Jed Mercurio Quotes

With anything, and especially with the pallet of viewers in watching anything on TV and film, you have to entertain them.

Possibly because I did start off as a journalist, my starting point has always been that you've got to keep an audience with you. Whatever you're doing, you always want a script to be a page-turner. It's very important never, ever, to feel above that.

I feel like every first episode of a TV show is bad, you know, and it always improves.

If you don't have a story that will hold the audience, you won't have a successful show.

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.

There's certainly pressure to find your audience early. You need to paint the picture, but it's tough trying to find the balance between a show that people can tune in on any given week while still grabbing the people who are there every week.

The main thing is to think strategically about what will engage your readers. Trust me when I tell you that few people are eager to read a story whose opening lines sound like a dissertation on giant bugs.

If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.

The issue is: how do you engage the audience? And one of the things I talk to our communicators about is: The outline is great; the stories are great. But how do you engage them? How do you make it feel like we are on a journey, not you are just up there giving me information.

In fact, sometimes when a short film is done well, you wish that it could be slightly longer.

Whatever films I make, the mandate is that it should touch the audiences and engage them from the first scene.

If people don't connect to Eric Carter's struggles, I'm sure they'll find a character in this series to connect to. That's ultimately what it's about for me.

What I have learned from working on those great shows is what is the DNA that makes them so deeply involving and interesting for an audience over a long period of time. So much has to do with character, complexity, and sophistication.

If you want to convey a message, you must do so in an enjoyable format.

I always believe that a good story will find its audience and that it will attract different kinds of elements of creative people who will make it more compelling.

It doesn't matter which genre you're working in, you try to find an honest relationship within that space, and say if it's the romance genre, within that you have to find a story and characters that resonate with an audience.

Small events and some songs and dance do not make a film. A film needs to have a proper structure and there has to be an output which would be relevant to people who watch it.

I think a script is great when it starts with the structure and works with the structure without falling into the typical three-act system in which the audience is ahead of the movie. I hate that, but that is like 99% of what I read.

A film sells feelings.

Cinema which is well-made, for any kind of audience, is worthy of being watched by just about anybody who would like to watch a good story being told.

'Yeh Hai Aashiqui - Siyappa Ishq Ka' has become a part of who I am. I will be narrating the stories, and as a narrator, I get to experience each story up close and personal and go through the same range of emotions as the characters.

You want, whenever you're telling a story, to have a certain amount of range, and you want to be able to take the audience on that ride with you.

Well, I think it's important to have some kind of a narrative engine that pushes the audience through the landscape. But I love films like 'Apocalypse Now,' which is a very mood driven film. It's a magnetic force that's pulling them through.

Lots of people do stand up shows with no narrative, but I love a beginning, a middle and an end.

I'm a huge believer in story being this invisible scaffolding that no one ever recognizes or realizes is actually making the audience engaged in what's going on. There is no formula for it.