Len Wiseman Quotes

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

The first thing, when I read the script, is that I need to care about what happens and feel compelled by the story and engaged by the characters. It needs to resonate with me, even if what the characters are going through is not something that I have experienced in my life. I have to feel like it has some sort of meaning to me.

Sympathetic characters usually have a voice. They usually don't have any trouble being heard.

Pixar is not about computers, it's about people.

If I'm doing my job as an actor, the audience knows everything I know about the character.

I've discovered I can't make a film about people I dislike.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

If I don't fall in love with my characters, I cannot shoot.

Once you get into a feature, whether it's a sequel or an original one, you have to start all over again, and you're creating a world, creating new characters. You're also tracking emotions. You're trying to create emotion and create a character that you can fall in love with for two hours.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

Acted drama requires surrender of one's self, sympathetic absorption in the play as it develops.

I think in some ways, acting and writing are the same. You're getting inside the skin of someone else; you're creating their language and their actions. As a writer, you have to see the whole picture and the structure, and you have to understand every character.

We seek to craft characters who inspire empathy: characters our audience will care for and, as a result, will care about what happens to them and thus will share the journey we have charted. A story, after all, is the character's journey.

I always want to make sure I'm telling a story about people that I care about.

That's one of those things that will really hurt me personally, if I label a character or think about what it might do if it were to do well. I just try to do a good job with it.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.