James Wan Quotes

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

I'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

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.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

I love making characters real and believable, through my own experience and choices.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

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

I like to write characters that feel like people that I would know.

I try to create characters people want to sit with, even if nothing is happening.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

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.

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.

It always helps me connect with characters, to think about what music they respond to.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

I just want to keep finding special characters that I feel like I can bring to life and characters that are real and not superficial.

I don't like the idea the viewer can kind of sit there and go, 'Make me like this person.' People aren't inherently sympathetic.

I can tell you that as a writer and as a reader, I regard character as king. Or queen. No matter how riveting the action or interesting the plot twists, if I don't feel like I'm meeting someone who feels real, I'm not going to be compelled to read further.

I always try to write about believable people.

Your structure and format may not be perfect, and you may not have picked the perfect franchise, but if I pick up a script, and the characters are real, whole, complicated and come from a place of somebody who really is feeling it, that's what people remember.

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

In terms of the parallels, I've never related less to a character than Riggan.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

I think, when I write, one of the things that I'm really attempting to do is I'm attempting to humanize my characters.

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