Garth Davis Quotes

I want to make movies that pierce people's hearts and touch them in some way, even if it's just for the night while they're in the cinema; in that moment, I want to bring actual tears to their eyes and goosebumps to their skin.

The big thing for me is to make films that you feel, whether you feel happy, whether you feel sad, whether you feel sick; it's to make the audience feel so that the next day they remember what they saw.

The interesting thing about movies, it's not always - y'know, you have to have structure etc and all those things, but an audience responds, in many ways, we walk away and certain things stay in our heads that are memorable.

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

I think a film is a failure if it doesn't have an emotional effect. That's the film's failure. Not if it doesn't deliver a message, but if it doesn't have emotional effect or visceral effect.

You know you are in a good film when it affects the audience.

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

You can sustain visual beauty and innovative visual ideas for a certain length of time, but in a two-hour experience, which is really what movies are, usually audiences - whether they know it or not - most want an emotional connection to character.

I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.

I am filled with awe that filmmakers have the capacity to stir us and give us back a sense of wonder.

A film should be an experience. You should feel something. It should motivate you to feel something.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation.

My favorite thing to hear from people is, 'I left the theater and couldn't stop thinking about it.' You want your work to have an impact after they leave the theater. It's the equivalent of leaving a musical humming a show tune.

I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

You can't but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it's a narrative art form.

I firmly believe that emotions are universal, and I know that when they connect with the audience, it works. There is no such thing as an entertaining or a serious film; there are good films and bad films. Good films will always find a vast audience.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

When I saw 'Talk to Her' for the first time, I was crying out loud because I couldn't imagine that I was doing that film.

I like finishing a movie and having this living, breathing thing.

It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.

When you tell a story that you know is having an effect on the audience, that, for me, is the transforming thing.

I want to entertain, but I'm interested in a whole range of feelings.

If you can connect with the audience emotionally, that's potent storytelling.

I want to make the movies that move people in a way they've never been moved before.