Eric Whitacre Quotes

A film with an untidy plot cannot grip the audience and define their emotional response.

If someone gets up and walks out of the movie, it means it's really affected them.

In film, there's always this looking for the 'If you lay down and burst into tears, you did a good job.'

Every play is rhythmic control. If you want an audience to go on a journey, it's rhythmic control. You're crafting when they lean in, when they push back, when they breathe, when they surrender.

You have a responsibility for the way you make the audience feel, and I want them to feel uncomfortable.

My main goal as an actor, with my craft or whatever poncy way you want to say it, is to always take the audience with me. To make them feel for me, or to make them hate me, I want a reaction. I want their emotions. The worst reaction someone can have is, "eh."

We like reactions - a reaction is walking out on us, a reaction is throwing tomatoes at the stage, that's a healthy psychological reaction.

I wish to please the people, but I want to make them cry, perhaps. There, I have said it.

You can get swept away by a musical, but real tears are rare.

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

I want to be engaged and moved by theatre, there's nothing more disappointing than being left cold. After 'The Author,' I felt wrung out emotionally, like a used tissue.

If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.

I may be alone in this, but I do sense the power of film, in that movies have the ability to literally change people's minds. That's pretty powerful stuff when you consider that.

'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

Above all, I try to create an emotion to which others can respond.

My whole mood or sense can change by virtue of the music that I'm listening to. It really does affect me on a visceral and emotional level.

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.

I want you to laugh and cry. That's what I do.

We're all affected by music. It has the power to inspire, uplift us, change our moods, and even alter consciousness.

My whole thing as a performer is to affect people, whether I make you cry or I make you laugh. I would love to make you think.

I never leave a piece of theater that I love and say, 'That was a good point; They made a good point.' I leave, and I feel something.

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.

Showing 'Get Out' to a room full of strangers and having them react lets them be introspective and see the way certain images affect other people.

I want my audience to be constantly captivated, bewitched, so that it leaves the theatre dazed, stunned to be back on the pavement.

My most successful song was 'Language' and I think partly because it's a nice, dancey record, but I'll see people cry in the audience to that song, and that's so much more interesting to me than making someone just jump up and down.