Joel Silver Quotes

Good cinema is what we can believe and bad cinema is what we can't believe. What you see and believe in is very much what I'm interested in.

We love bringing verisimilitude to audiences, hopefully having experiences you'll never have.

Everything in a story should be credible.

It doesn't matter how beautifully a film is photographed. The acting tells your story. It's what people relate to. If you don't believe the characters, it doesn't work.

Everybody claims they have relatable, connectable characters, but those claims often aren't true.

I have realised just how important it is to readers to feel that fictional stories are based on reality.

The truth has got to appear plausible on the stage.

We are Disney, in a sense. When you've been there for 20 years, there's a certain heart and soul to one of those films, and you inhabit that to a certain degree. So if it feels true to you, then your audience will hopefully go for it.

I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.

Lest men suspect your tale untrue, Keep probability in view.

Everything that I can do to ground the story in reality helps make it harder for people to be dismissive of it.

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

My action follows my characters. If a character is a cop, you cannot be posing all the time, you cannot fly off the roof because it doesn't make any sense - it's not practical.

Even when I do commercials, I try to tell a story about the product. With music, I try to tell the story of the person's struggle for success. And I believe every word I say. I never read anything on the air I don't believe in. I think people sense that about me, and they respond to it.

What I try to do often when I'm acting and what I like when I'm seeing good acting is how authentic it is. How true is this to what I know of the world that's been created for me? The ultimate test for me is, like, if I heard a clip of it on the radio, I'd like the audience not to know if I'm acting.

You make a film you feel is as real as possible and hope people react as though it were real.

I hate acting when I see it. I don't want to feel it, I don't want to see it, I want to be taken away with the story - I don't want the actor's ego in front of me. That's what I try to live when I do the work.

When you go to the theater, if you're really involved in the play, you don't think about it - you're in it.

You have an audience that is fairly well grounded in the real world. You serve them and yourself best by making everything as real as possible.

Acting is trying to be absolutely truthful; to get audiences to believe that you are a dean, when, actually, not only are you not the dean, but if you walked into the building they'd probably throw you out. That's very hard.

Verisimilitude is something I am constantly seeking in fiction. I am looking for surface detail that makes something seem real.

I think the best way to sell a made-up character is to plant his feet into the real earth.

I've been in so many writing workshops where someone hands in a story, and when the other writers in the workshop are giving feedback, they say, 'This is unbelievable.' And the writer says, 'Well, actually, the events are based in real life. This actually happened.'

I want my fiction to seem real.

Getting the player emotionally involved is the holy grail. We try to make players forget they're playing a game. We want them to live the experience and suspend disbelief.