James Wan Quotes

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

I think all television has to be about relationships and I don't think horror for the sake of it can work unless you're able to ground it in some kind of relationship.

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.

As a viewer, I care about people, I care about characters, I care about perspective.

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.

A good movie makes the audience feel like they've journeyed with the characters.

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.

As an actor, you always want to feel like what you're doing is making a difference to the story.

Feelings are universal, and if an actor's doing his job, I think he's making people sit there, and if it's in a movie or a theatre, going 'Hmm, yeah, I know that... I know that.'

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

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.

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

We can't help identifying with the protagonist. It's coded in our movie-going DNA.

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'd read one too many crime novels where the victim was just a name: body number one, dead woman number 12. I understood fear, and I wanted to create characters who made readers say, 'Please, don't hurt this guy.' That's the key to suspense. It's easy to disgust a reader. It's much harder to make them care.

As an actor, that's the best thing you can do, really take people along on a story and tell them something.

What really motivates you to try to work things out as an actor is in large part fear, because you want to get into that narrative and bring the audience along.

I'm hopefully making the reader feel a lot about the characters and then about their own life.

But in film you always watch situations or stories that you really have no relation to. A lot of times just because there's no personal connection doesn't mean you can't connect with the film or the characters in the film.

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

As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.

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.

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.

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.