Garry Winogrand Quotes

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."

I don't like movies that are too manipulative. A lot of movies thrive on really pushing your buttons and making you hate the villain.

And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.

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

The audience should feel like voyeurs. Their response is absolutely crucial.

As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction.

I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience.

You can't control how an audience responds to something. It's up to them.

Emotionally, light very much influences, I feel, the audience. It's not something that most audience members are conscious of, which is a good thing, because it means as filmmakers, we have the opportunity to gently control an audience into feeling a certain way.

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.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

I've made movies on every part of the spectrum, and you do understand when you go into certain movies that you're trying to elicit a certain kind of response from the audience, and people get a real sense of satisfaction when they're rooting for a character and the character pulls it off.

If a picture wasn't going very well, I'd put a puppy in it.

The public is composed of numerous groups whose cry to us writers is: 'Comfort me.' 'Amuse me.' 'Touch my sympathies.' 'Make me sad.' 'Make me dream.' 'Make me laugh.' 'Make me shiver.' 'Make me weep.' 'Make me think.'

Theatre audiences can't be made to think and cry: at best, they can be made to think and laugh, or to feel and cry.

Night after night, through years of performing and directing, I've stood in awe of the audience, of its capacity for response. As if by magic, masks fall away, faces become vulnerable, receptive. Filmgoers do not defend their emotions, rather they open to the storyteller in ways even their lovers never know, welcoming laughter, tears, terror, rage, compassion, passion, love, hate--the ritual often exhausts them.

Every laugh is not equal. They come from different places. That's sort of the challenge I go towards, making sure the laughs are for the reasons I want. It becomes a back and forth dance with the audience.

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

I still want to get some empathy from the audience, even though she's pathetic.

With pornography, if you don't get hard or wet, depending on your gender, it didn't work. With humour, if you don't laugh it didn't work. And with horror, if you don't get scared or haunted, depending on what it's trying to do, it didn't work. I'm fascinated by those three categories.

When I was working with Stanley Kubrick [on "Eyes Wide Shut"], he would always say, "You never tell the audience what to feel. Let them choose to have their responses."

Consider the public. Never fear it nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all never, never, never bore the living hell out of it.

When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.

The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects. So that no one would say, how did you do it, where did you find it, but they would say that such things could be.

I think seeing films should be interactive. I'd rather have people see a film that I'm in and either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it, than be like, "Oh, yeah, it was good." That's the worst!