Jon M. Chu Quotes

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

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

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.

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

We all do that thing which is the best in movies - we relate.

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.

If you don't have something that glues the audience to the screen, you're in trouble.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

If you care about the characters, then whatever scary thing happens to them, you feel it even more.

The power of story and the power of a well-crafted film or television show is really all you need to speak to people. I think Hollywood is sort of catching up to that.

I want to do stories that really move me, that have an audience, and at the end of the day, I want people to feel something when they walk out of the cinema.

A film sells feelings.

If the human story in 'STM' is relatable, it will work.

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.

I watch films, so I know what it is to be there in a theatre as the audience. So I always want to communicate with them when I make films, but that is not the only thing. I also want to say something which I feel deeply, and which I feel I can connect with the rest of the audience.

At heart, we believe that the films that work well are the films that do touch people emotionally.

I don't do films because they tell a particular kind of story, I do films with stories that touch me.

Everything we do is about the emotion of the characters. We believe the better the emotion, the better the movie.

Personal stories are the emotional glue that connects your audience to your message.