Jed Mercurio Quotes

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.

I think it is important that you care about the characters, and you are not just waiting for the next action sequence but have a vested interested in what happens to them.

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 have to have somebody to root for. I truly believe that's how you ground a movie. You ground them in the characters.

You have to think about storytelling over the long haul: what is going to engage an audience for, potentially, years and how characters can become deeply involving for an audience.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

You have to be involved and relate to the characters in order to make a film that is true emotionally.

I love seeing a story evolve over several books and watching characters develop.

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.

I'm always sorry to finish a book, to let go of characters I love, people I've struggled to understand for years, people who evolve before me.

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.

Being able to stay with a character over the course of years is a gift.

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.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

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

From beginning to end it's about keeping the energy and the intensity of the story and not doing too much and not doing too little, but just enough so people stay interested and stay involved in the characters.

I believe people leave a theater bonding with characters. Story is the vessel that carries character. Comedy is a very important component of expressing character.

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

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

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

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.