Elisha Cuthbert Quotes

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

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.

I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

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

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

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

If you don't care for the villain, if you don't love him and hate him at the same time, then he's just boring.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

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.

The easiest way for readers to connect with characters and feel sympathy is to make the character entertaining, sympathetic and likeable.

To connect with the characters, you need to connect with the world. If the world feels vaguely familiar, I believe the characters will feel relatable.

I've always felt, even with sketches, that if you don't care about these people, then it doesn't matter.

You can't make the audience fall in love with a character you don't like.

Certain characters get to me and stay with me for a while.

Whether it's Brad Pitt up there, if there's a good moment up there, and you get pulled into the emotion, you're not thinking, 'Oh, that's Brad Pitt. He's an actor, and he's famous.' That's kind of the nature of storytelling, right? You sit around the fire and tell a story, and you can get sucked into that story.

I think there is a difference between connecting with a character and supporting and believing their policies.

I think it's touching that the fans feel so close to the characters that they feel personally hurt. I've felt that way in plenty of TV shows - 'Game of Thrones,' 'Mad Men.' How could they do that to that character? That's drama.

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.

Stories have a special way of putting us inside the people, inside the boots of the soldiers. You're absorbed in a way a documentary or nonfiction can't do for you.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

Action-adventure, that genre, only works for me if you can care about the characters. If the hero's not taking some kind of a journey, then there are no stakes - and no stakes, then you don't care if he lives or dies, wins or loses.

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.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart.