James Wan Quotes

I want to make movies that pierce people's hearts and touch them in some way, even if it's just for the night while they're in the cinema; in that moment, I want to bring actual tears to their eyes and goosebumps to their skin.

I've always tried to make movies that pull the audience out of their seats... I want audiences to be transported.

For me, there is nothing more valuable than how people feel in a movie theater about a movie.

I like to think if something scares me, then there's a very good chance an audience will feel the same way. The key is creating scenarios that people can relate to.

I think horror should never be safe, whether it's violent or non violent.

The audience likes their emotions to be touched. They want to laugh and cry and feel good.

Horror is a totally different animal. It's intense. You can do drama or comedies, but in horror, you really have to trick yourself into believing a lot of unbelievable phenomena.

I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation.

You can get swept away by a musical, but real tears are rare.

As a viewer, I love watching movies. There has to be an emotional connection.

Horror movies don't exist unless you go and see them, and people always will.

Horror movies can be - I don't wanna say not real, but so over-the-top: you can get scared 'cos things are loud and in-your-face, but these are real emotions that I'm using.

I remember watching movies like 'Fatal Attraction' and watching the audience go bananas at the end of the film.

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 lot of horror movies just look at how they can scare people, and no matter which character dies, you don't ever really feel enough to actually care.

I always say that the horror genre and the comedy genre are close cousins because they are the two genres where you are attempting to elicit an involuntary vocal response from a crowd of people and you instantly know whether it's working or not.

When something is moving you get that intake of breath and that stillness from the audience.

You know you are in a good film when it affects the audience.

Writers write for one reason: to create an emotion in the reader, to reach across and make them feel something. You want a reaction. Yeah, it's nicer when the reaction is to throw flowers than it is to throw brickbats, but you have to accept both equally.

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

When you go to the movie theater and the opening of this movie and you see the kids just cracking up with a character you are giving your voice to, you get goose bumps. It's so beautiful.

The people only understand what they can feel; the only orators that can affect them are those who move them.

We watch a romantic comedy because we want to cry, say, or an action movie so we can participate in heroics. Horror's different. It can hit you with a moment of revulsion so hard you might want to erase the last five minutes of your life, please.

As long as I can make an audience feel something, I don't care whether it's a good thing or bad thing, just to feel something is important to me.

At the premieres, I always watch the audience. If a child asks to go to the bathroom, I know I've failed.