Cary Fukunaga Quotes

I find that after a screening, people really want to come and tell you what they feel.

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

You're watching the movie for the first time when you're working with the actors in front of the camera. You don't think about how the audience will react. You discover the film.

I saw 'Birth' at the Sundance Film Festival with a thousand other strangers, and I couldn't believe that was me in the film. I didn't recognize myself.

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...]

I don't know how people feel,that's the beauty of TV, is they can see us, but we can't see them.

My first experience of that was with my first movie which I did in India. And it was so different from other people. I find that "Oh my God." Every time the music is slow I feel that people are going to get up and go out. You get this nervousness. But, to my surprise, people starting singing the song even before it came in. They started singing along a week later, after release, which was very cool.

I love having made a film and watching it when it affects audiences in a positive way. It was always fun for me to hide in the back of a theater and watch Tootsie with an audience and hear them laugh. And it's gratifying 20 years later to imagine that they still can find it amusing.

The fact that audiences have come away moved, excited, entertained and stimulated by the film is extraordinarily flattering.

When you work so hard on making a film, it's all worthwhile when you get to experience seeing that film with an audience who thoroughly enjoy it and react to the movie.

When you put the musical in front of an audience, you get to see how the audience reacts.

The thing that is incredibly helpful is that we screen the movies and we ask the audience if they like it or not and we ask a lot of questions and do testing on the movies. For comedies, at least, it's very helpful. If they're not laughing and they don't say that they loved it, then I have screwed up.

For instance, when I go to the premiere on Tuesday I probably won't watch the film at all - I'll be watching the audience just to see their reaction to different moments, what I'm doing right and what I'm doing wrong, stuff like that.

When I watch a movie for the first few times I'm usually thinking about where I was in a given scene, who was next to me, what we were doing etc. But after I've gotten through all of this, when I'm really watching the film itself, then I get moved.

You know, we're not on stage, we're not doing a play, so we don't have a relationship with the audience but going through that process and also just hearing how much people love the film, you feel like you do have a relationship with the audience.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

I like test screenings. I like to see a movie with an audience of strangers. I think it tells you a lot.

I cry at movies.

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

'Funny Games' was conceived as a provocation. My other films are different. If people feel my other films are, or respond to them as provocation, then that's quite different. 'Funny Games' is the only one of mine where my intention was to provoke the audience.

When I watch a film, I watch it as an audience instead of thinking as an actor or an intellectual. I see whether it made me laugh, get involved or shocked me at certain points. Something has to stir inside me.

I want people to come see my films and enjoy them, but at the end of the day you can't control what people think.

I think that if an audience is truly appreciative of a performance, they will show it. Sometimes though, there are little differences, and there are audiences that are very reserved even though they are enjoying the show.

You never really know until you put the movie in front of an audience. I am a big advocate of screenings, which are getting harder and harder to do nowadays.

It's very difficult to get an audience to be terrified of what's going on. Think about it: You're in a room with so many other people, so for them to be terrified and to care about what's going on on-screen takes a lot of work.