Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

If you kill a character people feel sad. That's too easy.

I want to remind people that there is no soundtrack in 'Southland;' there is no scored music or soundtrack telling you what you're supposed to feel.

It's very simple, I just tell my sad story, and people weep.

We can never underestimate the emotionality of 'This Is Us.' Just when you think you don't have another tear to cry, we will find a way. We will find all of your tears. We will dig down deep, and we will yank them out, whether you like it or not.

In film, there's always this looking for the 'If you lay down and burst into tears, you did a good job.'

If I'm able to catch the screening, there's a point in the film where, like clockwork, a portion of the audience gets really emotional and begins to cry. And that's very difficult to make happen.

I don't want people leaving the theater depressed after my movies. I want them angry.

I think it's almost easier to make people cry than to make people laugh.

Comedy and horror are cousins; they're related. They both come from storytellers who want to specifically affect the audience and elicit specific reactions during the movie.

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

He steps on stage and draws the sword of rhetoric, and when he is through, someone is lying wounded and thousands of others are either angry or consoled.

I love movies that make me cry, because they're tapping into a real emotion in me, and I always think afterwards: how did they do that?

Ideally, I like to integrate the human issues into the suspense story itself.

I wish to please the people, but I want to make them cry, perhaps. There, I have said it.

I would like to say that I was inspired to write 'Shiver' by some overwhelming belief in true love, but here's my true confession: I wrote 'Shiver' because I like to make people cry.

No one - apart from my agent, perhaps - should leave one of my shows in tears.

We give you this story. It is for the audience to be moved and gut wrenched, not us. It isn't as if we don't go through those real feeling and it isn't as if I don't cry three or four times a night. I usually do.

The great thing about 'Friday Night Lights,' unlike so many other shows and movies, is that it doesn't take the obvious beats to pull your heartstrings or manipulate you.

Your job as a writer is to find storylines, narrative structures, and characters to show the things that you believe rather than saying them or telling them.

There is no better place to plot the death of a character than when you're miserable and working out.

Well, all the plays that I was trying to write were plays that would grab an audience by the throat and not release them, rather than presenting an emotion which you could observe and walk away from.

As you follow the escapades or the journey of the hero through a story, it evokes some kind of emotion in the viewers. The director's job is to make sure that the audience goes through the journey and has an emotional reaction.

I tell the story by feel most of the time, and I am not much given to labyrinthian digressions but seem to be naturally drawn to compression and pace, and the feelings come about on their own.

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.

The danger of serialization is that you almost get into a monotone - where they all have the same beat and pace, and it's all one long thing - and when you can kind of do this interesting mixture of episodic and serialization, you can kind of take the audience on a more interesting journey.