Chris Meledandri Quotes

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

There's no rule that we have to like the characters movies are about.

When you're building a character, or at least when I'm building a character, you start saying, 'How am I going to make people like him?'

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.

The reason that some motion-capture films don't work is if the scripts are not good, and the characters aren't engaging, then you don't believe in the journey, and you're not connected to it. It's not the technology's fault.

You have to have a strong idea for a hit movie, a strong core idea that resonates emotionally. It also has to technically achieve its goal - it's got to be well-written, well-paced, and interestingly told.

People seem to need a likable protagonist more than ever.

Animation scripts tend to be much more descriptive and are lighter on dialogue.

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

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

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

There's so many great wrestlers in this sport who could probably work circles around me and it's amazing to see that, but I love being the kind of character who can take you on a roller coaster, make you smile and laugh.

I'd love to star in dark drama that audiences could really relate to.

I think all television has to be about relationships and I don't think horror for the sake of it can work unless you're able to ground it in some kind of relationship.

Obviously, I try to make the films work for an audience. That's the main point of making a film, and in retrospect, one can see that certain films, let's say Leaving Las Vegas, demonstrated its own success.

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.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

I love doing theater so much - being in front of an audience and seeing how a character grows and develops with every performance.

I just love to be able to actually build a character.

As an actor, you always want to feel like what you're doing is making a difference to the story.

Whether I'm acting or making it, at the end of the day it's telling the story; action, drama. You want the audience to feel it - the story, the action, the scene, or a particular shot. I just keep working on crafting my art, on how to make action movies.

Pixar's short films convinced Disney that if the company could produce memorable characters within five minutes, then the confidence was there in creating a feature film with those abilities in story and character development.

People are going to go where they get characters that they remember.

There's something about seeing this little inanimate object coming to life that's just very exciting. That's why with 'Nightmare' I held out for so long to do it.

Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'