John Lasseter Quotes

'Friends' played in this territory of being funny, and then also just grabbing your heart. And not afraid of that. It was a comedic soap opera. Not being afraid to have an audience feel something, laugh and cry, was quite extraordinary and quite wonderful.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all - make us laugh, think, cry and cheer - preferably in that order.

The hardest thing to get is true emotion. I always believe you need to earn that with the audience. You can't just tell them, 'Ok, be sad now.'

When I make a film, the yardstick is my mind. If I laugh at the jokes and feel sad at the serious undersides, then the subject works.

You need to have a reader's sympathy in order to accomplish anything. It's like at a reading, I find it's better to read something funny than to read something tragic. It just goes over better because you have a finite amount of time with somebody. Of course, in a book, you have a lot of time. But you still do want to make a certain impression right when you begin.

We all know to feel sympathy for those who've suffered from drug addiction, child abuse, and terminal illness, so the set up elicits an emotional response that the story itself very well may not earn. Energy generated by the fiction itself is likely to produce more light.

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

The key is a good story. If you have a good story, you have enough emotional beats that you can hit.

I had a strong vision for 'The Best Man Holiday,' so I was able to translate that to the actors and ultimately to the screen. Things can't get too heavy or too outrageously funny; it has to strike a balance. Tone is everything. If you've set the right tone, you can get away with a lot of stuff. You can get away with making people cry.

I guess that is my favorite thing - to make people laugh and also to maybe engage them emotionally and touch them somehow in telling the story.

You can be a smarty-pants director, but that won't matter if the movie doesn't work emotionally as well as intellectually.

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.

When onstage, I always try to take my audience through as many emotions as I possibly can. I want them to go from laughter to tears, be shocked and surprised and walk out the door with a renewed sense of themselves - and maybe a smile.

I found out a long time ago that if I didn't have a good story for a song, I could just make one up! Now it seems over half the stories in my show are made up. The funny thing is, those seem to be the ones that resonate the most with the audiences.

Emotional honesty transcends reality; it's what allows disbelief to be suspended and yet what makes a story stay true.

I love to be a vessel through which characters can come through. And if I can move an audience with my work, then I've done my job.

In the case of 'Shape Of Water,' I want it to feel like a song. I wanted people to come out of the movie humming the movie.

My films express me, my sense of rhythm, my sense of impact, my sense of kinetic energy. I like films to move, but I like also clear storytelling and characters, and most of all, I like authentic emotion.

I don't think you can cry if the script is rubbish. I have to feel it; it's as simple as that. It's just like if you're watching something moving, and you feel yourself welling up. It's the same thing. You're just being carried along with the story. There's nothing magical about it. I think I'm in touch with my emotions, and I can't help it.

When we wrote 'Avenue Q,' we worked hard to create something that could be funny and satirical but also had some surprise moments of heart, moments when the music itself could become a central player and create something sweet and moving.

The thing that I probably enjoy the most and also am the best at in whatever art form I'm working in is being the protector of the emotional experience of the audience.

I think plot is very overrated. Plot is obviously necessary, but what I really care about is emotionally affecting the audience. Having a thought myself and then an emotional experience myself, somehow transferring that to the audience.

If a reader comes across a story that makes them cry, you can be sure that the writer felt every single thing that makes the reader cry.

There's nothing you can't tell to an audience, because they're all people who've had lives. The only thing they don't want to watch is someone who's really angry or out of control.'