Alex Kurtzman Quotes

One of the reasons wrestling works is because it allows people to suspend their disbelief. They may know it's not real, but if it's done well enough, they get sucked into it emotionally. And that's why they watch.

I had never experienced anything like the response I got from people for Pirates of the Caribbean, where you meet a 75-year-old woman who had seen Pirates and somehow related to the character, and then five minutes later you meet a six-year-old who says, 'Oh, you're Captain Jack!' What a rush. What a gift. That was the challenge with Wonka, too--to be, in a sense, like Bugs Bunny. I find it magical that a three-year-old can be mesmerized by Bugs, but so can a 40-year-old or an 80-year-old. It's a great challenge to see if you can appeal to that huge an age range.

Your relationship to a film, and to cinema, is very much determined by yourself, so what is relevant is you.

The movies that are really big, at least in my experience, oftentimes don't have characters that I feel as personally connected to.

In the end, drama is successful if you care about the people.

'The Voice' is not just a singing competition. It really comes down to how you come off as a person and how you connect with America with your story, and being relatable to people.

You need the audience to become invested in the characters and in order to become invested, they need to identify with the characters... and that's why the characters need to be real.

'Elizabethtown' was a movie made for all the right reasons, and people who connect with the movie really connect to it. It's not the biggest group of people ever, but I still really believe in 'Elizabethtown.' It wasn't, like, a savage blow.

It would be hard to play a character you don't like - for me anyway - or can't find something in them to like.

I'm never interested in movies where you don't care about the people you're watching, and that's my biggest quibble about horror, that kids have gotten stupider and stupider.

Whatever kind of movie it is, you're going to be more into it when you care more about the drama, or you'll have a better laugh if you feel like you know the people better.

I've spoken before on how the art of storytelling has been lost a bit. I definitely feel 'Empire' is helping to reprogram us back to that place where we pay attention and invest emotionally in the records and the artists.

A lot of entertainment, and especially in a half-hour format, can be all jokes, all the time. And some of those jokes can be really, really funny, but what I respond to, as a viewers, is identification or caring about the characters.

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

If I can get the audience to connect with the characters emotionally - and they love who they are, they love the larger-than-life situation that they're in, but most of all get the audience invested in the characters - then I always feel like I can sort of put them in the most outrageous circumstances, and the audience is okay to go with that.

I tend to find that movies have become so slick that I have trouble identifying with the characters.

I think television is about the characters you want to see again, and so you want to invite these people into your home. And certainly, seeing them get into bad situations and then watching them have to get themselves out, that's always super satisfying.

People see my films, and they cheer and they clap, and they are the kind of movies I like to see myself.

When the characters are believable and endearing, action scenes, for example, make an impact. Otherwise, the audience gets no kick out of action. The biggest strength of 'MCA' is that its characters are real.

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 think there just needs to be an emotional attachment to the surfer, however you get that, so that, when you watch the surfing, you can relate to that person, or you're rooting for them, in a way.

What makes an audience watch something and care about the characters is the emotional life of the characters.

If you care about [the characters] as if they were real, that always helps.

I think of the medium as a people-to-people medium, not cameraman-to-people, not direction-to-people, not writers-to-people, but people-to-peopleYou can only involve an audience with people. You can't involve them with gimmicks, with sunsets, with hand-held cameras, zoom shots, or anything else. They couldn't care less about those things. But you give them something to worry about, some person they can worry about, and care about, and you've got them, you've got them involved.

Any game becomes important when you know and love the players.