Rajkumar Hirani Quotes

As a storyteller, when you're writing a movie and when you're directing, you want to keep people entertained. That's the whole point, right? It has to be entertaining.

I found it very difficult to explain to someone why you did a film. It's not like having a conversation.

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

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 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.

Filmmaking, like any other art, is a very profound means of human communication; beyond the professional pleasure of succeeding or the pain of failing, you do want your film to be seen, to communicate itself to other people.

A film engages you emotionally and intellectually.

Every frame and every scene has to have an intention.

I know the movies that I've liked, and I know the experience that they've given me, so the goal is always to try to create a movie that I would like myself and that would knock me out, challenge me or intrigue me in some way. That's been my criteria for figuring out what I want to do, or also when I'm writing something or creating a scene.

So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.

When I saw 'Talk to Her' for the first time, I was crying out loud because I couldn't imagine that I was doing that film.

Look, I'm just a storyteller. When I make a film, I never want the film to become a vehicle of social propaganda.

I'm interested in making films that make people think.

It's our responsibility as filmmakers to tell a story that's a human drama.

I don't want to do a history lesson. I don't think cinema should be about that. Cinema should be about emotions.

Whatever films I make, the mandate is that it should touch the audiences and engage them from the first scene.

My goal is to always try to make you feel something, whether that's humor or sadness or excitement, and to try to manipulate screen space.

When I go for a project, I wonder what underpinning a project will have that's going to give the audience some emotional access to it.

A lot of the struggle I had with movies is I really loved moments and tones and feelings in a scene, and I loved creating those, but I never really had great stories to string them together.

Film is such a very good tool for communicating emotions, and all designers and creative people look to inspire an emotional response.

Always when you are doing films, the themes swallow you in one way or another.

I definitely managed to do different kinds of things. My focus is usually who the director is, because at the end of the day the director is the storyteller, what the movie is all about. I don't want to participate in something that I don't think is constructive storytelling.

In a film, you have to externalize things that are internal and of course it becomes a debate about to what extent you do that.

I think the last thing you want to do as a writer, as a storyteller, is to create indifference. I don't necessarily go out of my way to provoke, but I would much rather have a song that triggers a whole myriad of reactions than a song that inspires a shrug of the shoulder.

I don't think I'd ever start making a film until I had both the intimacy with the subject and the distance to make it live in a certain way.