Rod Lurie Quotes

I know when I go to a movie I want to experience something, whether to laugh, to cry, to feel bad.

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.

My films don't give you an easy ride. I can see that. The sense I get is that people have quite a physical experience with them. They feel afterwards that they've really been through something.

If the audience, in minute 50, is thinking about the way a movie is shot, there's a problem. I want it to permeate emotionally.

With anything, and especially with the pallet of viewers in watching anything on TV and film, you have to entertain them.

I think that the cinema is a physical thing. What I'm looking for is creating a physical shock with the audience. I don't care of the meaning. I don't care of the idea. I don't want to say something. I want to make a 'shock physique.'

Why movies are so powerful is because you are right in there and you stay in there until they want you to come out, and then you've really gone somewhere.

When art in general, and film in particular, succeeds is when it pulls you away onto a voyage. Then it's a good film.

I feel like people want to be surprised when they get out of the movies. They want something thrown at them they didn't expect. They want stuff that reminds them of the feelings that you get when you're watching art house movies but with the fun of like a big summer movie. That's the goal, I guess.

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.

People don't come to the theatres to watch a kiss. It's the story that appeals to them.

In the end, you don't want music to be noticed as much as digested and integrated into the storytelling. And make audiences sit forward in their seats and enjoy the movie.

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

To me, a good film is one that can keep me engaged for two hours.

There was not a lot of dialogue. The titles were just to keep you up. It's the visual stimulation that hits the audience. That's the reason for film. Otherwise, we might as well turn the light out and call it radio.

It's a very different thing when you're able to read something and see it in your mind, then to imagine it on screen. It's emotional transference that you don't have in literature that you have in movies. People invest in the person they see on the screen and they can't shift gears.

Theater's wonderful because it's visceral, and it's happening in front of you, but you never get that close. So the close-up is a great privilege of film.

The key to a good horror movie is what happens between the scares. The scares aren't the tricky part. If you're involved in what's going on in between, the scare is going to trick you. If you're not, the best scare in the world will not be scary.

When people leave the theatre, they should remember a line, a character, a sequence or emotion. With entertainment, I want to give meaningful cinema.

There are all these great TV series; you can watch all these hours and hours of shows and ideas, but there's still something great about a movie that unfolds in a couple of hours, and you have the complete experience.

I try to make all the action in my movies subjective: to give a sense of what it would feel like to actually be a part of it.

The experience you're going to take the audience on is as important as the story you're trying to tell. And that experience needs to excite me so much that I am desperate to share it.

In TV the main purpose is to have them keep their hands off the dial. In movies, where you have a captive audience, the opening is intrinsic to the film.

I really feel like the horror genre is capable of so much. Especially as an in-theater experience, something you watch with other people. It can do so much.

'GLOW' is the first time I feel like I've been able to have a theatrical experience on the small screen: to really be able to marry the two. And I love it.