Shawn Levy Quotes

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.

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

One of the things that separates a good genre movie from a bad genre movie, I always think, ironically, is when you care about the people. The dime a dozen ones are where you don't have any awareness of the character.

If you can't laugh at your own characters, or shed a tear for them, or even get angry at one of them, no one else will either.

And the most important thing - apart from telling a good, believable story, and being a true character - is to be someone the audience will care about, even if you're playing a murderer or rapist.

I'm sorry, but to ask an audience these days to invest three hours in a show requires your heroine be an understandable and fully rounded character.

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

It's hard to be scared if you don't feel for a character, because you don't care if they die or live.

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.

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.

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.

It's always really cool as an actor to have a character that people want to see the best for.

It's always useful to know that people are emotionally invested in a series because it means that you can take them down a certain road, and they should be interested.

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

If we get caught up in a story, it's because we've started to care about the characters, and that can only happen if we've moved beneath the surface.

People like the comedy more when they care about the characters.

I put a lot of time and energy and thought behind what I do and the characters that I create, and I don't want to do anything peripheral that is going to make an audience see me up there on the screen rather than who I'm playing.

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.

I think the tricky balance, the most important thing more than the horror is to have a compelling story, compelling drama, a show about great characters that you care about and you want to come back every week to see what they're up to.

Television lets audiences deeply connect with characters.

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

I feel that in horror movies, especially, if you don't care about the characters, you've lost the audience. No one cares, and it becomes a process of watching people get killed.

I really like comedy. There's always a choice, when you're writing: you can either go for the joke or you can go for the story, the important stuff.