Spike Jonze Quotes

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.

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

It can be a fictional character and yet relatable... It always depends on the content of the film and what you are doing.

I try to create characters people want to sit with, even if nothing is happening.

If a movie is really working, you forget for two hours your Social Security number and where your car is parked. You are having a vicarious experience. You are identifying, in one way or another, with the people on the screen.

As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.

I am a firm believer that a good plot makes for a fun enough read, but it's not what binds us. If we don't care about the characters, we won't care - not in a lasting way - about what's happening to them.

I believe people leave a theater bonding with characters. Story is the vessel that carries character. Comedy is a very important component of expressing character.

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

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

My characters are always utterly sympathetic to me, if that makes any sense.

To get a connection to your characters, you have to put them in a situation that you can feel yourself.

I've never been interested in watching or reading anything because it's the hero's story. I don't feel the need to be inspired by the character or learn a lesson. I feel the need to be engaged by them.

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'm focused on finding characters I connect to.

Audiences need to engage with characters.

I don't think the challenge is asking an audience to like a character; it's inviting them to try and understand them... then making that journey entertaining and worth their while. It's a classic trick, but it's human, and it allows characters to have more depth.

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.

I always try to make my characters people, and yet I always want to entertain.

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.

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

I like my characters to be ones I think about long after I've finished reading the script.