James Horner Quotes

For me and my films, I want my audience to experience cinema in its full glory. It's not just visual, it's audio as well. It's emotional, and I want you to be engaged with not just the scene but with the characters.

Nothing ever sounds quite the way it does when you're standing right in the middle of it.

I try and create for the audience something that relates to real-life experience.

At the same time, one of the things I noticed was that the moment there was any kind of audio attached to virtual reality, it really improved the experience, even though the audio didn't feel like a sound engineer or composer had been anywhere near it.

When I worked on 2001 - which was my first feature film - I was deeply and permanently affected by the notion that a movie could be like a first-person experience.

I don't want people to sit there and objectively watch the film. I want them to experience it as something that's under their skin, so you try to make the films really tactile.

To me, sound is a crucial component to, really, any moviegoing experience, but particularly with suspense films or thrillers. I think you need the audience to become subtly really attuned to the soundscape in, like, this uncomfortable way.

What I've realized is that a film operates both on the intellectual and emotional levels, and if you can find a way to tell a riveting story and draw ideas out of that, it's very powerful.

I think films have to reach people and really grab them. That's what I hope to do when I make a film - to get under your skin and really make you think about something, and have a transporting time that takes you somewhere.

I just love doing radio. I've learned to be more vulnerable through radio than even I've been through books and writing lyrics. It's a different type of experience where, if I'm writing a lyric, I can sort of hide behind it a little bit.

Music should come crashing out of your speakers and grab you, and the lyrics should challenge whatever preconceived notions that listener has.

Musicals are, by nature, theatrical, meaning poetic, meaning having to move the audience's imagination and create a suspension of disbelief, by which I mean there's no fourth wall.

One of the rules of the road is that if you want to create the sense of silence, it frequently has more pungency if you include the tiniest of sounds. By manipulating what you hear and how you hear it and what other things you don't hear, you can not only help tell the story, you can help the audience get into the mind of the character.

I have always believed that directing a film is like telling a story. You have to tell it well so that it is appreciated.

I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.

Acting is experience with something sweet behind it.

I like doing movies that relate to people's experience.

I have a hard time articulating the emotional experience of working on a film. Even when I have meetings on films or discussing them with directors, I find that's my biggest challenge. Different words mean different things to people.

Cinema is my religion. It is a way to make people sensitive, through emotions. To make them feel, experience empathy. People are touched and act ethically when they are emotionally touched.

Sounds always fascinated me.

There's such an immediate intimacy with film that you just don't get in theater.

The highest power of television journalism is not the transmission of information but the transmission of experience.

I don't think there's any more synesthetic medium than film.

Whatever I do, I'm always struggling to create a visceral experience. With my music, I'm more of a live performer these days. And film is such a different thing. It's where people sit in a dark theater. I want them to feel me as viscerally as if they were at a live show.

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.