Leigh Whannell Quotes

I began directing episodes, which was a great light every couple of months. We never short-changed our audience, but it became something that you had to work at rather than something that was a pleasure.

The minute you start assuming that the audience is very happy to see the same show again, you're dead.

Audiences have become so much more sophisticated, and they're looking for different eyes and different ways to tell a story. And 'Scandal' certainly gives us the freedom to take those chances.

I didn't really want to do another sequel. I go to those movies, and I just sort of enjoy them like a viewer.

I don't think there will be another Ghostbusters. I think we're all too old to do it. I think we've done it a couple times and there is not that much to get out of it, to do that would be fresh in it.

I've learned that you can do something great, but you have to continue reinventing yourself as an artist. So by the time someone else is copying your style, you have something else to offer your audience.

Three hours of creating is taxing on any brain, and you should stop there. Some days, you may stop without any words at all. It's much easier to write new stuff the next day than to go through painful deletions of a day's worth of crap you already wrote.

I feel like movies should stick to a genre and give the audience what they want, and then surprise them with the unexpected, and not just do the same thing you've always seen.

To this day, people ask me where is Austin Powers 4? I don't have that answer, it so hard to come up with a story that deserves an encore like that.

We were lucky to get Sam Jackson and Jeremy Irons and John McTiernan back. Long movie and hard movie to make and difficult for me because instead of working, my biggest concern was not repeating things I had done it in the previous films. And it rang notes in my head of episodic TV. A sequel is not a new movie; it's a chapter in a movie that you have already seen. Thank god Sam was there and thank god Jeremy was there. Again, it went outside the template of that series of films but it did well and made a ton of dough and the third chapter of a lot of sequels is always the one that falls down.

Attention spans are so limited and ticket prices so high. We're anyway in a business of manipulating emotions. But each film needs to be positioned truthfully so that people don't feel cheated.

When I started in television, it was brand new. It was the miracle over in the corner of your room. Now the audience has seen every story line. People have heard every joke. They can predict the plot almost before a show starts. That's a hard, sophisticated audience to reach.

I actually think the creative process is finite, and I'm wondering whether I've retched everything up. Because it's like vomiting or shitting.

"Cannonball Adderley said, 'First 20 minutes we'll jazz out, then the last hour it's gonna be songs that people paid to see.' Which is why he was driving a Rolls-Royce."

If you are tuning in just for the show, you're going to be sorely disappointed.

It's difficult to keep anything fresh for an audience these days. With technology being what it is people seem to know everything there is to know about a film before you've even made it.

Don't expect the theatre to satisfy the habits of its audience, but to change them.

People come out to see you perform and you've got to give them the best you have within you.

I'm doing the same thing and it's a hundred times bigger and a hundred times better. So if your going to make a computer game off a movie, is it going to be like "Avatar" where it's going to be a prequel before Jake even got to the planet. You've got to be smart because audiences demand that.

I'm working for myself; what else have I got to work for? How can you work for an audience? What do you imagine an audience would want? I have got nobody to excite except myself, so I am always surprised if anyone likes my work sometimes. I suppose I'm very lucky, of course, to be able to earn my living by something that really absorbs me to try to do, if that is what you call luck.

One of the challenges of the show has always been trying to be surprising, and that was easy to do when nobody was watching it. Now that people have started watching it, they get ahead of us. We've all started really guarding the material, just to make it fun for the audience.

There's always people who came 600 miles to hear the song you didn't play.

People come with expectations and as a bandleader I constantly try to remind the audience to leave its expectations in the lobby.

If you're not connected emotionally to a story, then you're dead. You're as a filmmaker really just opening the door for people to lose interest and their minds to wander, for them to start picking it apart. That's what people will do, people will naturally tear stuff apart because they're trapped with it, they paid money for it. And they came into it wanting to love it. So all you can really do is piss off the audience. Unless you do things right.

I've never thought it was a good idea to act back-to-back. If you are going to have any chance of replicating life, you need to live it. I also never forgot something Johnny Depp said to me, which Marlon Brando said to him, 'You only have so many faces in your pocket.' I really admire artists who take the time to recharge their batteries and not continually call on it. I think you can spot tired and jaded artists quite quickly.