Glen Mazzara Quotes

You can't tell an audience to like a character. And I think the best way to get the audience on someone's side is to embarrass them.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

Fiction allows you to embody certain ideas and give them an emotional reality. The characters allow you to get close viscerally to an idea.

I usually don't find myself reacting to my characters. I just create them ... And let the audience decide whether they're empathetic or scared or compelled to cheer me on.

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along.

I like making stories and characters that people can relate to. I also like giving the audience a departure from whatever they're thinking about in their life and enjoying a show or a movie.

The reason I'm an actor and am trying to make my way in drama is to move people, to affect people, to gain a response - so these people who come up to you in the street are your audience.

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.

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.

In writing literary fiction, you are trying to help yourself. And readers are going to literary fiction not just to be entertained, but because they feel something else will happen; that the experience will take them beyond themselves and show them something they haven't seen before.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

It's like fiction - the fact that somebody's telling you a story about people who didn't exist doesn't make the experience of the story any less real in your heart and mind. You go through heavy emotional responses to these stories, and wrestling is a similar thing - but it's happening in real space.

The heart of the theater is the play itself, how it dramatizes life to make it meaningful entertainment. To achieve depth and universality, the playwright must subject himself to intense critique, to know human character and behavior, and finally to construct art from the most mundane of human experience.

When I saw 'Talk to Her' for the first time, I was crying out loud because I couldn't imagine that I was doing that film.

I like finishing a movie and having this living, breathing thing.

A novelist writes a novel, and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.

We all go to the theater and cinema to be inspired and moved on an emotional level, sometimes to laughter, sometimes to tears. Once I discovered that acting could have such an effect, I was sold. It has been one of the most rewarding discoveries I have ever made.

What I find frustrating about scripted television is that it's rare that you are surprised by how you feel about the character, or how you feel about the show.

The real trick to these movies and making the big action sequences work - and I've forgotten this sometimes and screwed it up - the characters really have to be humanized. Because you can have the greatest special effects in the world, but if you don't care about the people in those effects, there's no impact.

I don't really make movies with an intention other than asking myself, 'Do I love the character, and do I love the story?'

I came into this business to create characters that moved people and told stories.

Things happen to all of us. The writer's job is to get you interested.

It's the writer's job to disarm the reader of his logic, to just make the reader feel.

Wrestling and sports entertainment is not about the moves, it really isn't. It's about being able to evoke emotion in one facet or another.

It is very touching that you are able to create some kind of impact through a character.