Gurinder Chadha Quotes

You decide which characters you want and then do the best you can to bring their humanity to the forefront in the context that you place them in - the crises in which you've placed them.

Any show I'm working on, I want the stories to always be about something, and to have the potential to be emotional. That's the kind of story that I like.

I enjoy pushing my characters to the limit. No matter how far out there I go, I look for things that make the characters human.

In order to deliver the emotional truth in the story, you have to include some of the literal truth.

I rarely return to characters. My characters, at least most of them, are much more a part of that superorganism that is the story than separate and independent creatures.

In the writers' room, when we talk about each episode, we first talk about the character journey of the episode.

But I also wanted to give them an intelligent emotional journey, without having to suspend reality - to be able to look at those characters and see reasons for the relationships and why what happens happens.

The stories that I like to tell and the movies I like are always grounded in the emotional arc of the characters.

I don't think people are ever going to a place where they're like, 'I'm over stories about character and love.'

It's exciting that you've got an entire season to experience 24 hours of highly dramatically charged human experience. It allows for the close inspection of minutiae in behaviour.

Coming from TV and film, rule number one is that you always service the main character first and foremost. If that's not working, you've got nothing.

Filmmaking is always sort of building a mosaic of this arc of what the character is going through.

As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.

If you have great characters, then your reader becomes emotionally invested in those people.

When I watch a movie, someone's beauty isn't what engages me: it's what's going on internally. And I imagine it's what the audience thinks, too.

I think it's always good not to listen to what the rules are supposed to be about the arc of the character and the third acts and all this stuff.

Normally my films have a single thread of an emotion, an insight or one single belief, and then I turn the entire story and build it around that.

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

I never studied anything about film technique in school. Eventually, I realized that cinema and theater are not so different: from the gut to the heart to the head of a character is the same journey for both.

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

All fiction is about people, unless it's about rabbits pretending to be people. It's all essentially characters in action, which means characters moving through time and changes taking place, and that's what we call 'the plot'.

I like taking a character at the most intense moments of their lives and exploring all that in full and then moving on.

As a novelist, I'm endlessly fascinated by human behavior and interactions.

If you know exactly what your character knows, it's a drama.

'The Piano Lesson' is very sophisticated, easily the most adult or complex material I've attempted. It's the first film I've written that has a proper story, and it was a big struggle for me to write. It meant I had to admit the power of narrative.