Children are often better actors than adults because they have a greater capacity for believing in a situation.
I have a longing for fiction, to try to believe in it and to disappear into it.
Where magic is concerned, there is always an initial decision, an initial willingness to let it enter your life. If that is not there neither is magic.
Especially, I think, living in any fantasy or science fiction world means really understanding what you're seeing and reading really densely on a level that a lot of people don't bother to read.
They say truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, but there's such a thing as believability when you're writing a novel.
When people come into the theater, whether it's the screen or the stage, they've gotta be transported and transformed.
I do crazy amounts of research. I want this stuff to 'work,' so to speak. I need to be, at least to me, believable - because if I feel - if I cannot invest some element of verisimilitude, the reader is absolutely not going to buy in.
I try to make the audience forget all their problems -- for an hour and a half or so get them out of themselves, and space, and time, and consciousness.
Yeah, I think the common denominator - and this is probably going to sound like Acting 101 - but the common denominator is belief in the character in the moment.
I can't relax when I'm watching a biographical drama because it's so close to what it is that I do that I just long for more fiction - so that I can switch off.
I just want to be told a story, and I want to believe I'm living that story, and I don't give a thought to influences or method or any other writerly concerns.
Faith means the will to avoid knowing what is true.
It's the reason we go to films and watch television: to escape the mundane nature of life and see another world and see ourselves in that other world. I think that's what sci-fi does so well.
When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings.
At the end of the day, audiences just want to laugh and be entertained. They want to escape from their reality, and that's why we make movies, to get people to escape from the realities.
Faith: not wanting to know what is true.
Action films have a certain illogicalness to them. They're what we call, when we're working, 'exaggerated realism.'
Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.
I think it's obvious when you're watching a movie, and there's people fighting or someone's slipping on the side of the building, that it's fake and it really removes you from it.
What happens in a fantasy can be more involving than what happens in life, and thank goodness for that.
It's a delightful thing to do, to entertain kids. They're a completely different audience because of their total lack of irony. You're always after a total suspension of disbelief, but the only people you can really achieve it with is children.
When reading fiction, we cannot automatically assume that what we read is fact.
Everyone knows that a movie is false. But if as filmmakers we give the audience too many reasons to lose the suspension of disbelief, I believe we're working our way down a hole.
Cinema, which demands suspension of disbelief, is an increasingly naive proposition.
I don't think I ever watched a movie without being totally immersed in the story. But at the same time, I had to keep some distance from it. I had to question what the narrative was trying to tell me or was injecting in my brain.
