What you never want to do is have a story that doesn't track emotionally, because then you're going joke to joke and you're going to fatigue the audience. The only thing that's going to string them to the next joke is how successful the previous joke is.
If the laughter of the audience was malicious we wouldn't show it.
But if I can be convinced and then through the work that we do together, the orchestra can really be convinced of the big sweep of that communication that the piece suggests, then the audience will get it and it will be a good experience for all of us.
If you individualize an audience, it helps up the stakes of your responsibility to that audience.
So many roles for women demand that you make the audience fall in love with you or sympathise with you.
When the audience first sees Cooper talking into his tape recorder at the beginning of 'Twin Peaks,' I think that's the greatest introduction to a character I've seen in my career. It tells you everything about the guy right there in a few minutes as well as bringing up a whole load of questions.
Usually with this genre the first thing that happens is a good fight sequence to show that you're in good hands. So we broke that rule. I think a lot of that comes from the western audience.
And over the course of the last six years, as I've directed more features and commercials, I've become better at articulating exactly how I want the audience to feel.
Sound is your friend because sound is much cheaper than picture, but it has equal effect on the audience - in some ways, perhaps more effect because it does it in a very indirect way.
All my big mistakes are when I try to second-guess or please an audience. My work is always stronger when I get very selfish about it.
Nobody has a magic lamp which can tell you in advance whether what you say will be effective in persuading an audience.
Making people laugh is so much more difficult than making them sad. Too much fiction defaults to the somber, the tragic. This is because sad endings are easy in comparison - happy endings aren't at all simple to earn, especially when writing to an audience jaded by them.
I don't know if I ever really considered making a connection with the audience.
The young people look great on television. They're youthful and have a lot of zip and energy, but when you see them live, they can only do about 20 minutes because they haven't got the training to hold an audience for an hour and a half or so.
When an audience comes to one of my concerts, I hope they'll see themselves, somewhere, in one of the songs.
I think everybody in news understands that the audience that watches for more than an hour is not your target audience - because those people are on life support.
Madonna can still produce a catchy pop song, but she hasn't expanded her artistic vocabulary since the 1990s. Her concerts are glitzy extravaganzas of special effects overkill. She leaves little space in them for emotional depth or unscripted rapport with the audience.
When I'm talking to a large audience, I imagine that I'm talking to a single person.
The kind of audience I'm speaking to is a very wide range of people.
I've grown up with my audience; they're my age or older. Not a lot of kids are coming to see me.
You want to do something that shows some type individuality and talent and imagination - at the same time, you want to be truthful to the predecessors, because obviously the audience liked something about them and you have to replicate that experience to a certain extent.
I think with most things online, if you treat your audience like friends instead of like Impressions and Clickthrough Percentages and Returns On Investment, then you're off to a great start.
If we're going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be.
These guys at Fox knew that as a filmmaker, I could always tell different types of stories and each can emotionally connect to a universal audience.
I actually grew up being part of the kids' choirs, so I knew 'Joseph' basically my entire life. We've brought in this new multimedia aspect that really makes the show jump off the stage and into the audience.
TV is easier: it's all planned out for you, and the audience is there to see a show and they are all pumped up, but when you are in a comedy club, you have to be really funny to win them over. To me, that's more pure.
Behind the proscenium arch, you can't always hear what people in the audience are saying.
Being a songwriter does not rely on an audience or other band members or a camera. I can just sit in a room and write songs.
Theater is about language, so characters have to define themselves through language for an audience.
Movies alone have the hideous capacity to do everything for you. So in directing movies, you have to figure how to leave things out - because when you leave things out, you evoke the imaginative participation of the audience.
Carol Burnett probably had the biggest influence on me as kid. Although I was very young and watched her a lot in reruns, I was mesmerized by the way she transformed, by her physical comedy and the rolling laughter from the live studio audience. I loved her most as Scarlett O'Hara and her well known Cleaning Lady character.
Films like 'The Wizard of Oz' and 'Shrek' are hits because they hit on different levels with different age groups. Striking that balance is what I strive for. But I won't know if I've done it until the audience sees it.
I so think it's limiting to define an audience ahead of time. This is something I've brought on myself by being like, 'There are no 'real' teen publications! That's what I'll do!' But then it's like, well, if I want 'Rookie' to be successful and popular, then people will invalidate the realness by saying it's popular and mainstream.
For Scary Movie 2, we had a due date and had to work fast. And though there's a lot of pressure, as artists, we just block it out. So really, the pressure comes from us. That's how the first movie happened. There was no outside pressure: we wanted to hit the audience hard.
I think every professor and writer is in some way an exhibitionist because his or her normal activity is a theatrical one. When you give a lesson the situation is the same as writing a book. You have to capture the attention, the complicity of your audience.
Too many companies think they want to do a video blog to sell merchandise, but if you turn your site into QVC, you lose. I have an audience that trusts me. It's about building a global brand - not selling four more bottles of Pinot Grigio.
