I think you have to do the stories that interest you and hope an audience likes it, rather than doing stories that you think the audience will like, whether you like them or not. I think there has to be something that you find compelling and interesting, and then hopefully an audience will agree with you.
I think about the audience in the sense that I serve as my own audience. I have to please myself the way, if I saw the movie in a theater, I would be pleased. Do I think about catering to an audience? No.
I don't think about the audience, I don't think about what makes them happy, because there's no way for me to know. To try to think of what makes for entertainment is a very Japanese thing. The people who think like this are old-fashioned. They think of the audience as a mass, but in fact every person in the audience is different. So entertainment for everyone doesn't exist
I don't write with any audience in mind. I just write. I take a chance on the audience. That's what I did originally, and I think it's worked--in the sense that I find there is an audience.
I wouldn't say that I'm actually trying to cause chills in the audience, but certainly my goal is to, at the very least, effect a physiological response - at the most, to effect some sort of state change, ideally, in the audience.
I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience - and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two - are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.
I think about all these influences and musical cultures, then the opinion of the audience is of course important, but when I'm working on an album or a new project, I'm not all the time thinking about what the audience will think about it.
I see the audience as the final collaborator. I think it's kind of bullshit when people say, "I'm not interested in the audience reaction." I'm like, "Then why do you do theater? You can write a book, then you don't have to see how the audience reacts." It's a living, breathing thing.
As much as I'd like to think and as much as people mistakenly think my audience is blue collar people in the heart of America, my audience is basically, in the States, an NPR audience. I play college towns in the summer because that's who comes to see me.
If you lead with the anger, it will turn off the audience. And what I want is the audience to engage with the material and to listen and then to ask questions. I think that 'Ruined' was very successful at doing that.
An audience will let you know if a song communicates. If you see them kind of falling asleep during the song, or if they clap at the end of a song, then they're telling you something about the song. But you can have a good song that doesn't communicate. Perhaps that isn't a song that you can sing to people; perhaps that's a song that you sing to yourself. And some songs are maybe for a small audience, and some songs are for a wide audience. But the audience will let you know pretty quickly.
I think the cartoons that they're children are watching, particularly 'The Simpsons,' they're OK. I think that the adult audience is making much too much of the danger that they imply. That's not the case. The danger for children today, honey, is the news. Keep them away from news on television.
I do think there's a smaller audience that's looking for something that's a little more adult and a little more nuanced [than many Hollywood movies]. At the same time, I think everyone who's making movies hopes to appeal to the widest audience possible.
I feel that tennis is an art form that is capable of moving the players and the audience - at least a knowledgeable audience-in almost sensual ways. When I'm performing at my absolute best, I think that some of the euphoria I feel must be transmitted to the audience.
I believe that DVD is that which gives some hope to retaining some content in movies that will appeal to an older audience or the more sophisticated audience or the audience that doesn't need or desire to see a movie on a Friday night.
There's actually a disdain for the conversation about audience in the art world. Artist to artist, if you say, "What do you think about audience?" they would probably say, "I don't think about audience, I only think about my work," yet the audience is such an important part.