Audience Sympathy

"and all these all every single one of these films has someone doing something that we know is incredibly stupid but for understandable reasons and they all contextualize it different ways"

"it never says you should do what walter did hey this is what walter did totally cool man you see a hottie you can totally murder her husband it's all good never ever ever ever however for a moment it puts you in their shoes and says can you understand why they would do that"

"I really enjoyed tying the, like, just the fact that you're able to draw these sorts of connections between, you know, like an insurance salesman and a post-war, you know, a GI, like all of those sorts of things are really fascinating. And I think writing characters that are assholes, but are completely relatable"

"What can we learn from noir?. In particular: *How can we make characters doing despicable things... compelling?*"

"What's really interesting about Hot Fuzz is in the first couple of pages, they could be setting up a James Bond character. Like, effectively, that kind of, like, almost bulletproof action hero, right? And then, after they've done that kind of, like, escalation, then they start deconstructing it. And this is a pattern that will, that As Good as It Gets, does very well. There's this kind of yin-yang or this peak and trough with our perceptions of the character that they play with to make it, in my mind, make the character both unlikable yet compelling."

"him trying see him trying to lure the dog right we're not quite sure what he's doing but before we see exactly what he's trying to do the dog pees on the wall and we're with Melvin so we actually understand why Melvin does not like that dog all right and that's really important because then even just the way it's structured, right, you could actually get rid of the dog peeing, you know, and then the dog just barks at Melvin and Melvin picks him up and throws him down the chute, but they needed to show why Melvin dislikes the dog. So, we understand the motivation behind extreme action, even if we don't agree with the action itself."

"they got us onside this incredibly cranky, incredibly racist person by making his racism so overt that we were laughing at him. And it allows you to have empathy or at least get on the side of this person so that even though they're unlikable you can be it's okay to spend time with them because you're laughing at them."