A Quote by James Broughton

Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema. — © James Broughton
Work in the theater sharpened my verse and my cinema.
One hundred percent, all your Shakespeare training serves you in the work in musical theater today: specifically in modern musical theater, our soliloquies, and now what we call rap. It's the reason it's so easy to learn, because it's verse; it's rhyme! It just sticks in the soul very easily.
We can't keep thinking in a limited way about what cinema is. We still don't know what cinema is. Maybe cinema could only really apply to the past or the first 100 years, when people actually went to a theater to see a film, you see?
When you're on TV, you come into people's homes. In theater and film, they go to you - to the temple of the cinema or theater. And it's very different.
I think what I loved in cinema - and what I mean by cinema is not just films, but proper, classical cinema - are the extraordinary moments that can occur on screen. At the same time, I do feel that cinema and theater feed each other. I feel like you can do close-up on stage and you can do something very bold and highly characterized - and, dare I say, theatrical - on camera. I think the cameras and the viewpoints shift depending on the intensity and integrity of your intention and focus on that.
I'm constantly involved in theater, looking at theater, trying to do work in theater, support theater. And that's kind of my creative passion.
I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors. Or, theater is for actors as cinema is for directors. I started in theater. Filming is as complete as directing film. In theater, you are there, you have a character, you have a play, you have a light, you have a set, you have an audience, and you're in control, and every night is different depending on you and the relationship with the other actors. It's as simple as that. So, you are given all the tools.
I work in between the cracks, where the voice starts dancing, where the body starts singing, where theater becomes cinema.
Don't talk to me any more about poetry for months -- unless it is other men's work. I really love verse, even rubbish. But I'm fearfully busy at a novel, and brush all the gossamer of verse off my face.
Write verse, not poetry. The public wants verse. If you have a talent for poetry, then don't by any means mother it, but try your hand at verse.
In a sense I feel very much a part of the cinema now in a way where when I come back to the theater now I feel like a visitor. The cinema is really what I enjoy. I want to do more independent movies.
In the theater you can chain a blue-assed baboon in the stalls and with a good script, good actors, and a good set you'd have what is called a production. With the cinema someone has to know about lenses and fine things. I have no time for the "auteur de cinema." To me, it's meaningless.
I think that narrative, fiction filmmaking is the culmination of several art forms: theater, art history, architecture. Whereas doc filmmaking is more pure cinema, like cinema verite is film in its purest form.
Whatever you think The Uni-verse is withholding from you, YOU are withholding from The Uni-verse. If you think that The Uni-verse isn't answering your prayers, chances are you aren't listening to your intuition and following it. You are so scared that you ask for new intuition, but that's not how life works. The Uni-verse is constantly whispering to you, nudging you to trust It and take a leap. But if you don't take the leap of faith, then The Uni-verse can't open any more doors for you.
Chicago theater vs. New York theater. There's just nothing to say about it really. If you've seen Chicago theater, you know that the work is true to what is there on the page. It's not trying to present itself with some sort of flashy, concept-based thing. It's about the work, and it's about the acting you're about to watch. So acting-based theater feels like it was born there to me.
The first two books that I did by myself were long stories in verse. I knew I could do that because I'd written a lot in verse. But, verse stories are hard to sell, so my editor encouraged me to try writing in prose.
I'd always loved the theater, and I began by writing plays. I work in the theater a lot in the UK, and I've worked in the theater out here quite a bit. Everything else - the films - followed as a consequence of that.
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