On stage it's just a wild setting - we have a big screen - hecklers, I'm fighting. It's entertainment, but I want to pierce [the audience's] souls and have them think about what I have to say.
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 want the audience, when they leave, to think of the characters on the stage in three dimensions. I want them to have empathy. I also want them to think about engaging more with where we are culturally.
The only thing I can say is that people requested,when The Exorcist it going to be on the big screen? People want it on the big screen and they want to see the footage. I think it's going to do very well. I think it will please people, and the fact that they added the new sound.
Actors go, 'I just want to act.' And I say to them, 'You know, stop for a second and think about what charges you up the most. Do you want to be on the stage, do you want to be in film, do you want to be a comic actor? Do you just want to make it for the money and capitalize on your look and do commercials and soaps?'
I don't feel I'm fighting to reach this huge audience; it just happens. I go on stage before the audience arrives and look out to this vast empty house. There's something therapeutic about taking in the ring where you'll perform.
The audience got jaded, they want a hit, they want a big success, and so you don't want to experiment because you say, well, I'll disappoint the audience, they may not like it, I better do something that I think is more commercial.
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.
If I think of the audience too much, then I'm going to start catering to them...and it turns into entertainment. And I've got time for entertainment; I'm just not at all that interested in doing it myself. I'd rather go for some pretty raw expression.
I think I might want to get into development, as in developing my own sort of piece, whether it be for the stage or the big screen or for television.
I want to be in a space where, if I appear on the stage or the screen, the audience should not know what I'm going to do.
A lot of those old ideas are dying with the people who created them, and there's this new generation of filmmaker that's saying, "We're in this together, these are issues that we all deal with, let's just present issues to screen without bias and figure out what the audience has to say about them."
My choices are made out of love. When I go on stage now, I want to make people happy. I mean, when I get hecklers now, I'm nice to them!
I think one of the reasons younger people don't like older films, films made say before the '60s, is that they've never seen them on a big screen, ever. If you don't see a film on a big screen, you haven't really seen it. You've seen a version of it, but you haven't seen it. That's my feeling, but I'm old-fashioned.
You've got to honor your relationship with your audience - that they sit down because they want to be entertained. And that doesn't mean you can't provoke them and antagonize them and challenge them in the course of the entertainment as long as you keep the entertainment part of the equation alive.
When I'm up on stage, I don't think about anything except the song I'm singing. Anyway, the majority of my audience is female, and I can't think that many of them want to see me a French maid outfit somehow!
I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.