Top 1200 Theatre Directors Quotes & Sayings - Page 6

If I'm in theatre, cinema doesn't even cross my mind. Similarly when I'm making a film, theatre doesn't cross my mind.

I have done some wonderful television, but you know, there's not as much exceptional material as there is in the theatre. So I do a lot of theatre, but really, as with most actors, I just love going from one to another. It's stimulating, it's diverting, it's a different way of life, and you know, I dearly like a good mix.

Well, 45-odd years of doing it, so we all pile up the things we like about directors and the things we don't like about directors. And sometimes they're very similar.

I like to work with talented people, I must say that. That's my weakness. I really like to work with good directors. That doesn't mean I don't like to work with starting up young directors, that's fun also.

I used to drive up from theatre in Michigan to Stratford, Ontario to watch every show. I idolized the actors from Stratford. I was very influenced by them because they would come down and work at my theatre and get time on their American Equity union cards.

In Britain, the theatre has traditionally been where the public goes to think about its past and debate its future. The formation of the National Theatre, at the Old Vic, near the South Bank, in 1963, institutionalized the symbolic importance of drama by giving it both a building and state funding.

Theatre's great. It's such an act of faith. It's a wonderful art form where you suspend disbelief for a couple of hours. It's a lovely art form because the actors and the audience are alive and in the room at the same time together. That's why I love the theatre.

It's very difficult for me to do fund raising for my own organization if I'm working for other companies because sponsors will say, 'Well, hey, man, if she's doing a ballet for Ballet Theatre, we'll give money to Ballet Theatre.'

As actors, we have the opportunity to work with many directors. Directors only work with themselves and other actors. They never know what it is like to work with another director. So that relationship that one has with a director is entirely always the king.

Theatre, in which actors take on changing roles, has among its many functions the examination of identity. For the individual, theatre is a kind of identity laboratory in which social roles can be examined vicariously.

Why did I want to become a director? I just had an early interest. My uncle was an actor in a local community theatre, and he ultimately persuaded me and a buddy of mine to come to that theatre, and we went to meet girls, and that turned into interested in kind of behind-the-scenes things, and from that point on, I was focused.

I've turned down good directors before because I knew the part didn't speak to me and I've worked with less talented directors before because the part I had such passion for.

If I were a star kid, I wouldn't have tried so many things. I would have done theatre and directly joined movies. I did radio and TV shows because I had to carve my own way. Outsiders like me have to reach Bollywood through modelling, theatre, or radio.

When I was really young, I was obsessed with Bollywood. Then I got exposed to world cinema, and I wanted to be a part of it. Then I was exposed to theatre, and I only wanted to do theatre.

After 50 years in the motion picture business, I'm still learning my trade. This recent shoot of 'Mandie and the Secret Tunnel' was a revelation. The two young directors, Joy Chapman and Owen Smith, represent a group of actors, directors, and cinematographers all over the country that never show up in New York or Hollywood.

I went to an Arts High School, so everyone there was kind of anti-clique, though they still happened. I guess I was in the theatre-dork clique. Not to be confused with the musical-theatre-dork clique.

A James Bond film can be artistically fulfilling. Absolutely it can. It can be complex, and it can be interesting. I consider Bond movies to be an extension of popular theatre, a kind of modern mythology. You see the same sort of action in 'Punch and Judy' or in the folk theatre of various cultures, like 'Grand Guignol.'

But, working with directors whose history is in performance, I feel like there's a different kind of focus, as opposed to directors who are more prone to being really technically proficient or visual. I feel like there are two schools of both, and a director needs to have both.

So, theatre will always be my first love. It's not that I am trained in it, but I also feel that theatre gives an altogether different experience every time it is played. But a movie and a TV show is always a one time experience for me.

I did theatre a lot when I was a kid. Then I went to acting school in New York. I did a lot of behind the scenes in college. I wanted to learn while I had the time. I studied theatre and film in different capacities.

I was really, really, really enthusiastic as a kid. I was up for anything. I was hugely into music and theatre. I was a big musical theatre kid; I loved reading.

I was interested in theatre, and the only experience that I had in high school was as an actor. But when I got in Conservatoire, my teachers would give me a lot of flack because I wasn't rehearsing my lines; I'd be doing stage management. I was interested in sound. I was interested in architecture. I was interested in every aspect of theatre.

I've talked to a lot of directors who direct solo like most directors. And they're always like, 'Oh, man I wish I had somebody I could direct with because it's a lot of work.'

I am a woman of theatre, I'm a librarian of theatre and I love all different kinds of music and all different kinds of expressions.

Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships.

Theatre, film and television are all modes of storytelling, and many of us are fortunate enough to move freely among them without feeling that we've 'left' or need to 'go back' to one or the other. In fact, if the theatre is to avoid a brain drain, this kind of fluidity is increasingly necessary.

I enjoyed working with all my directors. I may have done more films with certain directors, but it doesn't mean I enjoyed working more with them and less with others.

Some directors can tell stories and it becomes very intimate and small, and it's almost like a secret. Some directors have the gift of finding a way to show it and tell the story, in a way that brings in the audience.

I have taken film-work that has been a little more cliché-written, to support myself and my family, and that's a whole kind of other challenge. It's like chopping wood: You've got to take what you can get and bless what withstands you. But in theatre! There's enough great theatre that you can find something interesting!

Theatre is so much fun because you do theatre and you have a month of working it out on your own, and then a month of rehearsal, so by the time you get to stage I know where I'm failing and I know where I'm succeeding and your boundaries are pretty concrete.

As far as I'm concerned all theatre is physical. As Aristotle says, you know, theatre is an act and an action, and he didn't mean just the writing of it, he meant that at the centre of any piece there is an action, a physical action.

It is in the irony of things that the theatre should be the most dangerous place for the actor. But, then, after all, the world is the worst possible place, the most corrupting place, for the human soul. And just as there is no escape from the world, which follows us into the very heart of the desert, so the actor cannot escape the theatre. And the actor who is a dreamer need not. All of us can only strive to remain uncontaminated. In the world we must be unworldly, in the theatre the actor must be untheatrical.

But then I got a job selling coffee at the York Theatre, and when I met theatre people, something clicked. I felt comfortable with them; I felt like myself. I decided to go to drama school based just on that feeling. I had never done any acting.

There's something about doing theatre in London - it sinks a little bit deeper into your soul as an actor. It's something about the tradition of theatre, about performing on the West End stage.

There's good directors and bad directors. Some of the critics are really conscientious and really try to do what they can popularize the work or to explain the work and so on. And then there's the critics who just wants to make a reputation by attacking. Those are the ones I'm not keen on.

Theatre supposes lives that are poor and agitated, a people searching in dreams for a refuge from thought. If we were happier and freer we should not feel hungry for theatre. A people that is happy and free has need of festivities more than of theatres; it will always see in itself the finest spectacle.

First there was the theatre of people and animals, then of people and the devil. Now we need the theatre of people and people.

I started off doing stuff in theatre in Letterkenny from quite a young age. It was just a hobby, something I enjoyed. Some kids like tennis or guitar. I just enjoyed musical theatre so my parents got me into classes.

Questions about political theatre always overlook America's most powerful and effective political theatre, which is always thriving: the American musical. The politics is conservative but, to my mind, effective and insidious.

Searching out directors you respect and that you can learn from that's always the dream. That's the goal. That's hopefully where this whole thing is leading, and what better way to learn about directing and learn about what works and what I like and what resonates me than by working with a bunch of great directors.

But I think theatre in a repressive society is an immensely exciting event and theatre in a luxurious old, affluent old society like ours is an entertaining event.

When I'm doing TV, I miss theatre, and when I'm doing theatre, I miss being in front of the camera.

When directors tell me they want a song like one, I tell them no song should be like another. I don't listen to directors.

Theatre is a concentrate of life as normal. Theatre is a purified version of real life, an extraction, an essence of human behaviour that is stranger and more tragic and more perfect than everything that is ordinary about me and you.

My theater nerd world and my comic friend world are colliding... That's the thing that I was nerdy about, was theatre. I wasn't as much into the comic book stuff. So it's fun to see there are people that are into that that are also theatre nerds like me.

Life beats down and crushes our souls and theatre reminds us that we have one. At least the type of theatre that I'm interested in; that is, theatre that moves an audience. You have the opportunity to literally impact the lives of people if they work on material that has integrity. But today, most actors simply want to be famous. Well, being an actor was never supposed to be about fame and money. Being an actor is a religious calling because you've been given the ability, the gift to inspire humanity. Think about that on the way to your soap opera audition.

It's easier to go from theatre to film than the other way round. In film you're absolutely loved and cossetted and cared for. In film your director makes your performance. In theatre you're carrying it all.

There's an infantilization that happens to actresses in general - musical theatre, straight theatre, television, film - we're spoken to like children. Actors are spoken to like children a lot of the time.

It's been a huge honor to collaborate and create new theatre with new writers and to create theatre that will last after my lifetime. It's been in the most truthful way possible. It's my favorite thing to do.

It seems like pop singing has sort of influenced musical theatre in so many ways - you could argue good or bad, really - and musical theatre is written for that style so often, which is a completely different style.

Places like the National Theatre or Sheffield, these great engines of theatre, make us cutting edge because they can be experimental. They can do plays that nobody else can afford to do in ways nobody else can afford to do.

What worries me are these so-called radio stations with program directors who don't play all the different flavors of hip-hop. They should play the old with the new, 24/7, 365 days a year. A lot of these program directors are just jiving around and not playing all the good music for the people.

Whenever I'm in theatre situations I will go out of my way not to talk about my father, but in the film world I can be really proud of my family and say, 'You know what: my dad's a really, really famous theatre director,' because nobody has any idea.

People are mystified by it and so they kind of think, the acting community thinks they're gonna be replaced by CG characters and animators think they're gonna be replaced by performance capture (and) a lot of directors, particularly European directors, who have no experience of it.

What theatre people love about theatre - and I totally understand it, I just don't share it - is that they feel they mint something afresh every night. Because I would rather do something until I've done it and then know it's done. New day, next thing!

The theatre should be treated with respect. The theatre is a wonderful place, a house of strange enchantment, a temple of illusion. What it most emphatically is not and never will be is a scruffy, ill-lit, fumed-oak drill hall serving as a temporary soap box for political propaganda.

I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.

People who have never done theatre before, and have only worked in front of a camera, would find it very difficult, I think, to know how to command a stage and work with the logistics of being on stage. They're very different. The theatre is quite tricky, actually.

I wouldn't just come home from school and watch TV everyday, they had me involved in lots of local theatre. I was a very dramatic, talkative child. And that was part of my mother's creative solution - to put me in workshops and classes and children's theatre programmes.

I love to tell stories and I love to work with directors and I think I write really visually, which I think directors like, and I love making movies, so I found something that I'm good at and I'm really happy doing.