Marcia Gay Harden Quotes

I am an internationally produced playwright.

If I'm serious, yes, I'd like to have done what Shakespeare did... to act and write. You learn so much from acting. One of our great writers, Alan Bennett, does both supremely well. When I write a story, I tend to speak it aloud as I'm writing it.

I think books and movies are going to go a long way together in the future. I think we writers are very important material for directors.

I had some experience writing collaboratively when I wrote for the theatre.

As a director, you want to work with great writers.

I'm basically a writer, it's who I am. I direct and I like theatre directing very much. But I've done 17 movies, they don't say 'Let's get Garry, he'll make a helicopter shot,' they say 'Get Garry, he'll fix the script.'

For many playwrights, they write the plays anyway because they've got to be, the work has been started, it's got to be finished, but we all long, I think, to see the plays fleshed out on stage and I'm exactly like that. Yes, I'm not satisfied until I actually see it on stage.

I started being interested in acting when I heard the voices of Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir John Gielgud and Sir Alec Guinness. I've had the great privilege of working with Sir Derek Jacobi and Sir Anthony Hopkins. These are people who inspire the work that I do.

Having learnt my basics in theatre, I always feel film is a collaborative effort. If you do your part well and help the person in front of you in realising his or her potential, the film invariably comes out good.

I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre.

What's great about collaborating is getting to work with wonderful people. That's what theatre is about: other people getting you to give your best, and getting everyone else's best out of them.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

I would probably do anything with David Mamet. He's so great. I just love his writing.

I've had the honor to be in sessions with great artists.

I am always looking for what piece, what artists, what playwrights, what directors, what subject matter is going to catalyze an audience.

There's sort of a very symbiotic thing that happens on good TV shows with great writers, which is that they start to sort of embrace who the actors are and try to make the roles more specific to what they bring and what they can do.

Playwrights are the most gregarious writers - to get our work done, we need actors, directors, set designers.

Writing for the theater, you find yourself living a nocturnal life.

I never really wanted to write and wanted to focus on acting.

I feel like I'm a secondary artist, a kind of a conduit for the writer, and if it's a good writer, then I have a great road map.

It's much like writing a screenplay with someone else and that's how we view it, I think.

If I do a play, it's my vision, and everybody else is working on the production to support that. If I do an opera, I feel like part of my job is to support that composer, to try and create something that allows the composer to do his or her best work. In movies, it's usually the director.

I'd say there's more of a difference between a play and movie to TV than there is between TV and movies. But there's something involved in the repetition of things that require something different from me in order to sign onto a script.

I wrote my first play when I was nine. It was performed at Hampstead Theatre.

I'm working with theatre-makers who are the top of their game, and it's extraordinary.