Thornton Wilder Quotes

With acting, there's a certain amount of independence you have within the framework of the storytelling. When it's done well, it's a collaborative medium.

Stage is all real; it's just as honest except it's bigger. I love stage, I love TV and film, so I think I'll just keep exploring and try to keep a really full picture.

Acting isn't really a creative profession. It's an interpretative one.

I think as a filmmaker and as a director, you shortchange yourself if you inhibit the ability of your actor to bring their own personal experiences to the characters.

It's your job as an actor to fill out the blanks. I love doing that. To fill in the bones.

You pick projects for the part, the director, and the script. I just want to do different, interesting stuff.

It's fatal to talk about acting. It sounds faintly ridiculous if you start analysing it.

Looking at acting, in the movies or the theater, and the way I like to look at it, it's just an extension of childhood play... Kids play and imagine in a very intense fashion and they don't need any director telling them, 'You really have to believe in it.' They believe in it completely.

As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.

I want to do better. I want to produce better stories. I want to do better plays.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that.

So what's so enticing about doing a play is that you get to do that thing that got you into acting in the first place... There's a real attraction to being able to play, to just play. And that's something that theater affords you.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

The interesting thing about doing a play is to find a way to make it fresh and do it as though you were doing it for the first time.

Theater opened up a whole new world for me. It was a freedom I'd never known before.

Many times, when a director reads a script and wants somebody who says 'Far out', then they let me do what I want with it and that's usually more interesting for an actor.

I'm an actor and my job is to interpret.

Writing and directing might be a red herring, and really I'm just re-examining what it is to act, to do it well and do it properly.

I've directed 'Raisin in the Sun' five times. You keep discovering things. You keep on seeing things in the script that you never saw before. That's what great pieces of art do.

Theatre is an actor's medium. An actor has little control over a film. Which is why most actors who have done theatre, and then come to films find the former more creatively satisfying.

The cool thing about doing a play is that the final interpretation of a piece is turned over to the actors.

Photography is a pursuit that allows you to be very hands-on with what you show people of either yourself or the art you want to make, and acting is kind of the exact opposite. You do have a modicum of creative freedom as an actor, but you're still very much a cipher for other people's art.

I believe in giving actors the freedom to express themselves, and adding more to whatever is written.

I really miss the rehearsal process of theater.

I'm always amazed when any actor can decipher my direction.