The only Shakespeare I ever did was a production of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' two years in a row in my garden in Rockland County on the Hudson River in the 1980s. I had all the actors from the Actors Studio come out, and we made our own costumes.
It's my job to be the Pierrot, the clown, in the theatrical sense.
I spent all of my childhood at a performance art camp. Putting on plays, it was more like commedia dell'arte. It wasn't career-oriented in any way. It was more fun and therapeutic, so I never really thought of it as something I would end up doing. I was more convinced I was going to be a painter.
I went to school in the 1970s, and there was a lot of physical theater in those days.
Going on to train with Lecoq in Paris meant I discovered European theatre at a formative moment growing up.
They say pantomime's a lost art. It's never been a lost art and never will be, because it's too natural to do.
Englishmen have always loved Moliere.
I'm always keeping an eye out for a period piece. I was trained in theatre, so most of the things we did were classical - Shakespeare, Moliere, and Chekhov.
My dad was a mime and then he had his company and created plays for children and was very successful with it.
I subscribe to that school of thespian - to be a wandering minstrel or traveling player, a thing ofrags and patches, of ballads, songs and snatches.
Increasingly, I find myself drawn to classic forms - to Euripides, Shakespeare and grand opera.
I reject the word 'script' entirely-at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage-usually scenario-which it had in the Commedia dell'Arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to filming.
In graduate school, I decide to write my doctoral thesis on how Italian architecture influenced English playwrights of the seventeenth century. I wonder why certain playwrights decided to set their tragedies, written in English, in Italian palaces.
'School for Wives' is Moliere's first step toward grand comedy, but he still has one foot in commedia.
[Greek] Theater started off and used masks and Kabuki, in the East, they used mask-work. And then, Commedia dell'arte in Italy and then, you know, we're part of an acting tradition and, and performance capture is no different.
Pinocchio's really naughty. He's all impulse: 'I want to sleep now. I want to eat that. I want to run off to Pleasure Island.' It's commedia dell'arte meets Grimm's tales.
A popular character in old Italian plays, who imitated with ludicrous incompetence the "buffone", or clown, and was therefore the ape of an ape; for the clown himself imitated the serious characters of the play.
