Stage Direction Quotes

My background is on the stage, so when I'd write movies, they'd be a lot like plays.

I had many, many mentors that I worked with. Music teachers, choir directors, directors in summer stock or in regional theater. You know, people I was able to work with repeatedly and learn from who were really sort of appropriate people for me to work with at a given time in my development as an actor.

It's highly collaborative, musical theater, so everybody has got to somehow get along.

In theater, you have a rehearsal period and you know just who to be.

Actors are real. It's a real skill, and it exists, and talent really exists.

In a drama, you generally have to be very faithful to the script and the storyline, and it all has to fit together, and it's weighty and serious.

I was trained as a straight dramatist.

I always like being a director in terms of giving acting notes and punching up on the fly.

Actors can be many things - vain, venal, self-serving, obnoxious, bullies - but all of the good ones are great storytellers.

I do a little bit of acting, but I wouldn't call myself an actor.

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

There is so much freedom I enjoy in theatre. In films, the roles are limited.

You might be the best Hamlet of your generation in the bathroom, but unfortunately, you have to come out and do it on stage, and it's best to do it to people who would fill the house.

Sometimes I try to improve the language, the lines, or the delivery, but I don't ad-lib because I think that makes it really hard for everybody else involved.

When you're 19 and writing plays, you think every actor is full of it. They just can't handle your brilliant material.

The only time I've played a real baddy was when I was Regan in 'King Lear.'

You'd be surprised at how undemanding acting is.

I'm an actor. I have to play weird characters, quirky characters, strange characters, sometimes characters I don't understand.

While I find my job as an actor challenging, I also think that there's fun in that challenge.

I once heard a woman laugh at that most tragic moment in all drama, the off-stage shot in "The Wild Duck," and I afterward had her killed, so there will be no more of that out of her.

I'm the empty stage where various actors act out various plays.

I've been wanting to do a play for years.

Theatre is highly satisfying in terms of words. You get to speak in monologues; words drive the action.

Opera is really fun.

Compared to film or television, theater is more interactive, collaborative.