Stage Director Quotes & Sayings

My dad took me for an audition once, to show me, 'OK, you want to be a child actor, this is what it's like.' I sang a folk song about donkeys on this West End stage with this big director, and there was a queue of 200 girls all singing 'Memory.' I was terrible. Terrible. — Emilia Clarke

I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.' — Kenneth Branagh

If it's stage, the two most important artists are the actor and the playwright. If it's film, THE most important person is the director. The director says where the camera goes. — Brad Dourif

My favorite part about costume designing is the artistry of the job. You meet with a director and a visionary to discuss ideas. You research the characters and figure out the components of their look through your own vision. You create a color palette for a film, television or stage medium and discuss it with the director of photography who then lights your colored subjects. — Ruth E. Carter

And so as a director, as a leader, and myself as a director and a leader, I kind of try to make sure that we hold onto the vision and kind of corral it, but by the time you finish whatever the project is, a TV show, a series, a movie, a stage show, it should be a product of what all those people can do, and therefore, it can never be what you imagined it would be in the beginning. — Brian Henson

A director is a general in charge of an army of traitors like any showman. An audience will love you, laugh with you and wait outside your stage door when you're hot and on a roll, but no audience is ever truly friendly. Not for long. Bore 'em or disappoint 'em - even once - and they'll turn on you and tear you to pieces, regardless of who you are or might once have been. — Richard Stanley

On the stage, you alone hold the key, and on the night you have to trust that the director has inspired you enough to take the material and run with it. — Greta Scacchi

I think the wonderful thing about doing theater is that it's more of an actor's medium. I think that film is more of a director's medium. You can't edit something out on stage. It's there. — Kim Cattrall

When you're on stage with an audience, the director's nowhere to be seen. He's onto the next job. — Ian McKellen

My attitude as an actor, because I'm a stage actor, is whatever the director tells you to do, you try it. You don't resist what a director is giving you. — Anthony Heald

There's something mystical and wonderful about being in the room with the actual live performer s on stage that works. In film, it doesn't work so you're dependent on a great director to keep the thing moving along. — Marshall Brickman

The actor's physical type isn't and shouldn't be the main consideration. Does the actor look the part? It is the simplest question to deal with. The director deludes himself who yields to the temptation to believe that an affirmative answer settles the matter. An actor's looks will impress an audience initially, but after his first five minutes on stage it becomes aware of what he or she communicates (or fails to communicate) through acting! — Harold Clurman

With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product. — Martin McDonagh

When people ask me if musical theatre should be taught in music colleges, I reply that there is no need. All anyone needs to study is the second act of La Boheme because it is the most tightly constructed piece of musical theatre that there is. It is practically director-proof: you can't stage it badly because it just works too well. If you can write La Boheme, you can write anything. I would also recommend studying Britten's Peter Grimes. — Andrew Lloyd Webber

The headmistress was a very well-respected theater teacher. She taught me what stage left and stage right were, what a director was, and what all these things meant, which was something I had no concept of. She sent me off to drama school, at age 18, and I stayed there for three years. Before I knew it, I was working on a TV show. — Robert Kazinsky

Jury trials are really nothing more than poorly written stage plays. You've got two authors writing opposing narratives and a director who is paid not to care about either outcome. Hired actors sit on either end of the stage, while unwitting audience members strive to remain quiet. No applause should be rendered, no gasps of glory. Witnesses sit agape with fury as they stumble across their rehearsed lines. If only they had practiced just once more. If only they had more time or a dress rehearsal, then they would recite their packaged words with such eloquent delivery that the critics in the jury box would believe only them. — Elizabeth L. Silver

Coincidentally the couple who had endowed it had lived in her parents' building. They had had an eight-year-old with a pretty singing voice who drowned at a Maine summer camp. "You can't imagine what happened," said Sarah, but of course Rebecca could imagine. Being a boy soprano had a shorter shelf life than being a supermodel. She could almost see it as Sarah went on and on, the boy with the pale blue eyes, insensible to the hormones coursing through his body as he stood on the stage at Alice Tully Hall. Apparently his choir director had chosen "Old Man River," sung not in the bass range made famous by Paul Robeson, or in the dialect in which it had been written, but in a high register with crisp consonants. (To be fair to the choir director, he had never — Anna Quindlen

A director recommended me for the role on 'Soap.' They said, 'She plays heavy roles, murderesses and the like.' He said, 'On stage, she could be very very funny.' — Katherine Helmond

If all the world's a stage and all the people players, who in bloody hell hired the director? — Charles L. Grant

The only thing we are as actors are messengers. That's all we are. Correct? We are delivering the playwright's intention through the concept of the director. And I come on stage; if I feel confident in the role, then I give it away. — Patti LuPone

No one appears on our stage unless the director has placed them there for our benefit — Paramahansa Yogananda

The fun for me is knowing what the other person is saying and what my character would be thinking at that time. On the stage you get the chance to do all that, to analyze and build a part, to react, to contribute something no one else can-not the author, not even the director. — Barry Nelson

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through. — Bruce Beresford

My metaphor for acting in movies - not on stage because it's completely different on stage - is to put colors on an easel for the director to paint his own painting with in the editing room, long after I've left. You buy me for red and black, so I better give you really great red and black, but if I can give you purple, pink, green and brown too, I will. — Scott Glenn

When I drove up on the set one day, and they'd put up a sign that says 'The Bill Engvall Show,' I stood there for 20 minutes just staring at it. The director, James Widdoes, came up and said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'Look at this! There's my name on a stage door in Hollywood!' — Bill Engvall

On stage I am the actor, director and the bouncer all at the same time. Fear does not exist in this dojo does it? No Sensi! Sorry when I get excited I have to toss in some Karate Kid quotes. — Dane Cook

The cast, staff, and crew of a live theater work together toward a common goal: a good performance. Thus, theater is necessarily a group effort. However, it is never a group effort of vague fellow committee members, but of associated autocrats-a playwright, a producer, a director, a stage manager, designers, and, above all, actors. Each accommodates the others, and may overlap others in function when necessary. But each autocrat assumes distinct responsibilities and accepts them completely. — Laurence Sterne

I do so love how all magic comes with its share of dire warnings and unclear requirements," sighed Tybalt. "It's like being on the stage, only there's no director, and the understudies have all died of typhus. — Seanan McGuire

Many writers, especially male ones, have told us that it is the decease of the father which opens the prospect of one's own end, and affords an unobstructed view of the undug but awaiting grave that says 'you're next.' Unfilial as this may seem, that was not at all so in my own case. It was only when I watched Alexander [my own son] being born that I knew at once that my own funeral director had very suddenly, but quite unmistakably, stepped onto the stage. I was surprised by how calmly I took this, but also by how reluctant I was to mention it to my male contemporaries. — Christopher Hitchens

I was able to go from stage hand to floor manager to assistant director to director in a year because there was just no one else to do it and what I didn't realise and what people don't understand now about television is that we used to do about five shows a day. — Richard Lester

Words are harsh mistresses, to be sure. Like petulant divas, they want only those parts that play to their talents and mask their blemishes, and only when complete companies of players who love their parts are assembled will they sing in harmony. I am your director for this stage production and will employ my best wiles to create a performance both truthful, and beautiful. I know that words are tricksters who show one face to you and another to me, so I am never certain you'll hear in your head what I hear in my head. Since I deliver even this little truth with words, I acknowledge the irony. — Dennis Vickers

If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it. — Michael Caine

Choosing a director is like choosing a therapist - you want somebody who is going to be a step or two ahead of you, who can interpret and articulate your intentions better than you can, with the benefit of objectivity. I look for a collaborator who is going to help bring to life, on stage, in three dimensions, what is on the page. I wouldn't want a director who imposes conceits or distrusts the text or who has prejudged the characters. — Donald Margulies

After the curtain had fallen, a raucous display of malice had erupted from the gallery, and the ensuing scene, a quarter of an hour in which Hr'y's friends close to the stage attempted to applaud over the hoots and jeers of callous roughs in the shadows - a spectacle that culminated with the play's nervous director appearing on stage to quickly apologize for the production - is one of the better documented episodes in the many biographies of Hr'y's life. What's worth revisiting is the way he described it once he mustered the courage to put it all in a letter. The play had never really had a chance, he wrote. His 'extremely human' effort was met by a mob that responded with 'roars (like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal 'Zoo') — J.C. Hallman

I'm not experienced enough, or certain enough of my acting on the screen to say to a director, "You are wrong, I am right. I will only do it this way." I could never feel that, I wish I could be absolutely certain. But on the stage, it's different. I know where I am on the stage. — Ian McKellen

You are a dancer in this great stage we call life. Your imagination is the writer and thoughts are the director of the dance drama. So unleash your thoughts to dramatize your dance. — Debasish Mridha

A choreographer deals with the movement that you create, and with a creative director it's about the story, the stage, the lighting, the costuming, executing someone's idea, choosing how far to go or how little to go, and blending it so that you feel it, you're emotionally effected. — Laurieann Gibson

The computer programmer is a creator of universes for which he alone is the lawgiver. No playwright, no stage director, no emperor, however powerful, has ever exercised such absolute authority to arrange a stage or field of battle and to command such unswervingly dutiful actors or troops. — Joseph Weizenbaum

The director works as an interpretive artist, but he's still an artist, so you also have to give him room to create and to put his vision of the play or his translation or interpretation of the material on the stage. — August Wilson

In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play. — August Wilson

I play the guitar. This year at the Sundance film festival, I joined the band from 'The Guitar' on stage. We warmed up for Patti Smith, and then the director Michel Gondry got on the drums to play some songs from the soundtrack to his film Be Kind Rewind with Mos Def. It was pretty mad. — Saffron Burrows

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage. — Terry Teachout

Film is mostly a visual medium, and so the director has much more control in terms of painting pictures and painting a performance. For theater, the director does everything he can and then says, 'Out you go,' and the actors are in charge of that stage every night. — David Lindsay-Abaire