Quotes & Sayings About Theater Directors

In theater, you're in charge of your performance, and at the end of the day you're the one who gets credit because you're in front of the audience doing it, and in film and TV it's the director who gets to decide when to cut to you on a line, which take he uses. — Jonathan Groff

I had a hard time watching Wolf Creek. It is a film with one clear purpose: To establish the commercial credentials of its director by showing his skill at depicting the brutal tracking, torture and mutilation of screaming young women. When the killer severs the spine of one of his victims and calls her "a head on a stick," I wanted to walk out of the theater and keep on walking. — Roger Ebert

I am both proud and honored to be on the Board of Directors for the Texas Ballet Theater. — Janine Turner

I'd love it if doors open for me in America. There are directors I'd love to work with there. I'll always do theater, but I've got to pay the mortgage. — Lesley Manville

The thing is this: I've got an amazing career in England that couldn't possibly get much better. I do the best theater around, I work at the National Theater, the Old Vic - which I'm sure you've heard of because it's the one Kevin Spacey runs - and I play the most amazing roles and work with the most amazing directors. — Lesley Manville

School is like theater. Teachers are like directors, students are like actors, and classes are like theatrical presentations. — Victor Miller

But there were other great writers who had done all these things. What set Shakespeare apart ... even from other greats, was his generosity: his invitation, even insistence,for others to join him in the act of imagining ... His reticence [to add stage directions] made his works wonderfully elastic. It also made them demnding
sometimes maddeningly so
for directors and actors who had to figure out at every turn why these words and no others needed to be said right here and now. But Shakespeare was also demanding of his audiences: 'Yes,' you could almost hear him say, 'you are sitting in a fairly barren wooden theater. But dream yourselves to France. To a seacoast in Bohemia. To a magic-haunted island in a tempest-tossed sea. I dare you.' -Kate Stanley — Jennifer Lee Carrell

Unlike a lot of British directors, I hadn't done any theater. But, I had a great mentor who said, What you're looking for is exactly the same thing you've done in your documentaries, which is moments of emotional truth. — Susanna White

I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more. — Garry Hynes

I'd done table reads for my own screenplays, and I always thought they were so much fun. Why couldn't we do these for other classic screenplays and bring them to life? You can experience live theater, where you get to see plays produced by different directors and different casts, but there's really nothing like that for movie scripts. — Jason Reitman

I want to get into the theater. I really wanted to be a theater director, but I turned out to be a movie director. — Frank Oz

You can't make theater happen without actors. The actor is the central ingredient in making theater happen. Audiences may come to theaters to see the work of stage managers, directors and producers, but the only people who can communicate theater magic to audiences, through ideas and emotions, are the actors. They are the only ones who can communicate this by themselves, and if necessary, they can get along without you. But you can't make theater without the actor. — Laurence Sterne

A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's. — Hugh Jackman

But then foreign critics right away made sweeping comparisons to haiku, noh theater, and directors like Ozu, as if the movie were somehow representative of Japan - which was, well, not what I was after. Similarly, with After Life, I deliberately set out to make a movie that was unlike what I imagined the foreign conception of Japan to be, and I figured non-Japanese wouldn't find it interesting at all. — Hirokazu Koreeda

It was a pity that movies and live TV left New York for Hollywood. London theater, movies, television - until (Britain's) money ran out - were always better than ours since the city was the political capital of the country, as well as the artistic and literary one. In L.A. we've always been slightly sealed off from real life. It's no accident that two of our most interesting directors, Woody Allen and Bob Altman, are more or less settled in the real world. — Gore Vidal

I come from the theater, so for me rehearsal is vital and a way of life. There are many film directors who don't believe in it and some actors who prefer not to rehearse. — Hugh Jackman

The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors. — Eric Stoltz

A lot of the best acting training I had was in junior high and high school. We had very demanding directors and did real plays. You put our plays up against any theater troupe of any age, and they usually did pretty damn well. — Jello Biafra

There are two kinds of directors in the theater. Those who think they are God and those who are certain of it. — Rhetta Hughes

Movies, I don't really get the bad guys. In theater, I get more bad guys. Both audiences and directors are more willing ... to allow people to stretch. In movies, you do one thing, and then that's their reference. — Campbell Scott

I want to keep working. I want to step away from young adult fiction. I want to do theater periodically - Farragut North reminded me how great it is. I started out in theater. I trained in theater and then I kind of fell into film and TV. I want to work with interesting artists, talented actors, talented directors, and talented scripts. Not necessarily leading roles. — Max Irons

I think film is a world of directors. Theater is a world of actors. — Diego Luna

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent. — Joan Fontaine

You can work really hard on your physicality, on your craft, on the films you do. You can choose the best of directors, the best of productions, get the best technicians, you can put your entire body and soul into the making of a film, but at the end of the day, it all depends on the mood of that one audience member that goes into that theater. — Abhishek Bachchan