Theater Director Quotes

#1. I seemed to belong to three countries: I had an apartment in Paris, a house in Hollywood, and when I married British theater director Peter Hall, I moved to London.

Leslie Caron

#2. 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

#3. I've loved musical theater ever since I was a kid. My mother's a pianist, and my grandfather was an amateur theater director and stand-up comic. And I was an only child. And I loved attention. So from an early age, my family was teaching old musical songs.

Rachel Bloom

#4. I studied physical therapy, and I started to study theater because my aunt is a theater director.

Miguel Angel Silvestre

#5. I started as an actor, then became a theater director. I loved acting but didn't feel as confident as I needed to be, so I started directing theater; then I played in some movies, and then I felt the need to do my own stuff.

Baltasar Kormakur

#6. Typically, among the audience members joining the actors, the director, Ann Ciccolella and myself, about half of these theater goers have read the novel [Anthem], and half have not read it. That is interesting.

Jeff Britting

#7. So that's how we go on acting dramas in our theater of the mind even when we don't believe anymore in the audience or the director or the play.

Anne Rice

#8. Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

David Lindsay-Abaire

#9. I understood that I was not the best director in the world nor the worst director in the world. I realized that there is a very mysterious element to what works and what doesn't work in the theater. And it's good to know that from the beginning.

Joe Mantello

#10. I did a play in New York at the public theater, a Shakespeare play, and M. Night Shyamalan, who is the writer/director of 'The Village,' came and saw me in the play and asked to go to lunch afterwards.

Bryce Dallas Howard

#11. A film is the director's medium. The theater is an actor's.

Hugh Jackman

#12. 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.

Viggo Mortensen

#13. 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

#14. No matter what, when you major in theater arts whether you want to write or be a director or design scenery or whatever, when you are a freshman at UCLA then - I guess it's still the same way - you had to take an acting class.

Carol Burnett

#15. Theater is very much the world I'd like to get back to, particularly in New York, both as an actor and director.

Jason Alexander

#16. Theater is a lot more interactive, more of a cohesive unit. With television, it can be a different director every episode.

Condola Rashad

#17. My dad was a theater actor, so I would follow him backstage. And my mom was a casting director. The moment I heard the applause and realized it would get me out of school, I was hooked.

Christian Slater

#18. They say that theater is the actor's medium, television is the writer's medium and film is the director's medium, and it's really true.

Charlie Hunnam

#19. I never went to school for directing. I studied theater with a director. I followed plays to see how a director would talk to the actors. I tried to make my own school.

Denis Villeneuve

#20. Out of nowhere, I became a fairly well-known director with a penchant for opera, which I did for 10 years. Then I realized I was taking myself out the theater channel, and so I re-focused on theater.

Jack O'Brien

#21. People love seeing violence and horrible things. The human being is bad and can't stand more than five minutes of happiness. Put him in a dark theater and ask him to look at two hours of happiness, and he'd walk out or fall asleep.

Paul Verhoeven

#22. I admired Stephen Daldry very much; I think he's a brilliant director, and also, I feel close to him because he has a lot of theater behind him. He's also a man of great imagination and a lovely sense of humor.

Max Von Sydow

#23. I have walked many times around the world and each time it's different from the last one. It feels a little bit like I am a theatrical director, creating a theatre in space. It's really a theater in the sky. But of course the World Trade Center is certainly the most well-known of my productions.

Philippe Petit

#24. You know, I love plays. I love the smell of a theater. The old rooms and the carpet and all that stuff. I love to tell stories. Even before I was doing music, I saw myself as a director.

R. Kelly

#25. Well, in the theater, I think you're actually more responsible for what is going on onstage as a director than you are in film.

Philip Seymour Hoffman

#26. 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

#27. I think a playwright must be his own dramaturg. I believe in a theater where the director and the playwright work together to create what they need.

John Guare

#28. I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

Karen Allen

#29. I'm the girl that waits for the director to say, 'I like that,' or 'Can you boost it up?,' or 'Can you pull it down?' I'm that kind of actor. I started in theater, so that's the feedback that I'm accustomed to. It's the feedback that I really thrive off of.

Jill Scott

#30. Pinchas Perry, the director of 'The Chicago 8,' offered me the role of the judge, and he did not know that, 35 years earlier, I'd played a judge in the theater production. So life has its own little twists and turns.

Philip Baker Hall

#31. 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

#32. 'Killer Joe' provides a lot of red meat for the theater. Pam MacKinnon is the perfect director to shepherd a group of actors who share a certain bloodlust.

Tracy Letts

#33. I didn't go into the theater to be a producer, I went into the theater to be a director.

Harold Prince

#34. I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.

Sam Mendes

#35. 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

#36. My criteria for doing theater has always been slightly different than my criteria with movies, in that there are a lot of reasons to do films, having to do with location, money, and first and foremost having to do with script and role and director.

Stephen Lang

#37. Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the director's eyes, you 'get it right' does not allow for very much creative freedom ... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.

Mara Wilson

#38. My generation of director has no illusions that we are going to be fed and cared for by subsidized theater in America.

Diane Paulus

#39. I wanted to be in film. I wanted to be a film student, possibly be a director or cinematographer, not an actor. That was my goal. I didn't believe I had the physical beauty that I'd seen projected and advertised in movies, in theater. It just wasn't for me.

Pam Grier