I think film and television are really a director's medium, whereas theatre is the actor's medium. — Christopher Eccleston
A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard. — Billy Wilder
Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it. — Augusto Boal
The profession of film director can and should be such a high and precious one; that no man aspiring to it can disregard any knowledge that will make him a better film director or human being. — Sergei Eisenstein
All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists. — Stephen Sondheim
The duty of a film director is to focus more on the soul of the spectator. — Ken Loach
A good director creates an environment, which gives the actor the encouragement to fly. — Kevin Bacon
Film actors reach a certain level, but they don't get beyond it unless they work in the theater. — Shirley Knight
There is a kind of classlessness in the theater. The rehearsal pianist, the head carpenter, the stage manager, the star of the show-all are family. — John Kander
I'm a storyteller - that's the chief function of a director. And they're moving pictures, let's make 'em move! — Howard Hawks
I provide the bricks and mortar with the words and situations - the director and the actors and the designers build the house. — Eric Bogosian
There are two impulses in theatre: to be frivolous or to make rules. — Tadashi Suzuki
A film is a director's vision... there is, however, much input an actor or actress can have. — Natasha Richardson
Movies will make you famous; Television will make you rich; But theatre will make you good. — Terrence Mann
I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach. — Alfred Hitchcock
Short Theatre Directors Quotes
Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place. — Martha Graham
Good theatre draws the energies out of the place where it is and gives it back as joie de vivre. — Joan Littlewood
When you look at a movie, you look at a director's thought process. — Oliver Stone
The work of a director can be summed up in two very simple words. Why and How. — Peter Brook
The best director is the one you don't see. — Billy Wilder
A director shouldn't get in the way of the movie, the story should. — Frank Darabont
Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed. — Elia Kazan
To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater. — Antonin Artaud
Theatre Directors Image Quotes
Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life.
Film Directing Quotes
Drama is life with the dull bits left out. There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it. I believe in putting the horror in the minds of the audience, and not necessarily on the screen. The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder. — Alfred Hitchcock
It's not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn't. — Guy Ritchie
My cameraman and I devised a method, which we started using from my second film, which applies mainly to day scenes shot in the studio, where we used bounced light instead of direct light. We agreed with this thing of four or five shadows following the actors is dreadful. — Satyajit Ray
No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. — Ingmar Bergman
Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls. — Ingmar Bergman
That was certainly true the first time, when I did Body Heat, the first movie that I directed. I was looking for a vessel to tell a certain kind of story, and I was a huge fan of Film Noir, and what I liked about it was that it was so extreme in style. — Lawrence Kasdan
Directing ain't about drawing a neat little picture and showing it to the cameraman. I didn't want to go to film school. I didn't know what the point was. The fact is, you don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots and you're only going to get two. — David Fincher
I got expelled from high school, and then did my exams from home. I decided, through that experience, that I was going to expediate my plan and didn't go to university. Instead, I went to a community college and studied the theory and history of film with the idea that I wanted to write and direct. — Charlie Hunnam
Before I go off and direct a movie, I always look at four films. They tend to be The Seven Samurai, Lawrence Of Arabia, It's A Wonderful Life and The Searchers. — Steven Spielberg
I like, as a director and a spectator, simple, direct, frank films. Nothing disgusts me more than snobbism, mannerism, technical gratuity... and, most of all, intellectualism. — John Ford
Casting Directors Quotes
I also get fed up with the fact that casting agents and directors have this impression of me as being frail and petite. I find it very patronizing. I'm quite beefy and strong. I was a gymnast in school and I have lots of muscles. — Helena Bonham Carter
Casting sometimes is fate and destiny more than skill and talent, from a director's point of view. — Steven Spielberg
I randomly went to a casting session in my hometown in North Carolina, and the casting director introduced me to my manager. I really lucked into it! — Maddie Hasson
I often go to lunch meetings with my agent, a gallerist or a casting director, but if not, I stay at home and prepare my own food because I love to cook. Im great at pasta, fish and nice salads. — Jordi Molla
I think a good director casts a film so that the actors bring a lot to the table. — Debbie Allen
You are the director of your own life story. Don't cast idiots or people will walk out during your 2nd act. — Dane Cook
I always think that a director who knows about the technical side, but cares about the acting performances and casting as well, is ahead of the game. — Bob Balaban
I had been doing summer stock every summer while I was in college. We did a showcase, like most good conservatories do - monologues and things that agents and casting directors come to see. From that I got an agent. — Randy Harrison
I got an internship with the casting director of The Girl Next Door. I would hold the clipboard and help them in their casting sessions and get them lunch. — Olivia Wilde
Casting directors now just see me as the hard-core sniper or prison guard. — Barry Pepper
Film Director Quotes
The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't. — Jean-Luc Godard
And Later I Thought, I Can't Think How Anyone Can Become a Director Without Learning the Craft of Cinematography. — Gus Van Sant
In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director. — Alfred Hitchcock
There are no rules in filmmaking. Only sins. And the cardinal sin is dullness. — Frank Capra
A director standing by his film rejected by the audience is like him telling a girl 'I love myself and I don't care if you don't love me'. — Ram Gopal Varma
To make a great film you need three things - the script, the script and the script. — Alfred Hitchcock
Unlike all the other art forms, film is able to seize and render the passage of time, to stop it, almost to possess it in infinity. I'd say that film is the sculpting of time. — Andrei Tarkovsky
Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real... an audience should not be conscious of technique. — David Lean
The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money. — Tom Hooper
Most of the top actors and actresses may be working in ten or twelve films at the same time, so they will give one director two hours and maybe shoot in Bombay in the morning and Madras in the evening. It happens. — Satyajit Ray
I hate the word 'production'...it's a ceremony, it's a ritual...you should go out of the theatre stronger and more human than when you went in. — Ariane Mnouchkine
I never had any classes or went to theatre school like a lot of actors, so all of my training has been on stage with different directors. That was a pretty good school room. — James Denton
Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act. — James Agate
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
There are a few directors around who I have some excitement about spending my $7 at the theatre watching their movies. — Sean Penn
I directed before I was even in television; I directed in the theatre for seven years, so that was my trade anyway. But in the UK, I've given up any hope of being considered a director. — Mel Smith
On the one hand, young theatre directors were coming to television theatre, because they wanted to get closer to the cinema, despite having studied and worked for the theatre. — Andrzej Wajda
Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity. — Robert McKee
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
I love test screenings. Some directors don't, I know. But I love it. I think it's because I come from the theatre and in the theatre, previews are where you really have to listen to the audience and really feel how they're responding. I found our test screenings incredibly useful. — Stephen Daldry
In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me. — Anne-Marie Duff
I'm a theatre person, that's who I am. I'm happy to make sojourns into the world of movies but I'm basically a theatre director that potters off and does a couple of movies. — Stephen Daldry
In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience. — Ian Mckellen
I think theatre helped, only because it was acting experience. I got to work with a lot of directors. — James Denton
All drama teachers are very effusive, very emotionally open, very big, and gesticulate a lot, and are very physical. Those people don't work in banks and they don't work for pharmaceutical companies. They teach drama, or they may be theatre directors. That's why I love people who are openly gay in theatre, because they have license to do what they like, and there's a kind of artistic liberal tolerance thing that goes on. — Steve Coogan
My dad's a prominent theatre director in Toronto, so I grew up in that world, directing and producing theater since I was a teenager. I always loved movies but they seemed too complicated until I got a job as an assistant on a movie-of-the-week and the technical process became demystified, like peeking behind a magician's curtain. Not long after that I switched to movies and never looked back. — Ed Gass-Donnelly
I hadn't studied theatre and I hadn't studied actor training or anything, but I did have a sense of movement and composition, and what the final product would be like, but luckily I had friends who were good actors, who would help me get them, who would get themselves to the place where a good director should get them to build characters. — Rob Urbinati
I deliberately look for colorful people. They're very right for theatre. Theatre has to be theatrical. If you can get color into the accountant, you've got something. Write the whole thing first and then say he's an accountant. That's a very wacky accountant, but so what? Theatricality feeds and challenges the actor, the director, and the designers. — Lanford Wilson
I have a strong and strange character, and I've rarely met directors who knew what to do with this character. One of the few who did was my father, and in the theatre, Arthur Nauzyciel. — Lou Doillon
I think you're peripatetic when you work in this industry. My husband and I are assuming the role of co-artistic directors at the Sydney Theatre Company in 2008. But as long as the film industry will have me, I will have it. — Cate Blanchett
I think the writer's quite low down in the hierarchy really. But the fact that they took the piss out of Nicholas [Hynter] who, besides being the director, is also director of the National Theatre is, I'd have thought, slightly more risky. — Alan Bennett
An actor and a [theatre] director are both what I would call interpreters of work. We interpret a work, just as a musician will interpret a composer's work, we interpret the work of a playwright. We are servants of the theatre and I've always believed that. We must serve what has been written, that's what we're there for. — George Ogilvie
When I began to direct, I began to understand and realise that everything that I'd learnt, both in music and dance and in the theatre, seemed to come together as a director, and I began to enjoy it. And slowly I let the acting go. — George Ogilvie
Every now and then I have to teach directing. The thing about the theatre is that the most important thing you can do as a director is to make sure that everybody is in the same world - you have to create the world and make sure everyone buys into it. — Stephen Daldry
Whenever I'm in theatre situations I will go out of my way not to talk about my father, but in the film world I can be really proud of my family and say, 'You know what: my dad's a really, really famous theatre director,' because nobody has any idea. — Rebecca Hall
My whole family is very artistic - my uncles are all actors and theatre directors. — Morena Baccarin
My college training was primarily in theatre, with an eye to becoming a director, actor, or producer. — Orson Scott Card
Lighting is not about function. It's much more about the mood and the emotion that the playwright and the director are trying to create. Our job is to support their poetic direction. — Jules Fisher
I've never quite understood the idea of a "season." Whenever an artistic director says to me, 'I have this slot,' I always start to feel we're parking cars or something. — David Henry Hwang
The director is responsible for interpreting the playwright's work through the cast with the help of the staff. It is the director's artistic concept of the play that the cast, staff, and crew work to obtain. — Laurence Sterne
The Actor should make you forget the existence of author and director, and even forget the actor. — Paul Scofield
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
The other, the other aspect when I say I'm an actor is that as an actor you make this imaginative leap into being somebody else, that's to say the muscle of the imagination is as important as any other of the muscles in your body, and so it is something about this instinct in space and time which for me I associate with being an actor rather than a director. — Simon McBurney
I suppose as an actor you become very sensitive to rhythm, not just rhythm as you look at it sort of from the, from the outside as a director might see it, but within yourself you become used to the idea of hearing your fellow actors, responding to them in space. — Simon McBurney
The idea of making audiences feel like they matter, that the theatre matters, and that they're a partner in the event—that's what fuels me as a director . . . I believe it's actually radical to think about the audience. — Diane Paulus
In Conclusion
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