91 Quotes About Directing

Actors are all about entrances, but writers are all about exits.

That's what I love most about writers--they're such lousy actors.

Your boss takes a dim view of SEX?

I found out it is just as hard to make a movie that you are not proud of as it is to make one you love.

Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitro-glycerine: exhilarating and dangerous.

There was always a corpse when Death Troupe came to town.

That’s why I call you performers. Not actors—performers. Because when it’s time to prepare, you work out every nuance of a role. When it’s time to step in front of the crowd, you reach out and pull them in with both hands. When it’s time to say your lines, you deliver them with skill and meaning. That’s performance. And there’s nothing phony about that. There’s nothing pretend about that. There’s no acting that will take the place of that.

The striving fluency of the Hampstead nanny's boy is deceptive and occasionally plausible. With its cultural allusions and cross-references to other disciplines, it is the gab-gift of someone to whom English is an adoptive tongue. Intellect does terrible things to the mind.

The Director's Role: You are the obstetrician. You are not the parent of this child we call the play. You are present at its birth for clinical reasons, like a doctor or midwife. Your job most of the time is simply to do no harm.When something does go wrong, however, your awareness that something is awry--and your clinical intervention to correct it--can determine whether the child will thrive or suffer, live or die.