The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else’s decision about the final form of something. It’s so hard as to be intolerable.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can’t be told that I’m wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn’t to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it’s who has that last decision.

If you can’t fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

What you’re doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.

If you feel very deeply about something, it’s not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don’t like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

In the commercial theater, I’ve been pretty fortunate. The producers that I’ve worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

I’ve never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

I had a feeling about Shakespeare’s soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

I’ve experienced a private doubt, something that I’ve kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.