Quotes About Interpretation

I've had the healthy and sobering experience of constantly working with music that is invariably better than any performance of it can be.

When a performance isn't working, it's usually because the actor is trying to do something and they're not able to express their idea very well. It's a muddled expression.

But I can't say that I didn't like John Hammond's performances often better than the originals.

You act in a movie, and at the end of the day, the director and editor decide what your performance is.

I don't think it's necessary to be an actor to get great performances out of an actor. But I do think it helps me as a director because I know what I like as an actor, and I try to get that to the actors who I'm working with.

Actors should be overheard, not listened to, and the audience is 50 percent of the performance.

Dave Herman as Michael Bolton is one of my favorite performances ever.

I don't think of Storefront Hitchcock or Stop Making Sense as documentaries, I think of them more as performance films.

When all the performances are excellent, critics understand it's the direction.

Good directing is about getting the performance to be just what's right for the movie.

No one will ever argue that someone could have played Helen Keller better than Patty Duke. It was an incredibly demanding role and I don't think anyone can argue that it was a false performance.

You have to channel the interpretation and performance into 100 people. And with the audience, the critics.

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

I've performed Schoenberg's 'Pierrot lunaire' many times.

I used to love 'Ladies Night' by Lil' Kim so much that I performed it in school without really knowing what it was about. I just knew that she was getting at a guy and winning.

As a performer, I groove to my own songs.

Why, in such a case, should the performer essay any sort of considered approach at all?

To put what you see on paper is the same as funneling what you feel through yourself as a performer.

You've got to have a sense of different audiences. I'm a kind of performer manque - I come from a long line of failed actors!

A passion for any novel, and any character, can crystallise your ideas when you really need to be as open as possible as a performer.

I think the actual art of expressing yourself is a very important part of being human. And an important part of being a performer is understanding what it's like to create yourself.

Improvising is writing, too - there was no music and now there's music. So that's composition. And any time you take any sort of a performance liberty, you're making a compositional choice. I don't know a serious performer who hasn't made compositional decisions, who hasn't engaged in the art of composition.

We have done 'Talvar' in three different parts, recreating three different scenarios. And so, it was very interesting for me as a performer to be a part of this film.

Conductors are performers.