Quotes About Interpretation

Rehearsing a scene beds a role into you. But sometimes, if you over-rehearse it without unearthing any new meaning in it, you can suddenly forget your lines. You realise that you are on a stage, not in the real world. The scene's emotional power, and your immersion in it, disappears.

I definitely have fun commenting on the real world and interpreting through the 'Dear White People' lens.

If you're a documenter, you're taking a video of something in the real world you want to capture. If you're a director, you're trying to create something in the real world.

Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area.

If I have to read another cultural studies analysis of 'The Sopranos,' I give up. There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies.

The difference - the fundamental difference between theater acting and film acting is that film acting is disjunctive.

When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.

For me, you say the words 'concept record,' and the first thing I think of is theater or the opera or something.

All theater is dance.

Good theater is not realistic, and should not be. Its purpose, rather, is to highlight, never to spell out a situation.

I don't believe there is something called 'film' and something called 'theater,' and that words belong in the theater. Some rather bad films have few words in them; some good films have a lot of words in them.

I can't stand interpretation. I think it's one of the great scourges of the theater. I just think, 'Don't get in the way of the play.'

I'm not photographing the model in the classic sense; the model is playing a part in my photographs. It's more like theater. I always work with models I know, and I let them participate in deciding how to act their part.

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film.

There are an infinite number of ways to be moved in the theater.

Theater is there to search for questions. It doesn't give you instructions.

I think theatre should always be somewhat suspect.

What I want to give in the theatre is beauty, that's what I want to give.

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

I don't think it's the job of filmmakers to give anybody answers. I do think, though, that a good film makes you ask questions of yourself as you leave the theatre.

The theatre is a spiritual and social X-ray of its time.

I feel that I communicate best when I am not deliberately being linear. Along this same line, I feel some of the best sermons I've ever heard were in the theatre rather than the pulpit - as, for example, in the Theatre of the Absurd.

Film is fragmented and gets into lots of other people's hands. There are a lot of pleasures that theatre gives me. You get to perform uninterrupted.

I like the theatre because you paint with broad strokes. To me the theatre is stretching its definition really far.