Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
For years, I wasn't in the least bit interested in opera.
Mozart makes us care about people in flashes of lightning.
The more they uncover the more mystery appears to be there.
I constantly want to know - what is a table, or what is a cat?
In Japan, sometimes it's hard to know what you are looking at.
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience.
I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible.
In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.
I can't remember a single year of my life when I haven't made a piece of theatre.
Shostakovich's final pieces, his quartets, are scratching the surface of another world.
Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone.
'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness.
I think it was a desire to be able to find my own voice. I think that was the big urge within me.
I suppose I'm really interested in theatre that provides an intensity of experience on another level.
I've had various people close to me die, and I don't necessarily find the idea of death purely depressing.
Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time.
Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further.
The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen.
My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it.
In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo.
I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.
I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience.
Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.'
The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it.
I mean I'm talking about playing games, about imagining other people, and it's part of the way that it helps you actually see the world.
As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor.
With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.
I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody.
My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say.
Yes it was chaos, working through chaos, you never quite knew what you were going to do each day, but you knew that you wanted to make something.
The repeated action of working and playing acts like a trowel that uncovers a hidden structure under the earth. It is an action that deepens and develops.
I'm naturally attracted to something I don't understand because when you try to deal with something you don't understand, it opens a door into another world.
Normally when people ask me what I do I say I'm an actor, and that's what I always wanted to be and that's the way I approach work even when I'm directing it.
I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space.
We try to place the human body in relation to the image all the time, so it's never a kind of a backdrop, but it's more of ...a much more integrative experience.
My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work.
When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting.
I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.'
The only reality of the theater exists in the mind of the audience. That audience looks collectively at what is going on on the stage and collectively imagines that this is real.
I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes.
I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth.
There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light.
'The Master and Margarita' is deeply to do with the unconscious. It is a story about a man who writes a story in a time when he's not supposed to write that story: the story of Pontius Pilate.
My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise.
In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else.
'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.
I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something.
For me, acting is like a holiday. When you're directing, you have a strong sense of responsibility for others. It's exciting but exhausting, especially when you're like me: always wanting to break the rules.
I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something.
We live in an age where quantity is seen as preferable to quality, and many people tend to work in a horizontal line: next, next, next. But if you do that, you never investigate the vertical line - the depth of the piece.