On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn't like. It has to work straight through.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
If you're a movie actor, you're on your own - you cannot control the stage. The director controls it.
It's very different working on stage to film; the immediacy is there on stage.
Theatre is really difficult, so it's important that you have a director that kind of understands that and is really hands on.
Your audience gives you everything you need. They tell you. There is no director who can direct you like an audience.
It doesn't matter who's directing, or who's doing the movie; there are a ton of things that can go wrong, and they do all the time. So you just have to figure out how to get through it, and then how the director finally puts it together, and then see what the audience takes from it. That's the most important thing to me.
Nobody has yet proven that taking a chance and doing something unique that an audience isn't used to is a bad idea. What the theater lacks is that kind of courage.
With a stage play, they can't cut a word; you can be in rehearsals every day, you cast it, you cast the director, too; the amount of control for a playwright is almost infinite, so you have that control over the finished product.
Acting on stage is a living organism you can never pin down, and I believe the audience feeds off that, too.
The idea that you must treat actors a certain way in order to get a performance out of them kind of disturbs me, and it's disregarding what we do. Our job is to do our job.
As a director, you never think about how an audience would respond. You can think about that, but you will never change what you're going to do.