Thank God we don't know a lot about Shakespeare or Moses or Homer or Lautreamont. These are the best guys we got, and their art is powerful because they're mysterious.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
All great characters, great icons, in literature are a bit of a riddle, and that's the reason we go back to them over and over.
What's interesting to me about Moses isn't the big stuff that everybody knows.
I think nobody since has written such extraordinary work as Shakespeare writes. The characters he writes are full of inconsistencies, which is a great human quality - I mean, we're all very inconsistent in the way we behave.
Portraying Mozart is a scary task. Whenever I'm asked to portray actual historic figures, it comes with extra accountability. Not just to your director and playwright, but to the man himself and the beloved persona that the public forms.
You can find more traditional Shakespeare than we do. But what we want to bring to these works is energy, passion, freshness.
My favorite writers are all Jews - David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark - well, you get the picture.
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.
To me, characters are at the heart of great literature.
I think Shakespeare is everybody's treasure.
There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.