I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

I felt no need to write a German-bashing play.

While directing in theater that the actors will - I don't know if it's competitiveness or what it is, but they love to make each other laugh. They love to impress each other in rehearsal. They'll try something for a reaction. But in film, you're very often not all together in the room at the same time. You're shooting one day, somebody else is shooting the next. It's a totally different dynamic.

I don't direct the plays of others.

Any actor, any playwright who's worked a life in the theater knows how to do things cheaply and quickly. It's just all by necessity. Invention is everything.

Plays are literature: the word, the idea. Film is much more like the form in which we dream - in action and images (Television is furniture). I think a great play can only be a play. It fits the stage better than it fits the screen. Some stories insist on being film, can't be contained on stage. In the end, all writing serves to answer the same question: Why are we alive? And the form the question takes - play, film, novel - is dictated, I suppose, by whether its story is driven by character or place.

If you prepare, and you've got wonderful, bright people who get it, who accept and appreciate your preparation, then you don't have to explain yourself 9,000 times.