In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do.

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.