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.

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.

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.