In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.

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.

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

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.

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.