Marianne Elliott Quotes
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You have to lead by example. You have to be the calmest person in the room. You have to be very open. I think the qualities of a director are to enable and to find the best in everybody.
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I suppose what's so amazing about working at the National Theatre is that, because it's a subsidized theatre, you're not trying to create a product that's going to have a mass market in order to make the money back.
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'Friends' is easy to dismiss, but it's really good television - the art with which those actors play with comedy shouldn't be denigrated. And they also know how to play irony, which I think a lot of English actors might find quite difficult.
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It's predominantly a male society, predominately a male culture, predominantly a male theatre, and predominantly male critics, but that's changing, definitely.
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The plays I choose to work on are about having masks. We all have masks in life, but there is a different inner life going on. The audience has to work hard to see what is going on. I love what is not on display.
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I would like to see more female stories out there, particularly older female stories.
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I had done drama at university, but I never thought I could be a director. There were so few female directors then. I just assumed you had to be a man to be a director. I also assumed you had to be extremely authoritarian and extremely intellectual, none of which I was.
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It's a tremendous asset if you have a visual eye because you can make huge visual statements in a very theatrical way and play to the strength of theatre. But the high end of directing is working with actors and making the acting the best it can be.
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My generation feels it has been lied to a great deal.
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There's a certain type of theatre that I haven't got any time for at all - established, boring, same-old stuff without any reason or passion. There's quite a lot of it about, and it motivates me to try to do something different, something risky, raw, ugly, and challenging.
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If you can't see it, you can't be it. It's just having those brilliant women break out and do something - then other girls can say, 'I can do it, too!'
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It's incredible how London-centric the theatre world is. Certain actors won't travel away from London anymore for work; practitioners often aren't taken seriously enough unless their work is seen in London; and it's sometimes very difficult to get national critics to review shows - especially if there's a clash with a London press night.
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I've seen many shows ruined by bad reviews and good reviews, so I always tell my actors not to read the reviews until after the run is over.
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I think theater is so undervalued. I have seen things there that have been far more vivid than things that actually have happened.
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With everything I do, there always seems to be a massive risk involved.
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When I was a kid, I never spoke. I would sit under a table and not speak to anybody. No words for years.
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The less subsidy we have, the more the 'producers' take over, and the 'bottom line' becomes the raison d'etre. That's quite an unappealing landscape for artists.
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I hope that subsidised theatres continue to be rewarded for the wonder of talent they provide to this industry, on stage and off.
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You need to see yourself in what you direct, I think - directing is quite self-indulgent from that point of view.
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I'm drawn to female stories, of which there aren't that many, and particularly to stories now about older women. The things they have to confront and override is really fascinating. That's a whole untold part of our world.
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As you get older, you realise that your identity becomes more important - the environment in which you have grown is actually part of who you are just as much as your family or your school.
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I used to love getting older.
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Some directors have the gift of the gab, but I don't.
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I suppose I always find a lot of characters that are deeply, deeply keening with a sense of yearning and desire through sadness, but they have a bravery that keeps them going despite that.