Sam Mendes Quotes

I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.

Unless you're doing Shakespeare or Chekhov... the written word is not sacrosanct.

My advice to anyone adapting a novel is that once they've read it and learnt to understand it, then they must throw it away and never look at it again!

Adapting a book doesn't mean the book stops just because you've made a film out of it.

If you put on an Oscar Wilde [play], it will interest those who are interested in Oscar Wilde. But it won't interest anybody else, because they won't get that wit.

I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age.

When you got source material, whether it's a play or a book - a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It's like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation.

The theatre-acting, creating, interpreting - means total involvement, the totality of heart, mind and spirit.

I think loads of people see acting, when they're kids, as these magical stories that just happen within the context of the film or the play or the cartoon or whatever they're seeing. They don't imagine that there are actually people that go and do that for a living.

I do know that the best way to make a mediocre movie is to just transcribe the book.

There's no such thing as a perfect play. Sometimes you have to protect the life of the play.

We are not telling Tudor history; we are creating ' Wolf Hall ' from novels, which are already a rereading of Tudor history.

Focus on the play like it has a history and a life of its own.

In the theater you rehearse for a minimum of five to six weeks. And then you get to play it. Which means you get to get better. That's the great thing about the theater.

I'm happy whenever anybody does my material. I don't care what they do with it. I do what I want to with other people's songs.

I love the idea of getting to play different characters and tell some stories. When you're passionate about a project, it's nice to get the part.

Actors are the jockeys of literature. Others supply the horses, the plays, and we simply make them run.

When an actor plays a scene exactly the way a director orders, it isn't acting. It's following instructions. Anyone with the physical qualifications can do that. So the director's task is just that – to direct, to point the way. Then the actor takes over. And he must be allowed the space, the freedom to express himself in the role. Without that space, an actor is no more than an unthinking robot with a chest-full of push-buttons.

I don't care about my "impact" - I only care about the theater as an art form and criticism as an act of writing.

Plays have to be made, and we have to find a way to make them. All of us.

I called Scott Rudin, and I told him I wanted to do the play [Fences], so that's how the ball got rolling. I never said, "I'll do the play, and the next year I'll do the film, I just wanted to do the play."

It's exotic for me to be given a script that's already written, and be given a pay cheque, and asked to dress up and play, and that's all.

We play different people - our art form is performance art - so unless you're playing the same type of person, I don't know if you could improve or make it worse.

And yet the artist will go on with his work without knowing in some way if any of his representations are sound or unsound. The artist knows nothing worth mentioning about the subjects he represents, and that art is a form of play, not to be taken seriously.

I consider myself a lyricist first and foremost, but if you get something else out of what I do, that's fine too. I'm not sitting back here telling people how they have to take my stuff. We just want to play music, and hope that people like it.