Andrew Coyle Bradley Quotes

Well, here's what I'll say: The storytellers of 'Lost' have taken us on a pretty great journey, and there have been questions along the way, and criticisms along the way, but if you look at the totality of the show, or the experience of it as a whole, I think as long as you look at it from that perspective you'll be happy.

I read a lot of literary theory when I was in graduate school, especially about novels, and the best book I ever read about endings was Peter Brooks' 'Reading for the Plot. '

The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.

For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.

With fantasy and sci-fi, it's based in a real fandom. You're presenting to experts, and their source material is really important to them. They'll come up and ask: 'so when you turned your head slightly in that scene, what were you thinking?'

Actors have an opportunity to use storytelling as a way to solve pain.

I think I started out trying to be very objective about the flow of the play.

I never went to school for directing. I studied theater with a director. I followed plays to see how a director would talk to the actors. I tried to make my own school.

By increasing the size of the keyhole, today's playwrights are in danger of doing away with the door.

I think from an actor's point of view, you always want something to play that's dramatic or something that feels like it could be very bold in choice. And of course, the boldest possible choice you could play at the end of a character's life is death.

To be able to analyze plays and novels is so relevant to acting.

You can have great sequences with music, but if you don't have the acting you're bored after 15 minutes. Or not bored, but you're like, 'So what?'

I think that ultimately any effective drama or tragedy tries to put you as much as it can into the protagonist's shoes.

One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations.

The theatre is supremely fitted to say: 'Behold! These things are.' Yet most dramatists employ it to say: 'This moral truth can be learned from beholding this action.'

When you're trying to do a traditional book musical like 'Book of Mormon,' it's always nice to have characters that could very naturally break into song, and its good to pick a subject matter that allows that to happen in a way that doesn't disarm the audience.

As a dramatist, you have 200 choices at every fork in the road. But the audience will reject it if you make the wrong choice, if they feel you are trying to shape the character in a way that suits you. It rings false immediately. People can sense when you're being cynical or schematic.

The whole thing about writing a play is that it's all about controlling the flow of information traveling from the stage to the audience. It's a stream of information, but you've got your hand on the tap, and you control in which order the audience receives it and with what emphasis, and how you hold it all together.

I try to approach all episodic work the same. No matter the content. I look for a dramatic or emotional spine to the story I'm telling, something that stands out to me thematically about the episode and its relationship to the rest of the season/series.

When you're studying drama, when you're a young actor, there are simple rules about acting. "Why am I here? What prevents me from leaving? What am I trying to get? How do I hide something?" So when you're making a film like Abel's movie, you want to be thinking about those things all the time. And you wanna be armed with those things, and you hope the other actors you're working with have the same understanding of drama and scene and acting. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

I have always considered The Merry Wives one of the worst plays, if not altogether the worst, that Shakespeare has left us. The wit for the most part is dreary or foolish; the tone is coarse and farcical; and the characters want the fine distinctive touches he so well knew how to give. If some luckless wight had written such a comedy in our time, I should like to see what the critics would say to it?

It's important to tell meaningful stories and to find new ways to communicate those stories to people.

Whatever the case, oftentimes, for a story to feel complete to me, I need more than one point of view.

The theatre always felt like home, and it does to this day. When I do screen acting, I miss telling a story from beginning to end, as you do nightly on stage. I love that relationship with the audience and how it changes each night.

For me, there's something about a certain kind of genre film that has real potency in its emotional landscape.