Julia Stiles Quotes

One of the things I love about the theater is that no one can tell you to stop. Once you're onstage, it's three hours, and whether you're completely off or you're just horrendous, you've got to find a way to leave an impression. There's not that terrible thing that you get when you're making a movie, where you get in your car at the end of the day knowing that something you're not proud of was immortalized on film, and you can't fix it because they won't reshoot it.

Theater for me is terrifying but much more rewarding, because you know what they're seeing. Film is all little bits and pieces. And you can do an amazing job, but if the camera isn't getting it, it doesn't work. And then other times when you feel you really weren't present, and then you see it and somehow it works. So there's a mystery, there's a strange collaboration that takes place with everybody.

With a play, for me, there's no time to sit back on it. You're living on your instincts. And every night there are subtle changes and adjustments, because what's in front of you is a living, breathing audience.

I think any actor would agree that you can't replace theater. It's immediate. You have the energy of the crowd and every single night it's different.

Live theater to me is much more free than the movies or television.

'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience.

No matter how good you might be in a movie, you'll never be any better. But in a play, I can be better next Tuesday. That's the thrill of it.

If actors could actually make a living doing theater, that would be my first choice. Sitcoms are the closest thing to being onstage in front of an audience.

When you're on Broadway, what's kind of the whole point is that you find something new in the show each night.

I guess because theater's so ephemeral and it's gone. You make this nightly contract with the audience and you redraw that contract for the next night, whereas film and television, it's forever. I suppose it's always about adopting personas, never about being yourself. I think they call it a "shy man's revenge."

The live show is different from the album. It's different every night depending on where I am and how many months have gone by since I last performed.

When someone says to me, do you do stand-up I say absolutely not. I like to think of it as a theatrical performance. With me the show changes maybe five to ten percent every night. Of course, whatever I see in front of me and sometimes I get on a little run about it and it changes the show. And my delivery is such that people who have seen me many times say Gee, I never heard that before. Actually, they have, but I might have changed it around.

In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.

What do I need a movie for? The stage is on a higher level in every way, and a more satisfying medium. Movies, by comparison, are like calendar art next to great paintings. You can't really do very much in movies or in television, but the stage is such an anarchistic medium.

I miss theater. I miss living the arc of the character, from curtain to curtain, and I miss the immediate audience response.

Watching live actors onstage, in something that changes night by night, real people picking up cues from each other, it concentrates you on the process rather than the result.

I love the theater because the theater is alive. The audience is right there.

Improvisation is just writing in front of an audience.

You don't always do the same things you've done the night before. That's what makes playing live so interesting as opposed to being in the studio.

Performing in a live theater is absolutely unbeatable. It is something I have done my entire life and have a gift, it seems, for sharing thoughts live.

There is indeed a level of improvisation where we can distort and shuffle the music patterns, samples, and loops in each phase of the show within fixed cue points, but at the same time there is a constant result that we are trying to achieve each night while performing and operating our system - quite similar in spirit to a broadway show for example: If you go see a musical two nights in a row, the performances are different yet similar.

It’s one of the most enjoyable experiences. To me, it’s theater. Immediate reaction, the second it’s done. I get to be in my living room with you, trolling my own show.

To this day, to this very day, except for television, I've never had a writer. Anything I've ever done on the stage, happened on the stage and I developed it from there. It started doing impressions and jokes - which I did very poorly. To this day I can't tell a joke. That sounds nuts, but it's true. I exaggerate it and it becomes a joke. Everything I've ever done I've done out on the stage and it became a performance over many many years.

I love the theater because I love the live audience and when we went three cameras we have a live audience in the study so we had someone to play to and react to. That laughter.

The theater's a live thing, and film is, to some extent, a discipline where you're putting everything together and trying to execute something exactly. You do it away from people and then you present it at the end.