Alan Arkin Quotes

As an actor, you can do what you want with your role. That's why they hire you; to take the role and make it real.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I'm not rigid about directorial changes: I judge them on a case-by-case basis. In the case of a play whose text is widely familiar, I'm open to drastic changes that may alter the author's meaning, perhaps even considerably. If the results don't work, then I say so.

No, we've been performing our old songs a little differently each performance.

Shakespeare has always been up for grabs, and choreographers have every right to use him any way they choose.

There's nothing sacred about the book you've written. The Bible says there's safety in a multitude of counselors. The movie is the movie, and the book is the book. They're different critters, and each must stand on their own merits.

When you want to transcribe an idea truthfully from the page to the screen, it is not necessarily best to be particularly literal about it. It can be hard to convince people, specifically writers, of that.

A lot of writers want everything put on screen, but it doesn't work like that. The screenwriter brings her own imaginative interpretation, just as the director and actors do.

With Shakespeare, if you're not going to do the iambic pentameter, do some other play.

Obviously we had to study Shakespeare at school, but to be honest, I was not a fan. I found the language very difficult, and I didn't enjoy watching it or studying it. I auditioned five times for the Royal Shakespeare Company early on in my career, and I didn't even get past the first rounds.

I think that what we were doing with the live musical version of 'Shrek' was taking the ideas and the structure of the movie and not necessarily reinventing it but reimagining it. It is a very different medium to perform.

I guarantee you that two directors that are any good can take the same story, change the name of the characters, change the name of the town, and make an entirely different picture.

I don't write political plays in the sense that I'm writing essays that are kind of disguised as plays. I would really defy anyone to watch any of my plays and say 'Well, here's the point.'

You have to realize that when I started to work on 'Aladdin', Disney Theatrical wasn't in existence. I suppose I had always hoped that 'Aladdin' would be somewhere on the runway.

I don't care if people think I am an overactor, as long as they enjoy what I do. People who think that would call Van Gogh an overpainter.

The question I ask myself when adapting a book is how do I be true to the spirit and soul of the character? How would I describe this character in my medium? If you asked one person to do a painting of something and another to create a sculpture of it, you'll never ask, 'Why doesn't the painting look like the sculpture?'

A movie and a stage show are two entirely different things. A picture, you can do anything you want. Change it, cut out a scene, put in a scene, take a scene out. They don't do that on stage.

Doing Shakespeare certainly makes you a better actor.

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that.

I don't care what anybody says. Stick to the spirit of the play and you're doing it right. It's about embracing the spirit of the text instead of noodling some idea about things.

I thought I would spent my career doing Chekhov and Ibsen in regional theaters, so the fact that I started doing new plays was a whole new world I didn't expect, and that I would like to keep doing.

To me, the ultimate crime in an adaptation is the crime of reverence. A novel is one form of media, a screenplay is another, and a movie is yet another. There's even reverence to a screenplay.

But I'm not adverse to the idea of Torch Song as a musical. It would just be different. Because the play will always be there exactly as it was, and in a musical you could tell a lot of the story through songs.

Any good piece of material like Shakespeare ought to be open to reinterpretation.

I actually want to do a theatrical adaptation of 'Hateful Eight' because I actually like the idea of other actors having a chance to play my characters and see what happens from that.