Eli Wallach Quotes

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.

Theatre takes place all the time - wherever one is - and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

The exercise in theater is night after night you are doing the same play, but you have another opportunity to explore. It changes nightly even because of the audience and your day going into the evening of the performance. With film it's much more controlled.

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.

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

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

I grew up thinking art was pictures until I got into music and found I was an artist and didn't paint.

I don't think that theater is the higher medium, that it's better than film.

I love writing plays because they are living, fluid things that are energised by the producer, designers, musicians, actors and audience.

'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.

Here is something no real celebrity will ever tell you: film acting is not very fun. Doing the same thing over and over again until, in the director's eyes, you 'get it right' does not allow for very much creative freedom... In terms of sheer adrenaline, film has absolutely nothing on theater.

I have a background in theater - I went to school for theater. I love film - love it - but there's just something about theater that I really miss.

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

I always like spoken word records.

People predicted in the 1910s that live theater was going to be all gone and that we'd just be watching movies. No, live theater is still around, because it does things that are specific to it.

Theater is so wonderful and brilliant but it lasts very much in the moment. It's there and then it's gone.

What I love about the theater is that you know who you're acting for: your audience. And the thing I find really hard in film is, you don't. The audience is invisible. And we're sitting there, hoping there's other people out there.

The great thing about theater is the doing it again and again and again.

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 Color Purple received four Tony nominations; the play is highly looked at and it's a must see for everyone. I just want to carry on what Jennifer Hudson has done and help the team get to the finish line.

I learnt a lot from my Broadway experience, it was one of the most challenging things I will probably ever have to do in my entire life, because it was eight shows a week - live singing with really hard choreography - and the spontaneity, you don't know what's going to happen.

Musicals are good times. I live to do a musical, there's nothing like it, no experience like that in the movie business. You don't get to pull all those triggers at the same time doing anything else. Nothing pulls that from you. Dancing, acting and singing is like "Alright, I gotta fire on all cylinders right now" because that's what it requires. It's fun getting to exercise all those muscles.

The only way to see the value of a play is to see it acted.

Stand-up is an amazing art form, I think, because it's all about you having complete control of the situation, but absolutely none.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.