Simon McBurney Quotes

When you perform in front of an audience after only two days of rehearsal, you're flying by the seat of your pants - particularly when they're rewriting the show right up to the moment the camera goes on.

When you're boiling in oil, in the middle of a crisis, the challenges are so consuming there is no time for anything else.

There are often days when I've sat down in my office for hours and prepped for a show knowing, three minutes before I go on, some big crazy thing happens where everything is thrown out, and the teleprompter goes blank.

You don't always know how to do things when they're happening.

We’re burning,” Sadie pointed out helpfully. “Noticed!” I yelled back.

Mercy, it's the revolution and I'm in my bathrobe!

The sh*t's gonna splatter, start buggin, yo..." Mencheres to Cat

My normal routine is pretty much putting out fires all day.

Saturday Night Live is such a comedy boot camp in a way, because you get to work with so many different people who come in to host the show and you get thrown into so many situations and learn how to think on your feet, so filmmaking actually feels slow, in a good way.

My life has been a series of emergencies.

I did a smaller gig with an acoustic guitar and a drum machine. In one song, something wrong happened with the drum machine. I tried to cover up the mistake by playing faster and improvising a new song but it became crazy, and I had to admit it was all a mess.

He is in a gunfight right now. I'm gonna have to take a message.

You know, men and women are a lot alike in certain situations. Like when they're both on fire - they're exactly alike.

It's almost like you see too much, because when it happens for real, everything flies at you so fast, you never get a sense of the ice and where everyone is at that one moment.

But that's one of the nice things about doing a stage show, if something doesn't work out, you have the luxury of working on it over time.

'A Little Nightmare Music' is the first show we created. It's about all the nightmares that can happen in the span of a concert. When things go wrong - when the lights go out or a cellphone rings - that's when an audience suddenly comes alive, wondering what's going to happen next. Things going wrong often leads to something good.

When you're onstage in theater, if you mess up a line, there's no 'Cut! We'll get it again.' It's full steam ahead.

The beautiful thing about theater is every night is an opportunity to incorporate what you discovered the night before.

I remember when I was in Los Angeles, and there was one of the very big earthquakes, and it was just absolute pandemonium. I mean the streets were just - people were crashing into each other, people were looting, in just a very short amount of time.

Oh my God. My God. It’s all over.

I learned the slider out of desperation.

When you're in a crisis, there's really no playbook.

Please relax," said the voice pleasantly, like a stewardess in an airliner with only one wing and two engines one of which is on fire, "you are perfectly safe.

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