Beau Willimon Quotes

I've always really liked theater. It fascinated me. You can create a reality and get people involved in that reality. It takes place in real time.

I've done a lot of theater, and I know that it's a different audience each time who doesn't know the story, and we have to tell it.

Movies are all about plot. Theater, even if it's story heavy, it's about ideas. Theater has to resonate in your heart in a way that movies don't.

I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.

People always make that mistake when they talk about theatre - the notion of the 'theatrical' meaning something separate from life. If it doesn't relate to life, it doesn't relate to anything.

I believe that the story is the most important element of any medium whether it's theater, film, TV.

There's something about getting onstage in a play where the actor tells the story, beginning, middle, and end, the way they want to tell it. For me, it's the most powerful place to be, and it's the most empowering place to be.

In theatre, you learn the story is more important than the actor.

Where film can eat up story, theatre needs space and breath.

Acting and singing are actually very similar because they're both telling a story.

It's communication - that's what theatre is all about.

The wonderful thing about theater as an art form is it's a purely empirical art form. It's all about what works. And every show, every production, is created anew right from the moment you go into the rehearsal hall.

The point of theatre is transformation: to make an extraordinary event out of ordinary material right in front of an audience's eyes. Where the germ of the idea came from is pretty much irrelevant. What matters to every theatre maker I know is speaking clearly to the audience 'right now.'

I write my plays to create an excuse for full-tilt acting and performing.

With the theatre, for God's sake, everything makes sense. You create a clear sequential reality for a specific audience at one particular time.

I tell stories. Because I believe you can do things that joke tellers can't do, and that is, bring your audience along.

I think if you're writing a play, it should be its own end game; you'll never get to do a good one unless you know it's not a blueprint for a film; you're not going to get the action right and the story right.

Theater is a way to keep challenging myself.

I always envisioned working in film and in theater. Theater and film are not, they're not in any way substitutable. What I love about theater is so different from what I love about film, and I enjoy the craft of both.

Drama is action, sir, action and not confounded philosophy.

For me, a play is a form of writing which isn't complete until it is interpreted by actors. But it's still a form of writing. And so most of my time is spent thinking about how to write a sentence.

Lastly get emotionally connected to your story so you can deliver it, you know, if you can't deliver the emotions to your script there's no point to your story. Story is the key.

All the modern verse plays, they're terrible; they're mostly about the poetry. It's more important that the play is first.

I became an actress to provoke people and move people and to tell the stories.

Because theatre is a story-telling art form, we feel entitled to assume that the playwright got there before we got there.