As far as theater goes, Sarah DeLappe's 'The Wolves' is one of my favorite things I've ever seen.
The '80s were a time of technical wonder in filmmaking; unfortunately, some colleges didn't integrate their film and theater departments - so you had actors who were afraid of the camera, and directors who couldn't talk to the actors.
I actually started as a model builder and quickly progressed into production design, which made sense because I could draw and paint. But I kept watching that guy over there who was moving the actors around and setting up the shots.
Usually when I'm making a movie, what I have in mind first, for the visuals, is how we can stage the scenes to bring them more to life in the most interesting way, and then how we can make a world for the story that the audience hasn't quite been in before.
I get very excited when I have to work in a film and when I am narrated.
I'm a big believer in keeping the stage directions really tight.
On stage, everyone stays put; the vantage point is always the vantage point, and you have to play to the size of the house. And of course, on film, there's different angles, different shots, so that determines how animated or how still you must be.
A film set is the most comfortable place I could be in the world; that's what I know.
There is an animated version of 'Lazer Team,' with all the action sequences, that exists. It's a pre-visual fidelity, and the voice acting is terrible because it's one of our animators doing it. But we could sit there and watch what the scene is supposed to look like while we're doing individual shots.
For me, playwriting is and has always been like making a chair. Your concerns are balance, form, timing, lights, space, music. If you don't have these essentials, you might as well be writing a theoretical essay, not a play.
The thing about acting that's unlike any other art form is that it's collaborative; directing and acting are a collaboration, and your acting won't succeed if the lighting design doesn't succeed or sets don't succeed.
The sheer complexity of writing a play always had dazzled me. In an effort to understand it, I became a critic.
I worked for UFA as a set designer, you know.
The importance of rehearsal is maybe you want to talk about how the scene's going to be designed, how it's going to be staged, all of those things. It's all about preparation, and deciding what mutually you don't want to do, rather than necessarily what you do.
Throughout my career, when I was finished with the drawing for one film I would go up to the story department and help develop sequences. Sometimes these were for scenes that I would animate later on.
I went to the Experimental Theater Wing at NYU and wrote and directed a small amount of stuff there.
Film directing has perfected my theater directing. I think when I first started directing, a lot of my stuff was very lateral; I was afraid to have the actors' backs turned away, afraid to put them too far upstage, and I think once I did more things with film, I got more interested in composition.
Most TV shows are writing the next episode while you're directing the one you're doing, and they're trying to figure out what they're going to do, and they're putting it all together.
For my part, I like live theater best when it's taut, concentrated and intimate.
A movie contains literally tens of thousands of ideas. They're in the form of every sentence; in the performance of each line; in the design of characters, sets, and backgrounds; in the locations of the camera; in the colors, the lighting, the pacing.
I loved working with Renoir on 'The Southerner.' Oh, I loved it! I particularly loved when he had a scene with a cow going through a garden, and he wanted a little dog to come and bark at it and chase it out.
Going from 'Dexter' to 'Powerpuff,' there was a lot of dialogue, there was a lot of... you know, we did action, of course, but I was getting burned out on the words, and both shows had this big, thick black outline.
Directing is very close to choreography; you deal with space, time, emotions, lighting, making beautiful images.
My first time I directed a play was 'No Exit,' a play set in a subway.
I've learned a lot about stage-managing for illustration. Sometimes you have to delete characters from a scene just to keep from overcrowding the image. I've also learned to making big-scale design decisions early.
