Theatrical Realism Quotes

I thought movies were handed down by God. I knew that theater was made by people because I saw the people in front of me, but movies seemed like they were delivered, wholly made, from Zeus's head or something.

The work for the actor is always the same. We're looking for a human being. We're looking for believable human behavior.

All the plays that have ever been written, from ancient Greece to the present day, have never really been anything but thrillers... Drama's always been realistic and there's always been a detective about... Every play's an investigation brought to a successful conclusion.

I'm in awe of how grounded Ms. Tyson is and how her performances can be different but the same. She can switch up the delivery, but it's still with the right intention. Her words are effortless in terms of their meaning and how she inhabits them. She's been doing Trip to Bountiful for four months, and it still feels real. She's pretty amazing.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

As a director, I have to feel realism from actors, and they can't be plastic.

I knew what kind of actor I was going to be, and I looked for inspiration to people like Alec Guinness, Cyril Cusack, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent. I looked at them and thought, 'They play human beings as they really are.'

The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.

The physicality was important to me. Because the film has Shane Black's dialogue, and [Robert] Downey's delivery, and you look at [Jon] Favreau, Don Cheadle and Gwyneth [Paltrow], it is this heightened level with a comedic aspect to it. Everything is grounded in reality, but it plays a little heightened.

I like to ground plays in reality so they can jump higher. So we can account for the trampoline, so we can account for the leap.

Truth in drama is elusive. You never quite find it, but the search for it is compulsive.

I get fed up with all this nonsense of ringing people up and lighting cigarettes and answering the doorbell that passes for action in so many modern plays.

Pasteboard pies and paper flowers are being banished from the stage by the growth of that power of accurate observation which is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it...

One of my favorite things about the Kung Fu Panda 3 is the look of it. We never go for realism. I think a lot of time when people go for 3D that's the mistake. Because we're never going for full realism - for computer generated live action films like Avatar the goal is realism, to make the audience feel like they are seeing something that is real. Lord of the Rings had character design and environments to make it look real, whereas we aren't going for that, we are going for something that is theatrically, viscerally, and emotionally real.

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.