After I had received the Watson Fellowship and had been two years in Indonesia on this traveling fellowship, I stayed to start my own theater company.
Americans in particular are myopic. They're not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That's what I did. I went to Indonesia.
And I just think that to introduce an unknown Shakespeare is thrilling, too - not to do Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, to do the richer Shakespeare. People will come to this and not know the story.
But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
I am, to be quite honest, sick of hero stories.
I have directed good actors and have gone through the process which is more detailed in theater in a way. You have to get people to stay for two or three hours in a performance. They need more talk and rehearsal than in films.
I have had a lot of experience directing actors so although this is my first feature film, it's certainly not my first time directing with big stars.
I have never had a problem with people not being able to understand the words and the meanings in Titus.
I love Lion King and I adore the production, but for my first film I gravitated to the best writer in the English language with an important story to tell, with the best actors in the business, and I got them.
I really do believe that if you don't challenge yourself and risk failing, that it's not interesting.
I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form.
I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.
I'm not going to spend two years on a film or four years on an opera if I don't feel like I can put my own self into it. That doesn't mean it has to be about myself.
In theater, you can be much more abstract and simple and be suggestive. When we do the savannah in The Lion King, people walk with platters of grass on their heads, and the audience gets it. They get that that's a field that's moving grass.
It's people who are repressed and cannot express their fears that are dangerous.
My father was a doctor. He's gone now. Mother was in politics, but she has an artistic flair. I think she's very dramatic.
One of the reasons I love to jump back and forth between mediums is that film does allow me to be more literal. I can go to the real place. I can go to the Coliseum, and I don't have to fake it.
People will justify whatever for a good cause.
Theater evolves through religion to be the mediator between the darkness and existence, to help you get over the hump of a bad season and no rice paddies and a sickness, a demon that's come into your family and has spread malaria.
Theater is far superior to film in poetry, in abstract poetry.
There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.
We feel that Grendel is very, very potent as to where we are today, which may not be any different than where we were in the 10th Century.
We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.
We took Beowulf, the epic poem in Old English, and put it right together with John Gardner's contemporary retelling. If you bring it into today, we really feel that it has something very fresh to say now.
What I don't have in theater is editing.
When I was thinking about The Lion King, I said, we have to do what theater does best. What theater does best is to be abstract and not to do literal reality.
You know, I went to Oberlin. At that time, grades were - you elected to have them or not. It was all of that era where grades were out the window. But I did very well in school. I didn't really study the arts; I practiced the arts.
You program music with an image and then people are desensitized.
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