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The "stage" on which you perform in film and TV is much smaller. Moving your eyes across the frame is equivalent to crossing from stage right to stage left in a big Broadway house. Coming from a theatrical background and temperament, this is something I am still learning. However, I think ultimately your responsibilities to the character and the overall story are the same in both mediums, so my approach felt very similar.
Sep 10, 2025
The normal cut in a theatrical film is anywhere from 3 to 6 seconds. That means thousands of images in a film over a couple of hours. In Visitors the cuts come every 70-plus seconds. The point of view is that the stiller one can be the more open to their senses they become. The whole world is quick right now. If things can be slowed down they stay in memory longer.
No, I'm a theatrical, live performer or a movie performer.
I think what made it difficult for people to get, and still makes it difficult for people to get, is the theatrical nature of the work and the fact that, my music doesn't exist without the performance-art element.
When I first started out on the soap, I was more theatrical, like a stage actor, a little bigger than life. As I did more and more Love Of Life, I became more natural. I learned the value of underplaying. It was a great training ground for me. There was a big difference in my style of acting from where I started with that show and where I ended, and where I ended was a good jumping-off point for doing nighttime television and movies.
It's funny how that comes up, because sometimes I'll write something and I'll think, I don't know if that's a film or a play, and then other things I feel very strongly about them just being plays - they feel very theatrical to me.
It's always a risky business inviting somebody on stage. You never know what they're going to do. I try to avoid letting people join me onstage because it can be very distracting, and overly theatrical.
Between parts I was too old for and roles that were too overwhelming, out of reach then for my voice. I carved out a niche with the Wagnerian repertoire since I am attracted by its theatrical intensity.
I sang "Patience" by Guns N' Roses for my sixth grade talent show and I wanted to be an actor when I was younger. It was all very, very theatrical. It was only later that I separated the two and thought of myself as quite the opposite of an actor.
I've done quite a lot of improv work before, and I wanted to do this film ["The Invisible Woman"] because it felt like a different technique. We were very true to the lines, and there was something quite formal and almost theatrical about it.
I think my manager of 30-some odd years now, Tom Hammond. He's as fine a person as you could ever meet. And he's had great theatrical taste and has influenced me that way.
It's frustrating when people get upset with me about not going out to DVD - the reason is that I plan to tour with the films for many, many years, not just a month or a week. Literally years. And as soon as I would put it out on DVD, it would ruin the financial possibilities of me making it a theatrical event. Whereas the book, the publishing of a screenplay, would not cause that problem.
The stage is like a laboratory where you can run theatrical experiments, imposing interesting conditions on the cast or story and seeing how they pan out. Each new play is like creating a tiny virtual universe enclosed by the confines of the stage.
My pictures are about everyday life combined with theatrical effect. I want them to feel outside of time, to take something routine and make it irrational. I’m always looking for a small moment that is a revelation
Being a writer is a solitary life. So the little part of me that's an actor still enjoys the theatrical part of reading and doing the voices and telling the story.
I had my heart set on becoming an English teacher, but stumbled into acting after meeting a theatrical agent in my dad's restaurant in San Diego.
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
Reba McEntire came through town when I lived in Texas. She had this amazing theatrical show with, like, 13 different wardrobe changes. I was eight and I was like, Wow, I wanna do that!
I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
I'm the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.
I'm fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.
Twenty to thirty years ago, who was making documentary films? Nobody. Well, relatively few people. It was an art form that had limited theatrical distribution, if any at all. Some television distribution, but relatively small audiences regardless. And in the intervening years it's become more and more popular with a lot of people.
Brothers McMullen' would not be picked up for theatrical distribution now.
I've made a number of independent films that didn't receive theatrical distribution, that a lot of people haven't heard of, and as a result, I've conditioned myself to go into small independent films with the expectation that they will not, and therefore, I have to find my reward elsewhere.
Occasionally there are parents who say, "I brought my child so he or she could learn what the career of a writer is like, and you did this long theatrical performance instead, and I'm very disappointed."
Theatre director: a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.
One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, directing movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone. Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself.
When I looked at the state of women's MMA, what I saw was that it was missing rivalries or anything theatrical about it. Everybody was trying to be Miss America, unwilling to go under any kind of criticism, and taking the safe answers. I thought I needed to do whatever I could to get attention.
What was once a cottage industry dedicated to the discovery and development of new voices and works has become instead the raison d'etre for many a playwright's existence . . .. And since readings have become playwrights' main source of exposure, the nature of playwriting has changed to fit readings' needs. Investigation into what is eminently theatrical has been substituted - more and more these days - by what can simply come across and read well.
Growing up, I was the weird, theatrical kid who always tried to make people be in my plays. I've always loved comedy, but when it came time to figure out what I was going to go to school for, my parents were like, "Acting?! I don't think so. No." It took me a while to get the courage to pursue it. I had to do it in secret for a little bit, and then when I got married and was out on my own, I went for it.
I love theatrical props: a cup filled with solid fake tea, say, or a collection of fake food, including a rubber turkey, which, during the holidays, I wrap in tinfoil so it appears to have just come out of the oven.
Circumstances made me the theatrical personality I am, which many people believe is also a part of my personal life.
I use cinematic things in a theatrical way on stage, and in film I use theatrical techniques in a cinematic way.
Innocence as we understand it in our culture is very theatrical. The flip side is, if youre charming enough, you can get away with anything.
I did theatrical caricatures.
A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . .
Console game publishing has become more like theatrical release film-making and it is very hard if you are not one of the major publishers, and even for them it is hard unless they are working with major game brands.
Theatre artists are essentially sort of charlatans and thieves, I mean that's the tradition that we come from, so I have absolutely no, I make no bones about the fact that I steal from here and I take from there, and we all do it, that's perfectly all right, that's the nothing, there's nothing new in the world, there's nothing actually new in the way that you do something, but the point is is how do you take something and use it to articulate what is essentially a core of any given theatrical production.
It's a blast to watch. It's a lot more interesting live than it is on record. I mean, it really is a theatrical event. It's a sporting event! Cause you never know what's gonna happen.
Deductivism in mathematical literature and inductivism in scientific papers are simply the postures we choose to be seen in when the curtain goes up and the public sees us. The theatrical illusion is shattered if we ask what goes on behind the scenes. In real life discovery and justification are almost always different processes.
My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.
Sometimes people confuse contrivance and authenticity, and sometimes I think authenticity can get in the way of a good excuse to do something theatrical. I just don't like wasting opportunity - if you're going to do a photo session, if you're going to walk on stage, why not make it interesting?
White guilt is more of a sanctioned social convention than a genuine emotional experience. It’s a form of theatrical empathy that’s socially and financially rewarded. When you learn to say and perhaps even believe the right things about race, doors are opened for you. When you say the wrong thing, those doors slam shut. Then, the gossips and church ladies will shame you publicly, demand that you be fired from your job, and use every avenue available to them to coerce a confession, a public apology and a staged conversion that contributes to their progressive narrative.
Animal abuse is rampant in the U.S., right under everyone's eyes, for the entertainment of the public. The brutal confinement and pain of training methods of wild animals in the circus, the aquatic and theatrical shows, leads to retaliation by the animals. Eventually they find the right time to strike out, and they will.
There have always been dreamers. Men and women who catch a glimpse of something beyond themselves who dare to reach for goals and visions. .. Yet no earthly dreamer can match the greatest of them all, the Dreamer who died on the cross to make His dream a reality. John 1:1 says, "In the beginning was the Word." The literal meaning of logos, the original Greek term translated as "Word," is idea, thought or blueprint. It is an ancient Greek theatrical term describing the work of a playwright as he conceives, or dreams up, the plot of a play. So we could say, "In the beginning was the dream".
My mum was an actor until she started having children. I was the first child, so in a way I was the end of her acting career, which hopefully she's forgiven me for. She's still watches my show every week. It's funny because I didn't grow up in a household that felt like a theatrical household. My dad did a normal job and my mum had given up. But when I decided to try and do it - it wasn't the most alien concept.
The fellows who amuze me are the Albanians. An Albanian on the mash is almost exactly like the medieval swells of the Italian frescoes & the first ones we met quite startled us. They wear the tight-fitting trunk hose made of woolen stuff hooked up the back of the leg. It is white with long black stripes of embroidery down the leg & at the top in front the shirt is pulled through slashes. They are long slim chaps with dandy little moustaches & are most theatrical in effect.
It [9/11 tragedy] was the spectacle, what al-Qaeda gets its main power from - why their terrorism truly earns the word "acts." They are very theatrical, always - the simultaneous violence, the grandiose, symbolic gestures (the number 911, "United" and "American" flights, the World Trade as target etc). And then its aftermath.
I studied at the Budapest Academy of Theatrical Arts for four years and emerged with a degree.
The way to go to the circus, however, is with someone who has seen perhaps one theatrical performance before in his life and that in the High School hall... The scales of sophistication are struck from your eyes and you see in the circus a gathering of men and women who are able to do things as a matter of course which you couldn't do if your life depended on it.