The theater, for me, has always been a place where I'm free to be more creative, a place to sharpen my tools.
I like those older theaters - the acoustics are perfect, I mean, you just have that feel of there's been a thousand shows in there and now you get to be one.
I had a hard-scrabble childhood with my parents. I have a lot of baggage. To come down to the footlights and accept the audience's affection inside a Broadway theater - that didn't come easily to me.
When I moved to New York City in 1965, I wanted to be in theater. I was following my Ethel Barrymore dream. But I was too young to be Ethel.
I'd studied theater growing up and loved that, but didn't have many examples of artists around me.
I trained as a theater actor and you had a bare stage and you had to pretend, one prop and you are in the middle of 8th Ave. and traffic is just going by.
After 'Peepshow,' I really don't know what my next project will be. But I would like to keep on doing theater. I think I could do that forever.
I was always the only black in the movie theater, the only black in class, the only black in the library, the only black in the discotheque. I always felt observed and judged.
I think I've definitely found a niche working in comedy, but dramatic films are what brought me here. After I saw 'Titanic' in the theater, I got the bug.
A lot of people I went to college with felt like they wanted to pursue theater exclusively, so I don't think that I really was in competition with people that I went to school with.
So long as there is one pretty girl left on the stage, the professional undertakers may hold up their burial of the theater.
The thing I learned from 'Pride and Glory' is that people like to feel a little better leaving the theater than they did coming in.
I belonged to Stratford Children's Theater when I was a boy growing up in Manchester. Even then, I was always doing character parts.
I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation.
Unless an entire row of people got up in the middle of a performance and left the theater in disgust, I felt as though I hadn't done my job.
I grew up doing sitcoms and theater and even playing with the Beach Boys, where you're programmed to perform, your body gets into a rhythm and you know it has to perform.
As filmmakers, we can show where a person's mind goes, as opposed to theater, which is more to sit back and watch it.
I had never done any theater in high school, which actually worked to my benefit. I didn't develop any bad habits.
I like films better than the theater because you have to spend so much energy projecting your voice from the stage in the sheer effort to be heard.
I'm someone who believes the only way to see a movie is in a big theater, on a big screen, with a big bag of popcorn.
Sir Larry could be very strict and a disciplinarian, too. He had many faces; he wore many hats. But, ultimately, he loved the theater and he loved actors.
