I saw Cate Blanchett in 'Big and Small,' and it was mind-blowing. The fact that she can do theatre and is also a huge movie star is really exciting.
If these theatres didn't exist, the tradition of British theatre would cease to exist.
Mum wasn't at all religious, but she thought that going to the theatre was as important a ceremonial, communal experience that a person could have.
I'm probably only going to make 10 movies, so I'm already planning on what I'm going to do after that. That's why I'm counting them. I have two more left. I want to stop at a certain point. What I want to do, basically, is I want to write novels, and I want to write theatre, and I want to direct theatre.
We cannot deny that 80 or even 90 percent of the spiritual treasures from the past 3,000 years have come from Europe. There is no other Greek theatre anywhere else in the world. There is no other Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes.
In the theatre, we're all charlatans and liars and scavengers and fly-by-nights.
I'm into parlor dramas. I'm into theatre. I'm trained for the stage. I trained to do Chekhov and Shakespeare, I was trained for the stage.
Virtually all my conscious life I had been involved in theatre - I had been a child actor - but as a young man who had experienced the 1960s, British theatre seemed remote from my aspirations in life - theatre was still a posh thing, a middle-class thing, something for an elite.
In school, I always sang in choirs. In fact, I used to do a lot of musicals in the youth theatre that I was a member of between the ages of 16 and 18.
I figured as I got older, the good roles for women would be in the theatre. So 15 years ago I started building a Broadway career to try and develop the chops to be accepted as a great theatrical actress.
I'm the classic example of alienation: I grew up in a middle-class household without art or books. I was going to be a chemical engineer until I went to the theatre for the first time at 16 and was blown away by it.
The club shows are really intense and powerful, but for a shorter time, and the audiences are in close proximity than when I'm performing at The Palace Theatre.
Movies are a complicated collision of literature, theatre, music and all the visual arts.
If I'm not in the theatre, I'm in an open mic night or doing a guest set at the Comedy Club, or whatever, just trying to develop stuff.
I feel that if you can play on the streets or in a comedy club, then in a theatre it's a doddle because you've got an audience.
I guess I've accepted that theatre is never going to be edgy in the way I want it to be. It's too expensive for a start. And, the audience seems to be complicit in the dullness.
Poetry is all I write, whether for books or readings or for the National Theatre or for the opera house and concert hall or even for TV.
Political theatre presents an entirely different set of problems. Sermonising has to be avoided at all cost. Objectivity is essential. The characters must be allowed to breathe their own air. The author cannot confine and constrict them to satisfy his own taste or disposition or prejudice.
I had a country upbringing in a predominantly Maori community, and that contrasted with a very multi-cultured arts community in the Aro Valley in Wellington: growing up around a lot of theatre and poets and writers and stuff.
I went to the University/Resident Theatre Association auditions. Deans come and watch you in this theater. You have three minutes, and you have to do two contrasting monologues - at that time, this is 2003 - one classical and one contemporary.