A play, after all, is a mystery. There's no narration. And as soon as there's no narration, it's open to interpretation. It must be interpreted. You don't have a choice... Each play can become many things.
Mike NicholsRead
The thing is, as a film director, you're essentially alone: You have to tell a story primarily through pictures, and only you know the film you see in your head.
Interpretation
What this quote means
As a film director, one carries the burden of translating their unique vision into a visual narrative, often in solitude.
Mike Nichols emphasizes the solitary nature of directing films, where the director must rely on their own interpretation and vision to convey a story visually. This process can be isolating, as the director is the only one fully aware of the film as it exists in their mind, and they must find a way to communicate that vision through the medium of cinema.
Themes
FilmDirectorStorytellingVisionArt
In practice
Example use cases
During a film workshop, you might say, 'As Mike Nichols said, a director is essentially alone in their vision.'
More from Mike Nichols
All quotes →There’s nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you’re meant to do. It’s like falling in love.
Mike NicholsRead
You could say that it's in talking movies that inner life begins to appear. You can see things happen to the faces of people that were neither planned nor rehearsed.
Mike NicholsRead
The thing about being an outsider... is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking because you're constantly looking for the people who just don't give a damn.
Mike NicholsRead
I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
Mike NicholsRead
Plays, especially great plays, yield their secrets over a long period of time. You can't read it three times and say, 'OK, I got it. I know what's happening.'
Mike NicholsRead
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