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All Quotes by author - Tracy Letts
" After the success of 'August,' there were people saying I should change my life. And maybe I should have bought a yacht and traveled the world instead of returning to Steppenwolf to act in and write plays. But I'm from the Midwest, and that's what we do: We go back to work. "
Work
Change
Life
" I don't believe moviegoers don't have patience. Screenwriters are told a scene can't be longer than three minutes, that you have to cut to the chase. Not true! "
True
Cut
Three
" I don't have a great face for camera. "
Face
Camera
Great
" I don't write plays for them to be turned into movies. "
Movies
Write
Turned
" I grew up in a small town, in a small community, and I would not have had access to great plays when I was a kid were it not for the films of 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' and 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.' "
Small
Great
Hot
" I like it when actors get an opportunity to chew into something. They love scenes with beginnings, middles, and ends - scenes that give an arc to their characters and allow audiences to get to know these people. "
Know
People
Opportunity
" I'm just a Chicago actor who's a playwright. Even with the success of 'August,' the people in town who come to our theater know me by sight, because they've seen me onstage so much. "
Just
People
Me
" I'm not a fan - this is a personal preference - I'm not a fan of tour-de-force writing. I admire it, but it's not where my inclination is. I want to hide. "
Hide
Personal
Want
" In theater, the playwright is the boss, period. The decisions will go through him or her. In movies, the writer is pretty far down on the list. "
Movies
Him
Her
" I think my experience as an actor helps me to write anything. It certainly helped me to write 'August Osage County.' It helps me to write any play that I'm working on because I think one of the things I do well is write good roles for actors. "
Experience
Think
Good
" I try to write fun - though difficult and challenging - things for actors to do, because I know if they're having fun, they're going to give it everything they got. "
Fun
Difficult
Having Fun
" It's not a natural translation, transition, to take something from stage to screen. Onstage your action is communicated through the spoken word primarily, and on screen it's communicated through pictures. So it's always been kind of unnatural to take something that lives on the stage and turn it into moving pictures. "
Pictures
Moving
Action
" 'Killer Joe' was originally written in 1991 and first produced in '93 at the Next Theater's Lab - a 40 seat black box theater in Evanston, Illinois - back when I was getting started. I was just 25 and I had been acting for awhile, but it was my first play and the one that really got me noticed, especially by Steppenwolf. "
Black
Back
Acting
" One of the things you hope you've done as a playwright is create roles that can sustain different interpretations. "
Done
Different
Create
" Some people do stage and film. Some people are film actors, and some people are stage actors. I'm quite sure that any of the actors who did the original production of 'August' could have done the film of 'August.' I don't think any of them were particularly surprised when they didn't wind up doing the film. "
Doing
Wind
Think
" The nature of the beast is that film is a director's medium. It's not a Tracy Letts play, it's a John Wells film. 'August: Osage County,' as a play, is done. Written. On the shelf. It'll be performed in its entirety for years. "
Play
Beast
Done
" The way we tell our stories on stage is that we use spoken word to convey action, and in movies, we use visual images to convey action. "
Action
Movies
Stage
" When books and plays are made into movies, they frequently want to cut out the valleys and just show the peaks. "
Want
Movies
Show
" When I write a play, and we read it for the first time, the great fear is that everybody is going to say, 'You're a bum and you can't write. This stinks.' and throw the script in the garbage. The great hope is that they're all going to lift me up on their shoulders and carry me to the streets, singing, 'He's a genius, he's a genius!' "
Hope
Time
Singing
" You don't work as hard to watch a movie. You work harder to watch a play, so what the audience puts into it is interesting. "
You
Audience
Work
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