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" As an actor, it's much easier for me to get work in the movies because nobody knows who I am except for the work that I've done in another movie. I really enjoy that. "

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" As a child, acting just seemed like a natural extension of my love of play - and if you've forgotten how to play, you shouldn't be an actor. "

Simon McBurney

Love

Acting

Child

" I allow people to create, but I'm also marshalling everybody, which is difficult for my creativity, as I'm like a referee. Everybody else is kicking a ball. It is very messy. From the mess, though, you refine what is there. "

" I don't recall making a conscious decision to become an actor. I just remember winning a prize at a theatre festival when I was 17 and saying: 'Oh, that's what I have to do.' "

" Haunted since the day its discovery was projected all over the world in 1994, I, like many others, have always wanted to see inside the Chauvet cave, site of the world's earliest known cave art. Quite rightly, we will never go. It is closed to the public. "

" In France, they call the people who come to the theatre 'les spectateurs'; in Britain and Ireland, they are the audience, the people who listen. This does not mean the French are not interested in language. On the contrary. It actually says more about the undeveloped visual sense over here. "

" The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen. "

" Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it's gone. "

" Our lives are a sequence of things. When we're alive, they're continuing, just as my words now are an improvisation. So the idea of 30 years is actually quite nebulous. It's impossible to encapsulate it. All you can do is go: 'what next?' "

" I remember the fact that milk was delivered every day by a milkman. In summer, my mother would make what now seem in my middle-aged imagination the most delicious iced milkshakes. "

" My experience of my father's death was that it was still taboo; nobody would meet me after my father died because they didn't know what to say. "

Simon McBurney

Father

Say

" I try to push a single idea to its absolute limit. So for all of those ideas that existed in the story, you attempt to find a physical realisation in the space. "

" I have always felt more at home in a culture that has nothing to do with the one I was born and brought up in. "

" The brain constantly assures us, reassures us, that we are in control. But the closer you look, the more questions you have about it. "

Simon McBurney

You

Questions

" I was very bad at mathematics in school, and I always had the feeling as a kid that when I worked on problems, that I would be wrong. "

" In my opinion, there's nothing new in the theatre, ever. Theatre-makers are thieves, in the honourable tradition of charlatans. They fake it very, very well indeed for the entertainment of everybody else. "

" My work is not generally in the commercial sector. However, I'm not worried by the commercial sector. I refuse to work in any other way except the way that I work. "

" Everyone sees something different in 'Endgame': a biblical apocalypse, a portrait of painful co-dependency, a confession of guilt and dignity in the face of death, a night of baffling hopelessness, a meaningless babble. Each interpretation reveals an absurd truth - not about the play, but about the person watching it. "

" Theatre is about the collective imagination... Everything I use on-stage is driven by the subject matter and what you might call the text - but that text can be anything, from a fragment of movement or music to something you see on a TV. "

" Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time. "

" Infinity is a way to describe the incomprehensible to the human mind. In a way, it notates a mystery. That kind of mystery exists in relationships. A lifetime is not enough to know someone else. It provides a brief glimpse. "

" I'm passionate about music, and I feel that theatre has an extraordinarily musical ability in the way it operates on the audience. "

" 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 don't really think about a visual aspect to the work at all; I just think about making the piece. And everything that occurs visually comes out of the subject matter you are dealing with so that I find it difficult to treat the visual element as a separate entity. "

" 'Endgame' resists narrative and even thematic explanation. How you play it has to reflect this. If you decide something too much in advance, you forget the element that gives the play life - the audience. "

" I don't tend to get cast in the theatre much. People assume I come with all this baggage. But they do cast me in films. In films, I'm a nobody. "

Simon McBurney

Nobody

Theatre

" My parents loved classical music. And my father adored Mozart. But for some reason, I always had a reaction against it. "

" We feel closer to the drawings on the walls of Chauvet than the painting of, say, an Egyptian mural. These artists are not remote ancestors; they are brothers. They saw like us; they drew like us. We wear essentially the same clothes against the cold. "

" Most people won't order tripe in a restaurant, but it can be fantastic. "

" There's something hopeful about 'Endgame.' Beckett strips everything away and asks what remains. There's this surgical dissection of the soul, but at the bottom, you find shafts of light. "

" The very beautiful and very touching thing about opera singers is they are very willing to do whatever you want. Unlike actors, who constantly want to know why they're doing something, opera singers will sort of follow you into the fires of hell. "