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" I was keen to stage 'Faust,' although I find Goethe's 'Faust' indigestible. "
Simon McBurney
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Although
Goethe
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" 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
Me
" Ultimately, theatre takes place in the minds of the audience: they all imagine the same thing at the same time. "
Simon McBurney
Theatre
Time
Place
" Living in France while the Falklands War was going on, I felt a profound sense of shame and betrayal, just as I did by the war in Iraq. People have asked why I don't talk about that directly in my plays. Well, politics needs to be articulated in many different ways. "
Simon McBurney
Living
War
Politics
" 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?' "
Simon McBurney
Words
You
Impossible
" In 1600, Shakespeare's London was a city of 200,000 people. At the same time, there were already over a million in Tokyo. "
Simon McBurney
London
Same
Time
" 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 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. "
Simon McBurney
Problems
Feeling
School
" In the theatre, because you're all looking at the same thing in the same space, consciousness is no longer individual. There is a unified consciousness. Until you look and project what is happening, it doesn't exist; the audience are the ones making the theatre, not the players. "
Simon McBurney
Looking
Look
You
" I don't have what German directors call 'a concept' - a solid, fixed sense of the pattern that you should impose on the given work. I always get the feeling that I am raking up the earth rather than laying down the concrete. "
Simon McBurney
I Am
Work
You
" Most of what we say about ourselves is a wonderful piece of storytelling. "
Simon McBurney
Say
Wonderful
Storytelling
" When the brain gets lost, it doesn't stop working. It tries to makes sense of things. It begins to speculate and guess, and that's when things open up. That's exciting. "
Simon McBurney
Lost
Working
Stop
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Other
Commercial
Work
" I might be like a conductor, or I collect the stuff together and I do a lot of my own writing. But what is a pleasure is the whole creative thing in which we're all excavating and trying to find something. "
Simon McBurney
Own
Trying
Creative
" Any play that's making a point is less interesting than something that stays with you and suggests something further. "
Simon McBurney
Interesting
You
Something
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Theatre
You
See
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Tradition
Fake
New
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Work
I Am
Movies
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
You
Messy
Creativity
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Day
Remember
Now
" 'The Magic Flute,' I think, is fundamentally asking what is it to change people's consciousness. "
Simon McBurney
Think
Asking
People
" 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.' "
Simon McBurney
Saying
Just
Decision
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
You
Want
Hell
" Mozart's seeming frothiness is just a light touch with very profound material. That's what I've found working on 'The Magic Flute.' "
Simon McBurney
Profound
Magic
Light
" The way the mind decodes music is an individual mystery. But the physical circumstances can change the way you listen. "
Simon McBurney
Way
Mystery
Music
" My proposition is that music is at the heart of what 'The Magic Flute' means: that it's Mozart's music, not the words, we should be attending to. Music expresses what can't be expressed otherwise. "
Simon McBurney
Flute
Words
Music
" I find all food irresistible. I have friends who live in the mountains in France. One of them sells vegetables, and to walk through her garden when everything is bursting out - it's impossible not to eat something. "
Simon McBurney
Walk
Food
Impossible
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
Theatre
Mean
Listen
" When my mother was dying, I cooked for her. One of the things I realised was that the smell and look of the food was key. I concentrated on how it looked on the plate. Even if the amount was small, it gave her a nourishment of a different kind. "
Simon McBurney
Food
Look
Dying
" I sometimes feel I would like to do crazy things with 'Endgame,' where someone says something, but the words, instead of being spoken, are written words projected out of their mouth. "
Simon McBurney
Mouth
Sometimes
Feel
" 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. "
Simon McBurney
You
Everything
Find