James Lapine Quotes

James Lapine

Profession : Director

Birth : January 1, 1949

Something I like to do is watch someone else do their thing.

James Lapine

Fairy tales cross generational lines, and how you respond to them depends on when in your life you're seeing them.

James Lapine

Good musicals, a strange world, seem so easy. People say, 'Ohhh, it's magic.' Nothing's magic. A thing doesn't jell. Adapt. Change the rhythm. Shorten the scene. Rewrite the character. Maneuver the waters. Seeming easy is why so many shows aren't good.

James Lapine

The nice thing about the theatre is you can always change it. With a movie, once it's there, you're stuck with it.

James Lapine

Some of the things I've done in my life, I've done to make money because I had to make money... and some things I did just because they were on my mind and they were of interest to me... some of the little plays I wrote.

James Lapine

I just don't really think of career. I've never been driven by career.

James Lapine

I designed a theater magazine that was full of plays and essays about the theater, and then I worked at a theater school. By osmosis or something, I was learning from reading plays and not being analytical about them, but when I would read them, the joy in me was mostly from imagining them in my head and visualizing them.

James Lapine

I think visually... so, even when I'm writing a play, I'm envisioning it.

James Lapine

In most audience-participation shows, the participant is so clearly not a part of what's going on that it's the fish-out-of-water aspect that makes it funny.

James Lapine

We live in an era of reinvention: Madonna and everybody desperately trying to change their persona.

James Lapine

I don't do movie junket-y things, because I don't really do movies that much.

James Lapine

I've ended up working with Disney a lot, which is kind of peculiar. In theater, I've done a couple of projects with them and written a couple movies and whatnot.

James Lapine

I'm never so into the three-act movie thing. I know that's the form that people talk about, but it seems to me, in the movie, you just have to keep charging forward. You couldn't start over again like you do after an intermission. You just had to keep the plot moving forward.

James Lapine

I have nothing to hide.

James Lapine

I like the stage challenges of having somebody literally falling apart before your very eyes.

James Lapine

If you're like me and nosy, you're always eavesdropping on other people's conversations.

James Lapine

I'm a hippie child of the '60s. What drives me crazy about mass media entertainment is that it's so often devoid of any ideas.

James Lapine

When you grow up, you don't realize that your parents are any different than anybody else's. And their behavior - you have nothing to compare it to. So that is what normal is, even if it's abnormal.

James Lapine

When you're trying out on Broadway, it's very hectic, and you're making changes night after night. There's a lot of pressures from producers to make some changes, and you're writing for actors who are in it - and sometimes the limitations of actors who are in it.

James Lapine

I'd like to just say that there's nothing darker than 'Old Yeller' and 'Bambi' and some of the early Disney stuff.

James Lapine