Trevor Nunn Quotes

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Trevor Nunn

Profession : Director

Birth : January 14, 1940

In my teens, I developed a passionate idolatry for a teacher of English literature. I wanted to do something that he would approve of more, so I thought I should be some sort of a scholar.

Trevor Nunn

I always believe it's better to have 30 imaginations working on a project, rather than one imagination telling the other 29 what to do.

Trevor Nunn

If you feel very deeply about something, it's not possible to sacrifice your integrity about that.

Trevor Nunn

A lot of performing instincts are involved in the business of direction, but so is analysis and having a sense of literature.

Trevor Nunn

I had a feeling about Shakespeare's soliloquies, that there should be a real exchange between the actor and the audience.

Trevor Nunn

I so wanted to perform, and I grasped every opportunity.

Trevor Nunn

I tend to arrive in the rehearsal process with very strongly developed ideas about what I want to do. But I don't like those ideas to be things that are not subject to change, or subject to development, or subject to challenge.

Trevor Nunn

I would be terribly disappointed if anything would get in the way of my being cast in something, or if performances were canceled. It was a fix that I obviously needed.

Trevor Nunn

I've experienced a private doubt, something that I've kept deeply inside, and then eventually delivered a piece of work that people responded to with huge enthusiasm.

Trevor Nunn

I've just taken the decision that I'm going to now go full time back into the theater.

Trevor Nunn

I've never had any feeling of disconnection between the classical theater, or the contemporary theater, or musical theater, or the thing that we call opera.

Trevor Nunn

If you can't fully believe in your ideas, it very quickly communicates to a group of actors who need something to hold onto. They need to believe that whatever criticism, whatever comment is received, is meant.

Trevor Nunn

If you're a director, your entire livelihood and your entire creativity is based on your self-confidence. Sometimes that's dangerously close to arrogance.

Trevor Nunn

In a way, I have to have a dictatorship. I can't be told that I'm wrong. That conflicts with what I was saying earlier about listening. It isn't to do with receiving criticism and responding to other views, it's who has that last decision.

Trevor Nunn

In my early years, my father was away as a soldier in the war. When he came back, work was very difficult to come by. Even though he was a highly skilled man, a maker of furniture, the payment for that work was very poor.

Trevor Nunn

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

Trevor Nunn

Peter Hall was just organizing the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was going to be an ensemble, it was going to be in repertory, it was going to have a home in London as well as in the Midlands, and all of those things were happening at that time.

Trevor Nunn

So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before.

Trevor Nunn

The film director, in many instances, has to swallow somebody else's decision about the final form of something. It's so hard as to be intolerable.

Trevor Nunn

The first big break was winning a scholarship to go to Cambridge University. I was very lucky, because my parents couldn't have afforded a university education for me. Without a scholarship I couldn't possibly have gone.

Trevor Nunn