"Your job as a director is to serve the story. I don't think it's the job of a director in any medium to wave at the audience and say, "hey, don't forget about me, I did an important thing here as well!" You should make the play shine and make the actors shine. You should be invisible."

Roger Michell

"The most useful thing you can know as a director, is it's all right not to know"

Sir Richard Eyre

"In the theatre the search for utopia is a familiar, even necessary part of the process: to rehearse a play in the company of good actors, sharing a sense of common purpose, mutual respect, and pleasure in each other's company, is to come as close a you can to finding the elusive spot on the map marked 'utopia'"

Sir Richard Eyre

"There is no accepted way to become a director. You have to believe that you can do it, and by training in other disciplines, by practice and watching others, you become what you have it in you to be… I have seen bad directors talk obvious sense to actors and achieve appalling results. I have seen good directors utter palpable nonsense and provoke brilliance."

"A director must like actors and they must trust him… The director provokes the talent around him to give of its best; and then he edits what has been created so that the production makes a coherent statement. The director is the leader of a group who are on a journey to discover the play; neither he nor the group members know necessarily where that journey will lead them. To start out rehearsing a concept which is imposed inhibits creation and prevents discovery. A good rehearsal has the excitement of the unexpected."

Sir Peter Hall

"He [The director] is part guide, part philosopher, part friend; he is also part conspirator, part psychiatrist, part actor, part scholar, part musician, part editor, part guru, part politician, part lover. He is occasionally part servant. He has to wear a different mask to satisfy the needs of may different people. He should not be a liar, but sometimes he cannot tell all of the truth… It is a job of great power and influence, and can easily breed megalomaniacs and manipulators. "

Sir Peter Hall

"Actors trust him implicitly. Speaking about theatre, he'll say that it's not a director's medium and that he doesn't want to get between the actors and the writing. About film, he'll tell you he doesn't want the direction to get in the way of the actors' relationship with the audience. He erases himself, while in the background he's willing, as he puts it, to 'soak up the shit'."

Gaby Wood on Sam Mendes

The Observer, Sunday 14 December 2008 "How Sam Became The Man!