Trevor Nunn Quotes

• The National [Theatre] is an organisation that benefits directly from taxpayers’ money. I know of no edict that says that only those taxpayers with degrees in English literature pay for this place.

  Trevor Nunn

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• You are faced with the choice: either my integrity remains intact and this is the work that ends up on the screen, or I have to leave, and I have to be known to have left.

  Trevor Nunn

• When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

  Trevor Nunn

• When I was 13 years old, a professional theater company in my town needed a kid actor. I auditioned, and I got the part, so for just a few weeks I became a member of the company and I met some professional actors.

  Trevor Nunn

• What you’re doing is putting into professional play the way that you relate to other people, the way that you analyze and relate to a written text, the way that you would persuade anybody to do anything. It has to do with listening, with humility and a sense of yourself.

  Trevor Nunn

• The thing that I had saved up for myself and wanted most to bring off was a fully fledged professional production of Hamlet at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

  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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• One fine day I discovered that more complex plays really have to be directed.

  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

• 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

• 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 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

• 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

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

  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

• 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

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

  Trevor Nunn

Trevor Nunn (27)

Birth:	14th January, 1940
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Film Director, Television Director

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Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1905 - Kenneth Rexroth
• 1962 - Mark Ruffalo
• 1948 - Steve Garvey
• 1960 - Luther Campbell
• 1915 - Barbara Billingsley

Deaths

• 1943 - Beatrix Potter
• 2001 - Lance Loud
• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1987 - Sir Henry Thomas Cotton
• 1989 - Samuel Beckett