It was extraordinary to experience 'Mamma Mia!' What an injection of good spirit and heart it was.

Phyllida Lloyd

Categorized in : Good Heart Spirit Experience

I worked on live studio drama, which was one weird aberration in the 1980s. I worked on the 'Battle of Waterloo,' and my job was to reload the Brown Bess muskets - the only time the audience realised it was live was when somebody leant on a button and plunged the whole studio into blackout.

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The power of a close-up can be extraordinary, but you have to have actors who are able to reveal themselves.

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Onstage, there's a separation between character and audience; onscreen, you can go to a deeper place.

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I think courage is commensurate with your fear - if you lack imagination and you're fearless, that's not courage to me.

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Frankly, I find it very odd that, in a population that's more than 50 per cent of women, that Hollywood isn't producing more movies to cater to that audience. The demographic is being grossly underserved, in my opinion.

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You can't wait for someone to discover you; you have to just get on and do it. Have confidence that directing is a very suitable job for a woman - with our gift for collaboration, listening, and reading the nuance of things.

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When I began to direct, I discovered that I was much more comfortable than I was acting.

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In a way, 'Mamma Mia!' was such a left-field thing for me.

In a way, the debate about Margaret Thatcher in Britain has just gotten fossilized in this notion that she is either this she-devil who wrecked the industrial base of the country and ruined the lives of millions, or she is the blessed Margaret who saved the nation and rescued us from our post-war decline.

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I was given a mask of myself by Frances Barber when we opened 'Julius Caesar.' I looked much younger and prettier. Wearing it was certainly cheaper than Botox.

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Do as much theatre as you can while you're at school.

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I wanted to be an actress from about the age of five.

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I was hellbent on going to drama school, but my mother, rightly, panicked and persuaded me to go to university on the grounds that a degree would be 'something to fall back on.' Whilst at college, I realised I wasn't good enough or robust enough to be an actress.

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There's something about doing Shakespeare with a single gender, whether it is all-male or all-female, that opens up certain possibilities. You are able to throw the behavior of the men into a particular relief and be playful within a slightly larger-than-life way with it.

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Shakespeare was writing about his time, and it was a time when women were beginning to demand a voice, demand a say in their lives for one reason or another, mainly to do with the economics of the time.

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When I was asked to read a screenplay about Margaret Thatcher, I think I felt immediate apprehension.

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I realised you could become fat and bald as a director and still remain employable.

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It's the job of the artist to take something that everybody thinks they know about, they've made a decision about, they will be immovable on, and to shine a light on it.

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If you believe that how you do your work is as influential as the work you do, then a theatre rehearsal, which is a microcosm of the world, is the perfect place to model social change because if it doesn't work this time, you can try again on the next production.

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In management terms, directing opera certainly prepares you for a film set: the magnitude of it, the experts in other fields that you have to call on. Both are massive ensemble jobs in which there's incredible pressure to get things done on time and on budget - so much so that making the wrong decision may be better than making no decision at all.

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