When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

It’s not enough to hit the notes. There is no point in the singers just standing there and sounding wonderful if they’re not connecting with the characters they are portraying.

When the music and the characters are flawlessly synchronized, the opera develops an emotional force that movies and plays cannot match.

In opera, everyone’s watching from a fixed viewpoint, and that really challenges you. Lighting, the sets, stage groupings, the music-but doesn’t relate too much to film.

On stage, the audience watches from a fixed viewpoint and the director cannot retake something he doesn’t like. It has to work straight through.

The number of opera houses around the world and the high attendance rates show that opera an art form that is more popular than ever.

He’s wrong. That’s why his films look so terrible.

In Australia, they set up a special fund to kick films off. It was quite an enlightened sort of move. You could go to this government bureau with scripts and and get finance for films.

I don’t rehearse films as much as opera or theatre. When I began directing films I thought a long rehearsal was a good idea. Experience showed me that the best performance was often left in a rehearsal room.

Film is shot in fragments, and the same moments can be shot again and again until the director is satisfied.

With Cold Sassy Tree having its first production, I saw no necessity to do anything other than produce it with the correct setting.

I’d really been interested in opera when I was about 16, and I really like staging them.

I didn’t get upset because I wasn’t nominated, but I was a little surprised.

Directing an opera is similar to directing a play. The singing must not get in the way of the drama.

There’s a bright spot in every dark cloud.

Tender Mercies is a very low-budget film, but it was a huge budget compared to anything I had done in Australia. My fee for Tender Mercies was something like five times all of my Australian films combined.

Quite a few operas are still being commissioned around the world, although nothing apart from audience popularity can ensure more than a few performances.

At HBO, they seem to be well-informed. They make what I think are really quite mature films.

Perhaps the most difficult thing is shooting scenes set 6,000 feet up in the mountains of Mexico.

It is essential to do everything possible to attract young people to opera so they can see that it is not some antiquated art form but a repository of the most glorious music and drama that man has created.

There were movies that always made me want to be a director. You see brilliant scenes and the way the emotions were handled. I thought, I’d really like to do that.

With a film, I do my best to understand the author’s intentions and try to bring the characters to life.

Everyone has seen photographs of Mexicans wearing those big sombreros. When you come to Mexico, the astonishing thing is, nobody wears these hats at all.

When we were trying to get the money for Driving Miss Daisy, everyone kept saying no one could direct it well enough to entertain an audience for 100 minutes essentially watching three people chatting in the kitchen.

When I was 24 I went to Nigeria and it was such a culture shock, growing up in Australia and suddenly being the only white man in this unit full of black men.

In silent movies, they tended to put the camera down, and everybody walked in front of it and acted, and then they all walked off. Cutting was quite infrequent.

In my view, the operas of Carlisle Floyd will find a place in the permanent repertoire.

For a director, the most challenging scenes are the dialogue scenes.

The music of the most popular operas is so highly esteemed, it can stand endless revivals.