Usually, on Broadway or in Hollywood, you come up with a project, and you have to convince the producers that it's safe.
Vegas is the city of temptation. I think, perhaps, it is an experiment by NASA. If we're going to send people to Mars, how will we create false economies and cultures to satisfy them? Vegas has the answer. People go there when they've nothing left to lose.
Making art in big cities is often frustrating and difficult. It's why artists are drawn to smaller places.
Technology can become a crutch. Sometimes it's there just to hide behind when you're shy of what you're trying to say.
I don't disagree with the critics often, and I'm not destroyed by bad criticism anymore. There comes a point when you go beyond it.
Of course theater will always be associated intimately to literature, but the themes or whatever have to penetrate you by the senses. Theater is a sensuous experience, and that's its main difference from film or any other dramatic art.
When we work on a new theatre piece, we improvise a lot. But it's the opposite in opera, where everything is fixed.
Theatre's still expensive compared to downloading on Netflix; that has to be addressed. It doesn't mean it has to be over-subsidised by the state, but it's something we're trying to figure out.
I had been warned by other directors that opera is hell. The singers don't want to do what you want.
We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.
I find it very strange when people say that they are trying to solve 'Uncle Vanya' or find a solution for 'Henry V.' Plays aren't puzzles. They are about playing. But so much theatre has become about performing and acting rather than playing, which is a great pity because audiences are captivated by watching people play.
If you decide to work with the opera world, chances are there are going to be people who resist that.
With the social media phenomenon, where people's opinions inform so much of what we do with our lives, where the number of 'likes' decides what we should program, I cringe.
Cirque du Soleil distinguished itself by being a circus with no animals. Before then, circus was partly about showing how man can tame other species.