To be an actor, you have to be a child.

Interviewer: What advice do you have for kids who are as an actress? Either way I would encourage kids to make good choices, don’t get forced into things due to peer pressure, lead a healthy and safe life, and excel in the things you love. You can be great at anything, as long as you like doing it.

Having a play directed by someone else is like going to a religious school when you’re a child, you listen and obey…

Acting is about trusting your instincts, not censoring yourself and not looking back. Directing is the opposite in a lot of ways. It's measured. Number one, as a director, I get the script way before the actors do, so I have moments to graph out how the episode should be, understand the plot points and convey that to the actors. It's a much more structured approach, which is a bit more of my personality. I like to be more calm and in control. From there, you hope the actors bring other creative variables to the table. It's collaborative, but I'm still steering the ship.

Kids are closest to some of the most gifted actors, because they haven't gotten rid of that imaginary world yet. A lot times kids have the best insights into acting because they're still living there.

In my limited experience, shows are like children. You can teach them manners and dress them in little sailor suits, but in the end, they're going to be who they're going to be.

When you let children lead, you see their minds work in a way that’s different to ours because we’re moulded to think a certain way as we get older.

The job of a director on the set to a large degree is to keep everybody’s moral up, he’s one of the very few people on the set who doesn’t have anything to do, because he’s overseeing it. He’s not shooting it, he’s not editing it, so a director needs to make sure that the cast and crew can do the best possible job. Sometimes I see films where the actors walk through it almost mechanically, and then there are other movies where every actor, top to bottom, seems to be doing a really great job. Then you know that there’s a chemistry on the set created by the director, an environment that helps them to do their work.

Adults are always asking kids what they want to be when they grow up because they are looking for ideas. — PAULA POUNDSTONE

Grown-ups desperately need to feel safe, and then they project onto the kids. But what none of us seem to realize is how smart kids are. They don’t like what we write for them, what we dish up for them, because it’s vapid, so they’ll go for the hard words, they’ll go for the hard concepts, they’ll go for the stuff where they can learn something. Not didactic things, but passionate things.

Actors talk about a love of craft and contributing to artistic welfare. But, really, I think [the desire to act] came for me from wanting more attention from my parents.

In early youth, as we contemplate our coming life, we are like children in a theatre before the curtain is raised, sitting there in high spirits and eagerly waiting for the play to begin. It is a blessing that we do not know what is really going to happen. Could we foresee it, there are times when children might seem like innocent prisoners, condemned, not to death, but to life, and as yet all unconscious of what their sentence means.

From a young actor’s perspective, you learn a new set of skills in any movie. I’m only six years away from drama high school. At 23 or 24 you’re learning every day. I was lucky not knowing any of the actors prior, really. There was this unifying ulterior motive to make the movie great. It felt good. Things have to be utilitarian. It’s the healthiest way to approach art and creativity, you know. No ego.

For young actors, the more you can stand around or sit there—-even when you’re not shooting-—just sit there on the set and shut up for three hours, you’ll learn more in one day than you’ll ever learn in film school.