Robert Lepage

Theater originated with technology. People forget that.

I've always been a little scared of technology, which is why I explore it.

The extraordinary context of 'Coriolanus' is that it's the first republic - it's the first attempt to create a society not ruled by a monarch. It changes the whole system, and you see how the establishment reacts to that, how they have disdain but play along - and you recognize this is the whole American republican system.

Every time we make a new invention, we think we're going to save the world, but eventually, we understand that the real virtues of that new invention have mostly to do with commerce. Then we feel a huge emptiness, and we want to fill it with beauty.

A puppet, for example, is just a piece of wood, a couple of rivets, but put them together, and if you know how to do it, and the audience's imagination joins in with this, then a miracle will come out of that machine. That is what we and the audience do in the theatre - we create miracles in that space.

Reading fairytales to children expands their imaginations.

There's nothing sadder than when things happen the way you've planned them, because we don't have a lot of imagination, you know.

Often, particularly towards the end of the process, I think of myself less as a theatre director and more as someone who just directs the traffic. My job is to move the ideas and bits of the show into the places where they work best. Sometimes my job is also to say, 'No.'

When we work on a new theatre piece, we improvise a lot. But it's the opposite in opera, where everything is fixed.

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.

Without meaning to sound crass, I've never had any psychological... help. It's because I feel my work is so revealing about who I am and what I am trying to understand about myself. It's a therapeutic process.