Best 20 quotes of Colin Callender on MyQuotes

At heart, I'm really interested in this marriage of theater, film and television and I think what happened in the UK and obviously is happening here is that there's a convergence of talent kind of moving between the different disciplines and I find that very exciting.

I find it very invigorating having Ken Lonergan, who's an established, Pulitzer-nominated playwright doing Howards End, or Chris Hampton who's won an Oscar writing a TV series, or having an actor like Mark Rylance, who is probably England's leading theater actor, in the lead in Wolf Hall.

I have, over the years brought an enormous number of plays to television starting obviously with Nicholas Nickelby and then things like Angels In America or in Wit with Emma Thompson and Mike Nichols. So, yes, I do find that very interesting and I'm sure that down the road there will be plays that I'll want to do that way.

I live in New York, so I'm used to the audiences that cheer and clap through a play. It is unusual for London audiences.

In this new digital landscape, this sort of international marketplace, it's come full circle, and I wanted to take advantage of my talent relations on both sides of the Atlantic.

I think people want the intimacy in the engagement of sitting in a theater with people and seeing something happen live and engage in that. I think that could be a very powerful experience.

I think that's so particularly exciting about this moment in time is all the new platforms that are now existing, the Netflixes and the Hulus and Amazons and so and so forth; I mean they are really doing what pay TV was doing twenty years ago. So a show like Dancing On The Edge gets to have a digital life after it's playing on Starz. I think what's exciting is how these new platforms are providing more opportunities both for first-run programming on the one hand but also for second plays for shows that have appeared first either on traditional broadcast or on cable.

I think that the marketplace has changed in many dramatic ways but actually in some sense it's remained the same because the challenge of creating quality programming is the same, and I've always thought that if you follow the great material everything else will fall in to place.

I think where Playground is heading is deeper into that marriage between stage, film and television, with the increasing number of people in the film business working in television, obviously something that we were very influential in starting and doing at HBO. And I think that that's the focus of where I see the company moving forward, continuing to explore that intersection of all that talent.

I've had a long association with the theater over the years but I had never produced a play and it was something that I'd always wanted to do.The movies moved away from dramas, and I think that I'm very excited by the opportunity to take smart writing that takes risks and see it on stage. It's exciting to see that engagement between the audience and the playwright.

My career has sort of been characterized by taking advantage of the changes in the marketplace, sometimes by design, sometimes by accident.

My principal focus is finding great dramas.

One of the things that's different about London and the English market is that theater and film and television are all based in London. It's not quite the same as in the States where if the playwright here wants a successful TV or film career, they're whisked away by Hollywood.

The notion that the staging of the play Harry Potter should be raw magic and street theater rather than high-tech theater, was essential.

The play has to work for the super fans, and not speak down to them, and yet it had to play to those people who maybe had never read a Harry Potter book or seen the films.

The theater is a communal experience, and whatever the emotional connection between an audience member and the actors onstage, it ripples through the whole audience. Part of the fun of the play is being a part of that audience.

The White Queen in many ways it is representative of the sort of drama that I'm talking about. The books by Philippa Gregory were best sellers and they specifically told the story of history from the point of view of women.

When I did Nicholas Nickelby originally, that was a co-production between the new Channel 4, Polygram in Europe and Mobil Oil in America, and I have been involved in working on co-productions for years on both sides of the Atlantic and that's very much at the core of what Playground is doing. So marrying, finding projects that can be co-produced and can be produced using the very best talent from both sides of the Atlantic that's absolutely right at the center of what Playground is doing.

When I started producing it was right at the beginning Channel 4 in England. Nicholas Nickelby which was my first credit as a producer was Contract 001 at Channel 4 - that was the start of independent production in England and the emergence of an independent sector.

You never know, until you put a play up for an audience, whether it's going to work. Things you think will work don't, and things you're not sure about work really well.