The director’s job is to provide the actor with ideas, not to teach him how to act or to trick him into acting. There’s no way to give an actor what he hasn’t got in the form of talent. You can give him ideas, thoughts, attitudes. The actor’s job is to create emotion.

Obviously, the actor may have some ideas too, but this is not what his primary responsibility is. You can make a mediocre actor less mediocre, you can make a terrible actor mediocre, but you cannot go very far without the magic.

Great performances come from the magical talent of the actor, plus the ideas of the director.

The other part of the director’s job is to exercise taste: he must decide whether what he is seeing is interesting, whether it’s appropriate, whether it’s of sufficient weight, whether it’s credible. These are decisions no one else can make.

- Stanley Kubrick