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British director Stephen Daldry has found great success with a relatively small list of projects.

His career is not as steeped in credits as most directors, but everything he does seems to have a significant impact. His films number less than six, but among them are "Billy Elliot" and "The Hours," which have earned him two Oscar nominations. His stage productions include premieres that are likely to become part of theatre history, such as the first productions of Caryl Churchill's Far Away and A Number. He's only come to Broadway three times in the past 15 years, but those visits have been memorable. The first trip was to stage the Broadway version of his hit revival of J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls (onstage rain, sets falls apart). He won a Tony Award and so did the show. He returned in 1999 with David Hare's one-man show Via Dolorosa, in which Hare starred, garnering a lot of press at the time. Now he's back with what some critics have called the best British musical of all time, Billy Elliot. New York critics didn't exactly say that, but they came close. The show is one the few commercial smashes of a lean season. And Daldry worked hard for it. The director talked to Playbill.com about what it takes to keep multiple Billy Elliots and multiple Billy Elliots going.

Playbill.com: Many people wondered whether Billy Elliot would do as well on Broadway as it did in London, given the story's very British backdrop. Were you at all surprised by the positive critical and popular reception?
Stephen Daldry: We were, I think. We've never taken the show for granted, especially taking it into a very different cultural context. It was always going to be both scary and exciting. We had no idea how it was really going to play. We were more than delighted and more than relieved.

Playbill.com: Do you mean the finding of the children, or their training, or both?
SD: It's everything. It's the finding, it's the training and it's the maintenance of the children. We never stop auditioning. We're in a constant state of auditioning now to find more children for Broadway. At some point early next year we expect to open the show in San Francisco. So we're starting a whole new search for boys to play there. It's a long, incredibly involved and incredibly expensive process. It's not just the auditions. No child comes with all the required skills. So you have to put a child you're interested in into a training program. That means you have to start locating specific dance teachers, sometimes singing teachers, tap teachers, ballet teachers, depending on what the skill set is the child already has, and how you can augment them. Which means you have to source those teachers. They might already have those teachers, but more often they don't have those teachers. In England, it's much easier, because it's so much smaller. But in a country like the United States, if a child is in Houston, or Minnesota, you have to start putting time, effort and resources into making a training program that is evolved around what the child really needs. Putting that into place is a huge job.

Playbill.com: Will the three Billy Elliots in the Broadway production be staying for a while?
SD: I'd like them to stay there as long as they can. But of course, boys being boys, they grow into young men very quickly. How long they can stay is very much not in our hands. Continued...