A movie camera is like having someone you have a crush on watching you from afar - you pretend it's not there.
Interpretation
The quote compares the experience of being filmed to having a crush, suggesting a mixture of self-consciousness and performative behavior.
In this quote, Tom Stoppard illustrates the complex relationship between the subject and the observer in the realm of filmmaking. Just as one might feel nervous and performative when a crush is observing them, actors often find themselves trying to ignore the presence of a camera while they perform, leading to a unique blend of authenticity and artificiality in their art. The notion highlights the tension inherent in the act of creation, where awareness of observation can influence genuine expression.
In practice
This quote could be used in a film class discussion about the impact of the camera on actors' performances.
Love is - OK, it's 20 things, but it isn't 19. And I think that love reaches for something which is very, very deep in us and is very easily obscured, and is also very easily denied, which is the instinct towards the other person, other than toward the self.
I once did a radio program with a famous materialist, that is to say a scientist who believed that absolutely everything was physical and that all emotions were reductive to little electrical impulses in your neurons. And I found that I didn't believe that. But what the emotions really are, I don't have an alternative theory.
One of the reasons why there are so many versions of Chekhov is that translations date in a way that the original doesn't; translations seem to be of their time.
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty—and, by which definition, a philosopher—dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security.
Chekhov directors and Chekhov actors love working on his plays because there seems to be no end to what you can find out about the micro-narrative when you're investigating a text.
I think theater ought to be theatrical ... you know, shuffling the pack in different ways so that it's -- there's always some kind of ambush involved in the experience. You're being ambushed by an unexpected word, or by an elephant falling out of the cupboard, whatever it is.
Surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time. To conjure a place, a person, a situation, in all its specificity and dimensions. To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.
If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry
Above all, I craved to seize the whole essence, in the confines of one single photograph, of some situation that was in the process of unrolling itself before my eyes.
Espresso is to Italy, what champagne is to France.
Only truthful hands write true poems. I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.
Art, especially the stage, is an area where it is impossible to walk without stumbling.
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