Puppet Master Movie Quotes

it is bewitching to watch both men [Burton and Gielgud] struggle for Shakespeare's meaning while they squirm as individuals beneath the weight of their own psychologies. This is the problem for every interpretive artist who ever drew breath. He must be true to the writer and true to himself. He literally serves two masters. To expect the interpreter to be a puppet who conceives and executes the ideal Hamlet (or Puck or Lady Macbeth or Merton of the Movies) is to deny the human condition. An actor can discipline his effects in order to avoid distortion of the play - giving up, sometimes, his most popular tricks - but to expect him to reject the totality of his personality in order to imitate The Character is madness. The actor is stuck with the character, but the character is also stuck the actor. Directors sometimes pretend that the character is everything and that the actor must adjust no matter how uncomfortable it makes him, but the actors job is to preserve himself somehow - not by distorting the play... but by admitting his own limitations, by knowing what he can make real for the audience and what he can't. If the actor has been miscast, he cannot compensate for the error by destroying his God-given nature on the stage. It is the producer's job to know beforehand how flexible the actor is.

Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, tel- evision and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photogra- phers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters.