Our function as playwrights to some extent is to make audiences see with their ears, because films make us see with our eyes much better.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You have to make an audience experience with the ears as well as their eyes.
One of the skills you have to master in theater is the ability to make the audience believe that things that aren't there are there - just like when you're acting against CGI. Also, in a theater, the people in the back row can't see the whites of your eyes. Or your lips moving as you deliver dialogue.
As an actor, you're always at the service of somebody else's vision. In a play, it's more of the director's vision, and he or she's got their hands on you all the way up to opening night, and if it's a film, there are even more people.
The audience has to understand that if the film is going to have any meaning for them. If they are going to empathize with the characters, they have to visualize the process of concentration involved in making every move.
Fortunately, our audiences are used to a kind of boredom in the theatre, and if the writer is skillful, he will flatter them into thinking: 'Why, that's us up there, and aren't we - for all our little foibles - pretty nice guys and gals?'
As an actor, you have many tools - your body, your voice, your emotions, mentally. In film, you have your eyes because they communicate your thought process. In fact, generally in film, what you don't say is more important than what you say. That's not so much the case for stage.
Acting was merely a pastime; I wanted to make films. But theatre, ah - now that was a labour of love. Can there be anything better than performing without retakes and cuts, in front of people you can see, hearing them breathe in the darkness of the hall?
The bad things about theatre get balanced by the good things in film and vice versa. So to tell you the truth, I love it when I can go back and forth - it feeds different parts of you and exercises different muscles.
What's exciting about theatre is observing human behaviour. You're constantly making judgments about body language, the physical, the emotional, the intellectual.
One of the characteristics of plays that are made into films is that they can be very talky.
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