Excerpt from Michael Caine’s awesome book Michael Caine – Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making
Remember, unless you are actually looking through the camera and seeing the shot, you can never know if all the performers are delivering the goods or not. Half the time, movie acting is so subtle that the actors on the set with me will say:
“I don’t know what you’re doing.”
And I say, “Wait till you see the rushes.” (Sometimes I’ve even said that to the director.)
Once a director said to me: “I didn’t see that, Michael. I didn’t see that on the take.”
And I said, “Where were you sitting?”
“Over there.”
So I said, “How do you expect to have seen anything? The lens is over here by me.”
And here’s an interesting side anecdote: Alfred Hitchcock apparently never looked through the camera. Rare, rare, rare. So rare that he appears to be the only director to ever behave so. The camera was in his head. Incredible.
