{"id":12349,"date":"2010-06-29T18:03:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-29T22:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=12349"},"modified":"2010-06-29T18:03:54","modified_gmt":"2010-06-29T22:03:54","slug":"jimmy-stewart-thats-what-i-mean-by-the-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=12349","title":{"rendered":"Jimmy Stewart: “That’s what I mean by the moment.”"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Jimmy Stewart to a British Film Institute interviewer in 1972:<\/p>\n

I’m beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments–not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part–you produce moments that create a feeling of believability to what you’re doing….<\/p>\n

I was making a Western in British Columbia and we were on the Columbia Icefields. It was raining and there was heavy mist around, so we couldn’t shoot, so we were all huddled around a fire. Suddenly, out of the mist, came a man, and he was not a young man. He had a beard–it wasn’t exactly a beard, he just hadn’t shaved for a while–and he was a miner type, he was dressed like a miner. He came closer to us and he said, “Which one of you is Stewart?”<\/p>\n

“I am.”<\/p>\n

He came over and looked at me and said, “Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognize ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I’d come up and say hello. I’ve seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best–you were in this room and your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her. I thought that was a nice thing for you to do.”<\/p>\n

And I remembered exactly the moment, exactly the film, who was in it, who directed it, and I also realized that that picture had been released twenty years before. That man made a tremendous impression on me. To think that I had been part of creating a moment that this man had liked and had remembered for twenty years. I’ll never forget it. That’s what I mean by the moment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jimmy Stewart to a British Film Institute interviewer in 1972: I’m beginning to believe that, in films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments–not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part–you produce … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[109],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12349"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12349"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12356,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12349\/revisions\/12356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}