A Quote by Todd Haynes

All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera. — © Todd Haynes
All actors are protecting something, in their own way, that happens in front of a camera.
I really trust the authenticity of real people and my job is to get them to be themselves in front of the camera. Often what happens is, you'll get a newcomer in front of the camera and they'll freeze up or they imitate actors or other performances that they've admired and so they stop becoming themselves. And so my job as the director is just to always return them to what I first saw in them, which was simply an uncensored human being.
There isn't really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does. Something happens when she steps in front of the camera. There is this magnetic energy.
I ask my assistants if they're retarded all the time. When the camera is on you, of course, actors have the ability to make it real. For me, if I'm not talking, it is a problem. I have so much more respect for actors after being in front of the camera, and I realize that the hardest part is when you're not talking. Listening is harder than just acting. Listening is the hardest part.
I love the work, I love being in front of the camera and working with actors and directors and creating something. For me, it's like learning everyday.
Being behind a camera, in front of the camera, is my own little deconstructionist niche.
Photographs also show the way that the camera sees. It's not just me or you or anybody else. The camera does something that is different from our own setting.
[In comedy] you never want to leave the actors hanging out to dry. So you need to come up with funny individual stories for each character, and then you do this sort of comedy geometry, weaving them together. Once you've got a funny structure and you know why the scenes are funny, then you get super funny people to say your own lines, say their own lines, say things in their own way, and every scene is a live rewrite in front of the camera.
So I feel now very much like a guardian. I'm standing in front of art. I'm standing in front of cinema. I'm standing in front of Black culture. I'm standing in front of the history of America, and I'm protecting it by making art, by protecting our art, and by promoting our art.
A strange thing happens to me that I'm sure happens to a lot of actors when the camera starts rolling. I'm not 'me' any more.
So many actors are not open in front of the camera - they have a persona.
I think I've spent more time in front of a camera than off camera. That's just the way it is.
If somebody actually just walks up to you and says, ‘Hey, do you want to do something out of the ordinary?’ there might be a little reluctance at first. But deep down, you want to do it. It’s adventure. That’s what brings people in front of the camera. I also feel that when you’re in your own environment that’s where you experiment, where you do all kinds of crazy stuff. So I thought, ‘Okay, let’s just see what happens if I allow that to unfold.’
If some magic thing happens, and everybody goes completely nuts, and does something we never thought of, the cameras catch everything. That comes from having camera people who are almost like actors and writers themselves.
I'm always going to hear people make that connection and I've just accepted it. It's alright. I'm just happy that I get to do my own thing now. I learned a lot from the show [the Voice] as far as being in the TV world and being in front of the camera, which is really great because I'm not as nervous in front of the camera as I was before.
I want to prove that actors are good, not just at working in front of the camera.
The stigma that used to exist many years ago, that actors from film don't do television, seems to have disappeared. That camera doesn't know it's a TV camera... or even a streaming camera. It's just a camera.
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