Daily Inspiration Quote by Mark Rydell

Rydell is doing that uniquely directorly thing: praising a performance while quietly narrating how it was engineered. The line looks like a simple compliment - "very alive", "very good actor to act with" - but the repetition is telling. He’s not reaching for poetry; he’s measuring an on-set reality. "Alive" is a technical adjective disguised as an emotional one: present, responsive, giving you something to cut to.

The real subject isn’t blindness as plot, it’s collaboration as leverage. Rydell points out that "through most of the picture he's blind" to underline the paradox: a role built on deprivation can still be rich, but it requires carefully banked moments of connection. That’s why he spotlights "many places early... before he was blind". He’s revealing the director’s structural solution: load the front of the film with relational texture so that, once the character loses sight, the audience still feels the person, not the gimmick.

Then the slyest detail: "Like convincing him in the office to do the picture". It’s a flash of meta-cinema - persuasion as a scene, casting as performance. Rydell frames pre-production negotiation as playable drama, implying that the actor’s willingness, intelligence, and ego-management are part of what ends up on screen. The subtext: the best acting partnership starts before the camera rolls, and the director’s job is to capture that spark, then ration it across the film’s constraints.