Aging & Wisdom Quote by D. W. Griffith

Griffith isn’t just describing a casting preference; he’s laying out an industrial logic dressed up as creative principle. The line pivots on a blunt calculus of efficiency: training “young people” is faster than “alter[ing] the methods” of seasoned stage performers, and the payoff is twofold - obedience and optics. In early cinema, actors arriving “from the boards” carried theatrical habits: projecting to the back row, broad gestures, a tempo built for live audiences. Film demanded a different grammar, one still being invented: intimacy, stillness, calibration to the camera’s distance and the editor’s cut. Griffith frames himself as a teacher because the medium needs a new kind of labor, not yet protected by tradition.

The subtext is power. “I pick out young people” positions him as gatekeeper and sculptor: he selects raw material, reshapes it quickly, and owns the resulting style. It’s also a quiet rebuke to theater’s prestige. By implying stage actors are too set in their ways to be worth reforming, he elevates film’s demands while justifying a system where directors, not performers, dominate authorship.

Then comes the most telling phrase: “actors who look the parts.” That’s cinema’s ruthless advantage and its trap. Film can trade in faces as meaning, using appearance as shorthand for character before a word is spoken. Griffith’s intent is practical - believability on screen - but it also reveals how early Hollywood begins to standardize bodies and types, turning casting into a visual ideology as much as an artistic decision.