"It was very much about performances, the whole ensemble thing was just great - everybody working together. Sometimes it didn't feel like a film set. It wasn't technically driven, it was very, very enjoyable"
About this Quote
Murphy is praising something rarer than a good shoot: a set where the machinery stops being the main character. When he says it was "about performances", he’s drawing a line against the contemporary default in filmmaking, where actors often work inside a lattice of green screens, pre-vis, and coverage planned like a military campaign. The compliment isn’t anti-technology so much as pro-presence. He’s signaling that the production’s center of gravity stayed with the people in the room, not the gear around them.
"Ensemble" is doing a lot of work here. It’s less a genre label than an ethic: trust, timing, and shared authorship. Murphy’s emphasis on "everybody working together" subtly resists the star system that flattens collaboration into hierarchy. He’s pointing to a creative environment where performances can be built live, in relation, rather than assembled later in the edit suite. That’s why "Sometimes it didn't feel like a film set" lands as the real endorsement. A film set is typically synonymous with fragmentation: marks, resets, waiting, lighting tweaks. Not feeling like one implies flow, momentum, and a looseness that reads on camera as intimacy.
The repeated "very" and the almost casual phrasing ("just great") give the quote its credibility. This isn’t a manifesto; it’s an actor admitting relief. Subtext: in an industry obsessed with technical perfection, enjoyment is a metric of artistic health, and ensemble work is the antidote to performance as content.
"Ensemble" is doing a lot of work here. It’s less a genre label than an ethic: trust, timing, and shared authorship. Murphy’s emphasis on "everybody working together" subtly resists the star system that flattens collaboration into hierarchy. He’s pointing to a creative environment where performances can be built live, in relation, rather than assembled later in the edit suite. That’s why "Sometimes it didn't feel like a film set" lands as the real endorsement. A film set is typically synonymous with fragmentation: marks, resets, waiting, lighting tweaks. Not feeling like one implies flow, momentum, and a looseness that reads on camera as intimacy.
The repeated "very" and the almost casual phrasing ("just great") give the quote its credibility. This isn’t a manifesto; it’s an actor admitting relief. Subtext: in an industry obsessed with technical perfection, enjoyment is a metric of artistic health, and ensemble work is the antidote to performance as content.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
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