Time & Perspective Quote by Dustin Hoffman

Hoffman is doing a very actorly kind of truth-telling here: demystifying the glamour by pointing to the ugly mechanics. The sentence is all logistical friction, and that is the point. “Hard to shoot a movie” isn’t a complaint so much as a reminder that performance isn’t a continuous emotional river; it’s a series of starts and stops imposed by budgets, weather, studios, and human fatigue. When he says you “break for a long time and then come back,” you can hear the quiet dread of having to re-enter a world that’s cooled off without you.

The key phrase is “in a sense.” It’s a small hedge that reveals craft. Hoffman’s acknowledging that “biggest scenes” aren’t objectively biggest; they’re designated as such by script structure, audience expectation, and the pressure everyone on set quietly agrees to apply. That pressure lands unevenly: “each character had” spreads the burden across an ensemble, implying a moment where every performer is asked to deliver peak intensity on demand, after momentum has been interrupted.

The subtext is a defense of acting as labor rather than inspiration. You don’t wait for the muse; you rebuild the character’s internal temperature after weeks away and hit the mark like it’s the first day. Coming from Hoffman, whose reputation is bound up with intensity and preparation, it also reads as a subtle assertion of professionalism: the real challenge isn’t feeling deeply, it’s feeling deeply on schedule, in fragments, with the camera finally pointed at you.