"When you're on a set it can be very tedious and slow. It's just not as big as when you see it on film"
About this Quote
The glamour of filmmaking collapses the moment you’re actually there, stuck under hot lights while someone adjusts a mark half an inch. Sanaa Lathan’s line punctures the audience’s fantasy with a working actor’s boredom: production is less “movie magic” than industrial patience. The point isn’t complaint so much as calibration. Film sells velocity, scale, and momentum; sets run on repetition, waiting, and microscopic tweaks that only register once they’re stitched together in edit.
Her phrasing does a neat bit of demystifying. “Tedious and slow” lands with the flat honesty of someone who’s done enough takes to know the emotional truth can’t be rushed. Then she pivots to perception: “not as big as when you see it on film.” That “big” is doing double duty. It’s literal scale (a street corner dressed to look like a city, a cramped soundstage that reads as a mansion) and emotional scale (a scene that feels seismic onscreen might have been shot in fragments, out of order, with long pauses between lines). The subtext is craft: cinema is an illusion built from logistics.
Coming from an actress, the remark also reframes performance as endurance. Acting for camera isn’t only about accessing feeling; it’s about sustaining it across technical interruption, preserving continuity when the energy in the room is anything but cinematic. Lathan lets the audience in on the quiet labor behind the spectacle, reminding us that “big” is often an editing room achievement, not a set’s lived reality.
Her phrasing does a neat bit of demystifying. “Tedious and slow” lands with the flat honesty of someone who’s done enough takes to know the emotional truth can’t be rushed. Then she pivots to perception: “not as big as when you see it on film.” That “big” is doing double duty. It’s literal scale (a street corner dressed to look like a city, a cramped soundstage that reads as a mansion) and emotional scale (a scene that feels seismic onscreen might have been shot in fragments, out of order, with long pauses between lines). The subtext is craft: cinema is an illusion built from logistics.
Coming from an actress, the remark also reframes performance as endurance. Acting for camera isn’t only about accessing feeling; it’s about sustaining it across technical interruption, preserving continuity when the energy in the room is anything but cinematic. Lathan lets the audience in on the quiet labor behind the spectacle, reminding us that “big” is often an editing room achievement, not a set’s lived reality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Movie |
|---|
More Quotes by Sanaa
Add to List
