ABSTRACT
The acting profession is something only a professional actor understands, someone who has grown up in the theater and knows it is always essential to show up evening after evening and to repeat each time the same, rehearsed performance, which need be only approximately true to life. In the theater, the spectator sees the actor's body as a whole, and his facial expression necessarily eludes him. But when so much of the face is seen on the screen, it reveals unmistakably whether the person behind that face is that character. Collaborating with Ivan Passer and Jarda Papoušek was ideal. American newspapermen like to ask whose idea something was, what a given actor or writer contributed. From the moment preparations for making a movie begin, the camera is just as important as the actor or, later on, as the cutting and the music. It is one of the main components of the director's style.
