In Making Movies, director Sydney Lumet recommends lying to actors so that they loosen up and give you better takes.

In Hollywood, you should be trying to do the very best in every take (see the appendix), even if that means that you’ll make many mistakes. The movie only needs one good take, which will be seen by every viewer.

The movie and the play are working under very different constraints: She tries twice before she lands it, but when she does, it makes the scene that much better. But the movie director asks: “What else do you have?”. Sue is cast and she performs the original choreography perfectly in the first take. Later, Hollywood decides to make a movie based on the play. Changes that improve the show but cause mistakes are not worth it. It doesn’t matter how impressive the jump is if she gets it wrong half of the time. So, when Sue, the best dancer in the play, suggests adding a risky-but-awesome jump, the choreographer says no.

If a dancer actually breaks a leg the play has to stop. On Broadway, actors put on a great show eight times a week consistenly. There is a math supplement to this post where I build some intuition on the different probability distributions involved.

What does a high variance mean