Question: At the start of the film, where the stage light falls from the 'sky', it says Sirius on it. Are we meant to presume that this stage light lit up the place in the sky where the star Sirius would be in real life?
Question: What kind of logic is behind Christoph's urge to keep Truman in the show now that he's realised what it's all about? Did Christoph suggest Truman (and all the viewers too) would start faking a happy life as all the other cast? Wouldn't it nullify all the idea of the show?
Answer: I think he wanted to explore the angle of "Now that he knows, what happens next?"
Well, he already witnessed what happens when Truman finds out.
Question: How does Christof talk to the actors? They don't look like they have earpieces, and if they do, why didn't that make Truman suspicious earlier?
Answer: They do have earpieces, just minuscule ones that can't be seen unless you are looking directly into a persons ear. As shown in the scene with Marlon on the beach, he is being fed his lines by such an earpiece. They are also present when Truman is in his car and he picks up the signal they are using to show where he is at the given time. Also, even though you can hear what someone is saying, you can't talk back to them which is why Meryl and Marlon had to talk to a camera when requesting help/confirming Truman wasn't there.
Yep, that's it. Also, the earpieces might not even be that small but Truman isn't looking for them and thus doesn't see them.
Chosen answer: It appears that Christof and the control team in the moon did not, in fact, have contact with the actors very often. It is more likely he had contact with people on the ground who could make things happen per his instructions. But there were inconsistencies. For example, how could he create instantaneous traffic jams at a moment's notice, and set up a hazardous spill scene on the outskirts of town to prevent Truman from leaving Seahaven, but he couldn't get anyone to interrupt or vary the cycle of movements by extras that Truman watched in his rear view mirror when he was trying to convince his wife something in their town was amiss - even when he was talking aloud, anticipating the next extra's move before it happened? Christof could arrange for a road race to happen by and to have people almost instantaneously hustle Truman's father onto a bus when he showed up in town as a homeless man, but it took quite some time to get Sylvia's father onto the beach to whisk her away to Fiji, even though Christof knew exactly where they were headed. And when Truman and Meryl were having their major argument in their kitchen, Christof could engineer Marlon to show up with a six pack of beer, but he couldn't communicate with Meryl to provide her advice on how to handle the situation, and she ended up screaming for help into a camera. I think Christof did place some sort of communication/listening device on some actors at critical times. We saw that in a couple of instances (e.g. When Marlon went into Truman's basement looking for an already disappeared Truman, Christof was feeding him direct instructions). But I don't think it was routinely done. And when it was, Christof's surely would have had the technical know-how to create a supremely inconspicuous piece of equipment.
Question: How could people sneak into the show? It's in a large dome, and I assume there's lots of security.
Chosen answer: A motivated individual can find a way. One could get hired as an extra, or as a crew member. And one could certainly simply elude security. The larger the operation, the easier it is to find holes in the system. We have certainly seen many instances of that in real life, in museums, theme parks, celebrity residences, national landmarks, etc. Why not in a fictional, dome-enclosed town?
Question: Why did Christof not get rid of Sylvia earlier when it's seen that Truman fancies her? He could just have taken her off the set and had the other actors tell Truman she "transferred" to another school, so as not to have her be alone with Truman and attempt to tell him what was going on. Also how could Sylvia predict that Truman would fancy her, thereby making it easier for her to tell him about Seahaven being fake?
Answer: They fell for each other, the feelings were hidden enough for the show makers not to notice until it was already "too late." I don't think they minded Truman looking at other women or female actors flirting with Truman, as long as they held to the script and understood who Truman was supposed to end up with. Sylvia broke those rules, because of her feelings and only made the decision to tell him the truth after she realised she was going to be removed and never see him again (in person I mean). It wasn't her plan to fall in love with him, nor to tell him his life was a lie (although that could theoretically be true, but not the falling in love part).
Question: While Truman is performing the closing act in the film, we see him being watched all over the world by various people. Two security guys in a car park are watching when a guy taps on the window. The guard says something like "Just leave it in the car." What's he referring to?
Answer: Money to pay the fare for parking. They work in a car park.
Question: If Cristoff wanted to get rid of Lauren/Sylvia, then why does he continue to show flashback scenes of her?
Question: What happened to the car radio when Truman was going to work and accidentally discovered someone was narrating his whole movements in advance?
Answer: The radio caught the radio chatter of the director giving instructions to the actors. They have to do that constantly as they follow Truman so they can react and improvise in time and prepare the coming situations.
Question: What is the song that is played during Truman's high school dance, when he sees Sylvia get replaced?
Answer: It's a cover of T-Rex's Twentieth Century Boy, performed by Big 6.
Question: How did Truman make a fake body sleeping and a hole in the closet while all cameras were watching?
Answer: There's a scene between Christof and Simeon where they discuss the fact that Truman has been moving things in the basement, but he "gave up and fell asleep." Truman tricked them into thinking he was upset about Meryl leaving and used the activity to mask what he was actually doing.
Answer: Basically he got lucky that the camera angles weren't perfect. He knew he was being watches so he slowely and silently snuck out of bed and placed the doll. It's just luck that they didn't use the clearer angle of him sleeping until after he switched. The audio was focussed on that so they couldn't hear anything else going on in the room.
Question: How did Truman get out of his basement without anyone seeing him?
Answer: He deceived them into thinking he was still downstairs sleeping, but he snuck out through a hole he had made. The cameras aren't on everywhere, just where Truman is.
I have a problem with the fact that Truman dug a hole to escape because wouldn't the camera watching him crew have heard the sound of him digging the hole?
Well their focus is on him, I think it's one of the major mistakes they made to keep all audio focussed on him sleeping instead of the entire room. That's why he was able to sneak around and then dig the hole without being noticed. They do switch cameras around but the audio stays on him.
"He deceived them into thinking he was still downstairs sleeping," by placing a large inflatable snowman under the blanket?
Yes, exactly.
Question: There seems to be a major plot hole in this film. A big deal is made about dissuading Truman from leaving the town. If he was raised and educated in the studio, surely they could have simply taught him that there was nowhere to run to, that the town where he lived was all that existed. Is the answer to this ever explained in the film?
Answer: Doing this will immediately take out the realism from the show. The reason so many viewers watch Truman daily is because he is living a "normal" life in a "normal" world. Doing anything out of the ordinary will dilute this feeling of realism so they try to persuade him not to leave instead of telling him there is no where to go.
Answer: Also, Seahaven isn't very big. All those manufactured goods and foods have to come from somewhere.
Answer: Truman is a natural explorer, the only way you could convince him of this would be to say he is living on a colony on another planet, which would make for a much different show. Truman is also an explorer, so unless he believes that going out will kill him, he's not going to be dissuaded.
Answer: Even though Truman cannot leave the town because it would ruin the show, they're still trying to emulate a (somewhat idealized) average American life and community. Truman is taught the same things as everyone else in school, buys products from all over the world and presumably meets people from many different places, even though he cannot go there. Clearly, he is also well aware that the Earth is round and that Fiji is on the opposite end. It's possible that they considered coming up with a reason for why Truman physically cannot leave, but in a promotional video for the movie, it is the revealed that the show started in a single room and that the set was constructed gradually during Truman's childhood. With this in mind, it would have been difficult to retroactively explain to Truman why he cannot leave after never mentioning it during his youth.
That's the point though - why teach him the earth is round, why teach him Fiji exists? They must have realised this would be a problem, but they took no steps to compensate for it.
Because, as stated in previous answers, the entire point was to have him live in an idealized, but still real, version of the real world. If they'd created a false reality for him where things were altered (i.e. the Earth not being round, etc.) the show wouldn't be so popular. Part of the appeal of the show, as shown in the viewers' reactions) was watching to see if Truman would figure it out.
Answer: That would seem like a logical deduction, yes. The light was presumably on some sort of track to allow it to simulate the movement of the heavens caused by the rotation of the Earth.
Tailkinker ★