Yeah, use the fields parameter in your API call. Add it to your query string:
https://api.airtable.com/v0/YOUR_BASE_ID/YOUR_TABLE_NAME?fields[]=Movie%20Title&fields[]=Director
I hit this same issue last year pulling dashboard data. Only needed names and IDs but got massive JSON responses with everything. API calls were crawling.
URL encode field names with spaces or special characters. “Movie Title” becomes “Movie%20Title”.
Want fewer records back? Use maxRecords parameter. maxRecords=10 returns just the first 10 records.
If you’re using axios or fetch, build the URL programmatically instead of manual encoding. Much cleaner.