CHAPTER 19
DIRECTING ACTORS
Apart from a knowledge of filmmaking, the most useful understanding any director can acquire is of acting. You can and should read about it, but more important is to take classes and actually do it. Acting is a well-documented craft, so what follows is a brief digest of useful ideas and practices.
IN SEARCH OF NATURALNESS
While an animator creates a complete world according to an esoteric vision, live action cinema must fashion its tales from people and objects captured by photography. The theater uses the same means but boldly forces the spectator to accept something patently untrue. Go to Hamlet and you must suspend disbelief and accept that you can see through invisible walls what's happening in a medieval Danish court. However, a cinema Shakespeare such as Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing (1993) has little choice but to use authentic locations and costumes or to risk doing a modern production. Film's intimacy and fidelity to the actual forces the need for realistic settings. Authentic settings make audiences expect psychological realism in the acting. The unwillingness of audiences trained to high standards to suspend disbelief faces film productions unable to afford experienced screen talent with problems. You will need to understand acting and become a drama coach if your characters are to meet your audience's basic expectations.
THEATER AND FILM ACTING COMPARED
When you see a fine theater production on TV or film, some quality in the acting intrudes to make the performances false to the screen. Actors are doing something that they had to abandon early in the 20th century as film and its audiences matured. The difference between acting for theater and film is now very significant and is a psychological matter rather than one of technique. The difference is in where actors find support for what they do. One has an audience, one does not, and this makes a world of difference.
- In the theater actors invoke the audience's support in sustaining belief in their roles.
- In fiction film actors draw belief in their roles as in life, from within themselves and from other characters. There is no audience.
Fiction film is not different from documentary in that it demands conviction from within, not externally. When a theater actor first enters the film situation, he feels robbed of support and may suffer doubt over his ability and worth. The director is now the only audience and must wean the actor to a new, more personal and internalized way of sustaining focus and belief. A non-actor will feel no different because we are used to getting other people's reactions in unfamiliar situations. Film crewmembers, each busy with their jobs, are at first strangely impersonal and remote. The director will need some methods to support non-actors as well as trained actors.
DIRECTING IS REMOVING OBSTACLES
In general, film actors don't need special techniques or arcane information from their director. What they require is authoritative help in casting off any layers of human insecurity so they can be rather than perform. Quite simply, freedom from tension is what permits this. The film actor should have no sense of performing for anyone other than you, the director. The biggest surprise to anyone watching a scene being filmed is the smallness and apparent inconsequentiality of the action. I remember as a young cutting room assistant sneaking on to the set to watch a close-up being shot. It was all very static and after some mumbling from the actors the assistant director called “Cut” and I thought, “Nothing happened—they can't have been filming.” Yet when I saw the scene huge on the screen the next day, everything happened. The fiction camera captures life as intimately and completely as if you are seeing a documentary—and then some. What the director evokes is human truth, which in everyday life takes place within a small compass. It's hard to believe that a huge Panavision camera can be such a perfect and intimate voyeur.
MAINTAINING FOCUS BY DOING
The film actor cannot lose focus even for a moment because the camera registers everything and there is nowhere to hide. An under-occupied actor being stared at by a camera becomes fatally aware of how she may look. This is a vicious circle, for the actor becomes self-consciously aware of how destructive it is to be thinking such things. Now fatally divided, one half of the actor's attention is fixed on trying to act while the other half is trying not to be a judging audience. The battle against self-consciousness is lost until the actor can escape back into her character's state of natural preoccupation. The character's inner and outer actions offer a useful escape because they tend to engage her in the character's state of mind, deflecting the mind from consciousness of self. Doing is therefore the path to being. To stay in character, all actors need a continuous flow of internal or external actions, of things to do.
FOCUS AND RELAXATION
Paradoxically, mental focus leads to an overall relaxation of mind and body, which further assists the actor in finding and maintaining the character's mental focus. To know where actors are, study their body language until you know instantly their particular signs of tension—particularly in their shoulders, face, hands, and walk.
Usually you can undo this tension by redirecting their attention or by using indirect ways to reassure actors that their work is effective. When they care too much, they get tense. Have some improv games ready as a refresher to solve extreme cases. Be on your guard, for a relaxed actor can also be one who is not trying and doesn't care about the production.
The experienced actor avoids the onset of paralyzing self-judgment by maintaining a flow of the character's physical tasks. He or she works hard to invent just the right action or task to resonate the character's present state of mind.
EMOTIONAL MEMORY
Not only is the actor freed from self-contemplation by maintaining a flow of actions, but the truest actions release powerful, authentic emotion during performance. Stanislavski named this curious psychic reflex emotional memory. Of his many discoveries about acting psychology, this is the most frequently misunderstood. To do it justice we must look at how the human mind works when an actor is being rather than signifying.
THE MIND-BODY CONNECTION
A person's body invariably expresses his or her state of mind. A brother knows what kind of day his sister has had from the way she dismounts her bicycle or eats a sandwich. A class knows what mood the teacher is in when he puts down his books. This knowledge of body language is developed in our earliest years. Indeed young children react intuitively to what adults express non-verbally and only become confused when the adult uses contradictory words. When people reach their teens they have learned to value cerebral control above what is intuitive and emotional.
Remember that no inner state exists without outward evidence. To the alert, we always show what we feel. This means that when an actor's mind and emotions are correctly engaged and his actions are appropriate, his body will unconsciously express all that his character feels. Directing should therefore be concerned with arriving at a character's true state of mind by helping the actor develop the actions that truly accompany it. Emotions are enlisted by actions, not the other way around, as most people think. Exactly how you cover your mouth with your hand when you have spoken out of turn will bring on the feeling of embarrassment. Try it. Now try feeling embarrassed and letting your feeling direct your hand. It's a non-starter because one cannot choose to feel an emotion.
BUSINESS
Actor and director must generate plenty of business (or appropriate action) while preparing each role. Don't move on when an actor correctly describes what the character feels unless you have also explored what the character might do in the circumstance. Doing will usually involve a small but significant action, like dropping the eyes, turning to glance out a window, feeling for change in a pocket, or recalling the image of an indulgent aunt. Many actions will be interior as well as exterior, and interior ones are just as important. Deciding why you want to go for a walk can be an interesting and informative thing to watch if done authentically and well. Good actors love this kind of challenge.
STAY BUSY IN CHARACTER
As an actor, the key to maintaining your character's flow of consciousness is not just to keep busy, but to keep busy in character. To exist realistically as a new character, you must have your attention fully occupied by your character's thoughts, memories, inner visions, and outward actions. Given any opportunity, your ever-anxious mind will detach and begin to imagine how you must appear to those watching (foolish, undignified, heroic, handsome, deeply moving, etc.). This is disabling and leads immediately to the black hole called loss of focus.
LOSING AND REGAINING FOCUS
Signs of Lost Focus: When an action comes across as false, the actor has either chosen poorly or has lost focus. Losing focus (ceasing to experience a character's thoughts and emotions) shows in the whole physical being, in everything the actor says and does. An audience, no matter how uninformed, will register this. Being focused is not peculiar to acting because it underpins everyone's sense of normalcy. In everyday life we maintain actions and pursue relationships from assumptions about who we are and how we appear to others. These are only challenged under exceptional circumstances.
Reasons for Lost Focus: When someone we respect watches us, or when we must speak to a group, we may become so self-aware that we stop functioning automatically and harmoniously. We cease, in fact, to behave normally. The implications are major for the film director, whose work so often centers on getting actors to reproduce the processes and feel of real life under conditions of intense scrutiny. Actors lose focus for a reason. Something in the text doesn't sit right or someone has done something to shake them out of their character. Your job is to find out the reason. Insecurity of all kinds, even the fear of losing focus, leads to loss of focus: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself … ” (Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1882–1945). In a moment, the audience sees a believable character crumble into a beleaguered actor. Unless the actor has learned how to recover, she can feel completely exposed.
Regaining Focus: An effective way for an actor to regain focus is to look closely at something nearby, such as a carpet pattern or the texture of her sleeve. Because it is real, something in her character's here and now, the actor's attention is stabilized. Now she can broaden her attention by stages to include her character's larger sphere of awareness.
USING THE ACTOR'S EMOTIONS AS THE CHARACTER'S
What should the actor do when an irrelevant emotion intrudes itself, such as pain from a headache, surprise over an unexpected move by a partner, or confusion from a misplaced prop? Part of any good actor's training is learning to employ every genuine emotion as part of the character's present. This means, in effect, embracing and co-opting the invader instead of struggling to screen it out. Because every real emotion is visible, struggling to put a lid on the inappropriate will also be visible. The tactic of incorporating external emotion is thus inevitable.
By using every facet of an actor's self to maintain the character's physical and mental action, and by reacting to every nuance of any other characters' behavior, the actor stays so busy every time the scene is played, and so aware on multiple levels, that he or she no longer worries about remembering lines or whether anyone is watching. Everything in the intense, subjective sphere of the character's reality recedes from consciousness. This intense state of focus is readily available for beginners to experience in improvisation work (which is what makes improv so valuable). It takes more discipline within the regimen of a text, especially when multiple takes and angles stretch beyond a day of movie work.
NEVER DEMONSTRATE
The director should always encourage actors to find their own solutions to a problem. Unless desperate, the director should never step forward and demonstrate what she wants. This implies you are an actor and want a mimicry of yourself, when actually you need something unique to the actor.
NEVER SAY, “BE YOURSELF”
This innocent request can set actors worrying: What did he really mean? How does he see me? Which me does he really want? Always focus your actor on aspects of the character's experience.
SET SPECIFIC, POSITIVE GOALS
Avoid negative instruction of all kinds (“Could you not be so noisy opening the closet?”). You can get what you want by saying, “See if you can open the door softly this time.”
Convey your wishes through redirecting attention to a particular kind of action (“I'd like to see you more irresolute as you turn away.”). Less effective would be to say, “Be irresolute” without locating the character's doubt in particular moments of the scene. The actor may not agree but you can negotiate another specific place. Another way to get a change is through suggesting a different subtext, such as “Try making your refusal more ironic” or “Try closing the door on him with finality instead of regret.”
ACT AS IF NOBODY'S PRESENT
Instruct actors never to look at the camera, to ignore the crew's presence, and to act as if they were alone in real life. This prevents them from falling into the trap of playing to an audience.
OBSTACLES: HABITS OF BEING
MANNERISMS
Certain kinds of people do particular kinds of jobs, and some jobs generate mannerisms that are a liability in filmmaking. Lecturers and politicians tend to address invisible multitudes, instead of talking one-to-one as they did in rehearsal. Firemen talk in clipped, official voices; salespeople may be ingratiating; and so on. Unfamiliar circumstances like filming cause people to fall back on their conditioning, and many ingrained behaviors are hard or even impossible to change. The positive aspect is that many of the qualities for which you cast a particular person will survive the unnatural procedure of filming and appear just as you wanted them on the screen.
Many actors also have particular mannerisms that you may have to live with. To eliminate them would mean changing something so basic that you would disrupt their talents. Here the director must exert careful judgment before speaking up. As always, try to relocate actors' attention in the positive, rather than asking them to suppress the negative.
LIMITING AN ACTOR'S SPHERE OF ATTENTION
When an actor's misconception of his relationship to the camera must be altered, try to guess what is ingrained habit and what is only a misperception about filming and correctable. For instance, the theater-trained actor who addresses an audience can usually be redirected by saying, “Imagine there is a small bubble of space only big enough to enclose you and your partner. There is only one person, him, listening to you. Talk only to him, there is no one else, no camera present, just you two.” Usually this reminder does the trick and keeps theatrically trained actors using authentic, unmagnified voices and actions. Interestingly, the scene intensity rises noticeably, which shows that poor theatrical technique can also function as a retreat from the danger of real feelings.
TACKLING SERIOUS ARTIFICIALITY
With an incurable voice projecter or anyone habitually artificial, the best solution is to bang yourself over the head and recast. If that is impossible, some selected video playback to the actor may forcibly communicate the problem. Be aware, however, that many are shocked and depressed when they first see themselves on the screen, so showing an unsatisfactory performance should be a last resort, done privately and supportively.
Sometimes you will cast someone to play a small part, and this person's concept of acting comes from TV commercials. Valiantly your housewife in the short scene projects a wacky personality. If she is playing a stage mom this could be just what you wanted, but in most other circumstances it would be a disaster. Take her aside and get her to talk through the character, perhaps getting the actor to recall someone similar whom she knows and upon whose image she can model herself. Trying to become an idea of the part is what is phony. Get your actor to develop her character's interior process through improvising an interior monologue or thoughts voice (see Chapter 22, Exercise 22–3: Improvising an Interior Monologue). Once she is busy maintaining her character's interior processes, the actor can no longer stand outside herself and make a presentation, which is at the root of the problem. Fully inhabiting her character, she begins to speak and act out of a genuine consciousness. This at the very least takes care of realism.