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Actors get into a lot of trouble with transitions, the emotional changes and events of a role. Transitions are the places where actors feel the most self-conscious, worry the most about whether they are going to be able to “hit it.” Directors often exacerbate the anxiety by using the result direction of asking actors to hit a certain emotional “note.” It is in the transitions that bad acting is most likely to show up.

Transitions, or shifts in thought or feeling, in real life are utterly unconscious, one of the most spontaneous, organic things we do. We do not plan to change our minds, have a new feeling, undergo a change of heart, react, realize, or go off on another train of thought. We may ignore, repress, or refrain from acting upon such tiny inner events, but we can’t prevent them from happening or summon them to our will. They are set in motion by what is going on in our subconscious.

Actors’ transitions are another matter. They must be prepared. But how? First, here are some things that can go wrong:

1) The transition is not there, because the actor hasn’t found it in the script, hasn’t understood, or doesn’t believe that there is a transition or event at that moment.

2) It is indicated or fake. The actor decides on a transition and demonstrates it to us rather than creating it honestly and organically, or allowing it.

3) It is forced. The actor intends to make the transition organically but does not get there and, at the last moment, out of a feeling of obligation, pushes it rather than not make it at all.

4) It is flat, because the actor is worried about forcing or pushing, and is afraid to overdo or overact, so at the last moment she drops out.

5) It is overprocessed, labored, telegraphed. This is a variation on playing the end of the scene at the beginning. We see the actor “winding up,” anticipating the next emotional event, letting us know that even though right now she is in a rage, she is getting ready any moment now to break down in tears. In real life there is no process or motivation involved in the experience of transitions at all. They are unexpected, lightning quick, and like lightning they seem to come “out of the blue.”

looks planned, because it lacks the idiosyncrasy of a real-life transition. The actor has made a choice that is pedestrian or obvious.

A transition is an emotional event. Sometimes it is called a “moment” or a “beat change.” Now a discussion of moments or “beats” is always complicated by the fact that so many screenwriters use these terms as stage directions, in lieu of the word “pause.” When you see a parenthetical “beat” or “moment” in a screenplay, that means the screenwriter has in mind a very brief pause at that moment. It has nothing to do with the beats and events I am discussing here.

A moment means the actors stop each other, and affect each other. Sometimes a genuine moment catches the actor so off-guard that she momentarily forgets her lines. An actor should never stop the scene when that happens. Such inner accidents create a lot of energy. She should allow this inner accident to be an emotional event, and she should continue the scene and do something with the energy that has been released. The forgotten line is likely to come back within a few seconds. The director, of course, must be open to this idea, must be able to tell the difference between a “dead spot” and an energy-releasing inner accident and must allow a climate in which creative accidents are welcomed. Sometimes actors forget thatma moment is an event, not a feeling; it is not an end point. When a moment occurs, the actor must then do something. Emotional events for characters can be wins or losses, discoveries, choices or mistakes — not realizations or reactions, which are not playable. By the way, when I say that a

character’s emotional event might be a “choice” made by the character, this is a different use of the word from when we talk about actors’ choices. “Actors’ choices” are also called “character choices,” i.e., choices that create the inner life of a character. A choice made by the character is something different, however; it’s an emotional event in the scene.

Transitions need to happen in the moment. The character’s wins, losses, discoveries, choices, and mistakes need to be made in the moment. We want them to emerge spontaneously from the subconscious, the way they do in life. They need to count — or read — on the screen, because the emotional events tell the story, but we don’t want them telegraphed or emphatic. We want them to be spontaneous, vivid, and subtle all at once.

What is needed from actors is connection, engagement, a willingness and ability to affect each other and to be affected, to deal with each other and with the environment. This is achieved by having a through-line. The through-line is what makes a performance simple and unfussy. Meeting the transitions in the moment is what makes the performance nuanced.

What is needed from the director is that he or she structure the scene (and the full script). The tools for understanding (via script analysis) and then creating (in rehearsal) scenic structure are what the scene is about, or its central event; its beats; the sub-events leading up to and resulting from the central event, that is, the events of

each beat; and the characters’ through-lines. These tools will be examined in detail in the Script

Analysis chapter. For now, what I mean by an event, from the director’s point of view, is what happens. This is not exactly the same as a plot event — it is an emotional event, for example, an apology or a seduction. An emotional event in a relationship might be “No matter what she does, she can’t cheer him up.” When the audience feels this event, is taken up by it, connects to it (whether or not they would describe it that way), they wonder, “Will this couple stay together?” In other words, “What happens next?” The director is responsible for putting the events of the scenes together to make a satisfying story, that is, keeping the audience interested in what happens next.

The events, however well understood intellectually by actors and director, only really work if they happen in the moment. When a scene is structured properly, actors can commit to choices, then abandon themselves to the moment. The scene will then naturally and inevitably “build,” achieving its proper pace and flow. The “how” of an actor’s choices — for example, how he gets the other actor to leave the room, or give him comfort — comes from the moment-by-moment interaction between the actors.

This is the ideal: solving the scene by finding one simple choice (through-line) for each character that all his behavior can be hung on, like a hook, and then allowing the actors to play off each other. But often, once that central problem of the scene has been solved, there are still transitions here and there that are not working, that need to be sharpened, deepened, or cleaned up. This is the most dangerous place for a director to use result direction. When a director wants to ask an actor for a transition but doesn’t want to use result direction, he can use his “Quick Fix” tools, thus:

Images

The best way I can think to describe how images and associations work in creating transitions is to relay Stanislavsky’s anecdote, from A n A c t o r P r e p a r e s , about a woman who has just been told her husband was killed in an accident at the factory. She stands in place for minutes, not moving. The question going through her mind while she’s being told this is, What will I do with the dinner I’ve prepared if he will not be there to eat it} The mind works in such incredible ways, especially when information is coming in that one can’t deal with or accept. The image “husband” connected with the image “dinner” and her mind would go no farther. The most useful images in this regard are off-kilter, out of context, even bizarre, because that’s the way people’s minds work.

Verbs

An excellent way to make transitions is to make a simple full change of action verb, without thinking about the why of it. If an actor changes suddenly and completely from begging to accusing, we (the audience) will know that a transition has taken place. And it will be more believable than if it is made by dragging us through an actorish “process.”

When the director is describing such a transition to an actor, he should leave out connective phrases. So instead of saying, “Here she is pleading with him, and then

something makes her start punishing,” say, “She pleads with him all the way to here; then she punishes.”

Physical activity

If an actor is not getting the emotional event or transition interiorly, the director can suggest it with exterior means. Standing up from a chair, putting down a newspaper, even turning her head away can, if the writing is strong enough, suggest the moment quite adequately and avoid the pitfalls of an overwrought transition.

In any case, one of the worst kinds of result direction is to tell an actor what he realizes at a certain point or what reaction he is supposed to have. If you can’t come up with some specific playable direction, such as a through-line, playable event, image, verb or physical activity, then the best thing to say is something like “I think there’s a change here,” or “I think there’s a transition we may need to make here,” and let the actor figure out how to get there himself.

Through-lines give the actors a sense of history, risk, or need among the characters. A through-line can be an objective (spine/need), a verb, an adjustment, a problem, a given circumstance (fact), a subtext, an image. Another way of thinking about the through-line is as a primary engagement or focus. So it could be an object, as in a scene, for instance, in which a character returns a stolen ring to a friend. The ring itself, first burning in her pocket and finally shining on her friend’s hand, could be the primary focus, or through-line. The primary engagement of a character could be with a memory or image. It could be with drugs or booze.

Or it could be with a third character. Most two-person scenes have an absent third character, someone who is crucial to the relationship of the characters who are present. In “Days of Wine and Roses,” most of the scenes are between Kirsten and Joe; in some scenes, the absent third character is Kirsten’s father who has loaned them money; in some, it is their young daughter, asleep in the next room.

Concentration on the through-line keeps the actor connected to the other actor, but with something of his own. Having something of his own, a strong choice, makes him able to listen and play off the other actor without picking up the other actor’s tone. Unless you are directing soap opera, you don’t want the actors to pick up each other’s tone, since it becomes melodramatic. In real life we often pick up each other’s tone. We unconsciously adopt our antagonist’s reality and start defending ourselves or explaining ourselves in relation to his agenda. This is a place where we want movies to be more surprising, emotionally cleaner, and more revelatory than real life. It’s what people mean when they talk about an “edgy” quality or the “heightened” reality required of acting. “Edgy” or “heightened” are, of course, very vague and general and would not be helpful directions to give an actor.

caricatured as long as the verbs, facts, images, events, and physical lives of the actors are all alive and centered in a reality. Heightened is achieved by making the choices and transitions crisp, specific, and committed, not wishy-washy. And also engaged. While the actors are committing to something of their own they need to be sure that they take energy from each other, that they don’t screen each other out, that no matter what the other actor does they make an adjustment that allows them to keep playing their own intention; they use what the other actor is giving them as a playable obstacle. This is how scenes of confrontation — so common in movies and so rare in real life — can be alive and believable. This is how comedic or fantastical situations can carry us with them.

“Heightened” also has to do with making choices that are not obvious and pedestrian. This means finding a truth deeper than everyday actuality, seeking insight. I think when many people talk about heightened reality they mistake it for putting a frame around the performance — this causes a performance to look pushed or faked or overdone. Heightened means more honest than we are in real life.

When actors find the deeper truths of a script, it is always best for them to maintain a privacy. When the actor confers with his director about such ideas, the transaction needs to be delicate. And actors should not talk about these ideas with the other actors. It becomes casual, a kind of gossip; it dissipates the energy of the idea and damages the actor’s concentration. Meryl Streep disclosed in an interview with Gene Siskel that for every role she gives herself a secret, something which her character would not want others to know, and which she herself conceals from her co-stars; in “Kramer vs. Kramer” her secret was that she never had loved her husband.

When actors keep secrets from each other, when their transitions are crisp and clean, their images private and idiosyncratic, their intentions (verbs) opposite to the obvious surface meaning of a line — a performance may have “edge.” And the actors’ performances can contribute to the style of a film.