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“Most actors’ problems, professional or amateur, deal with tension and there are a lot of devices and ways of eliminating it. In a very professional actor the tension is because they haven’t made a choice that has taken enough of their mental interest. In other words, they haven’t made a vital enough choice; it’s not up to a level that will engage their imagination and get them into pretending unself-consciously”

— Jack

Nicholson

The last two chapters have concentrated on the “right-brain,” improvisatory, unpredictable stuff — “in the moment,” listening, risk, freedom. I’ve been harping on giving up preconceived ways of saying a line, but now it’s time to talk about structure — choices that fulfill the material. Directors often want to learn “actors’ language,” but adding a few “terms of art” or jargon to your vocabulary will not make you a good director. What’s needed is a new way of looking at behavior.

Constantin Stanislavsky, the actor, director, teacher, artistic director of the Moscow Art Theatre, and author of An Actor Prepares, formulated acting techniques that were objective and quantifiable but could activate the subconscious and mysterious. It became possible to create structure that made a performance repeatable while preserving moment-by-moment reality, emotional truthfulness, and the actor’s inner freedom.

Before Stanislavsky, acting training consisted of instruction in voice, movement, and selecting a vocal pattern and gesture deemed appropriate to various character types. Certain gestures denoted annoyance or rage; a rising or falling inflection would call attention to the punch line of a joke; a catalog of postures and gaits identified class distinctions and personalities. For example stooping and hand-wringing denoted a pitiful character, nose in the air a haughty character, etc. Stanislavsky charged that this work resulted in posing, stereotype, and cliché that in no way resembled actual human behavior.

Stanislavsky’s ideas are still brilliant and radical today — radical both in the sense of going to the root of things and in the sense of their defiance of conventional wisdom. It is still hard for producers, directors, writers and even actors to understand and trust that if an actor commits to a playable choice rather than to a decision about vocal inflection or facial expression, the movie will be better.

Powerful actors must connect with something powerful in the script or else they can’t commit their imaginations. A good actor who is uncommitted imaginatively will look like he is “walking through” a role. It may not be possible for an actor to engage and

listen with the other actor(s) until he has worked out the choices that illumine the emotional center of the script. For a really professional actor, a poor choice — a choice

that does not fully realize the material — reads as a false note. That is, when the material offers an opportunity to make a choice and the actor has missed that opportunity and failed to “fill” the words, there will be a “dead spot.” The scene at this moment will seem slow

The choices an actor makes activate his inner life. The trick of an actor’s preparation is to find choices that 1) connect to the deepest and freshest meaning of the script, and

2) turn him on, capture his imagination, so that 3) he can connect to them with emotional honesty and get to the places he needs to go. The actor looks for choices that are objective, playable, and that engage his own subconscious so that he can be in the moment, thinking real thoughts and feeling real feelings.

Imaginative choices are practical and idiosyncratic, not academic. They are secrets, gateways into the imaginative subworld. They are not something the audience is supposed to “get.” Although they are inspired by the script and illuminate its deepest reaches, these choices are not in service of the author of the screenplay; they are in service of the actor’s concentration. If they work and bring the script alive, they are good ones; if they don’t work, they’re bad ones.

Choices create behavior. This is where not having gotten stuck in preconceived ways of saying a line pays off, because the behavior dictates the way the lines are said. The lines come out of the choice. Sanford Meisner puts it this way: “The emotion of the scene is a river and the words are like boats that float on the river.”

An actor’s work on the script is to find his choice, a “what is to be acted,” a “something of his own” from which to listen and play off the other actor. The choice the actor gives himself, the “something of his own” must be so simple, so compelling, so present that he need not step out of the moment to find it. Choices that are arrived at ahead of time are really ideas or probabilities; choices must actually take place in the moment, or they become forced or mechanical. Choices must be specific, private, and eccentric to each actor. When the performances are private, the experience of each audience member watching the film is a private one. Thus the more the actor achieves specificity and simplicity, the more the performance achieves universality.

QUESTIONS

“Finally, you know, I consider that my profession as a director is not exactly like a supervisor. No. We are, simply, midwives. The actor has something inside himself but very often he doesn’t realize what he has in mind, in his own heart, and you have to tell him. You have to help him find himself.” — Jean Renoir

The best route to making choices is asking questions. It may surprise you in discussion with actors to hear them asking questions with answers that seem obvious to you. I have seen directors get panicky and conclude that the actor is at a loss. The opposite is probably the case. As he works, an actor keeps a performance fresh by continuing to ask questions, opening up corners and crannies of the character’s world, feeding himself, adding layers. Of course, actors do not always share their questions with their directors. They may do this work privately. If they do ask you, as director, a question, don’t answer unless you have an answer you believe in. Not all actors’ questions need to be answered anyway. The asking of questions is part of a process.

Often the most helpful response you can make to an actor’s question is to turn it back, to say, “What do you think?” Often actors know the answer already, but are insecure. Or, sometimes they know the answer but don’t know they know it. Let’s say the actor asks, “Why doesn’t my character tell his wife about the letter?” Perhaps the director says, “What do you think?” and the actor replies, “I don’t know, I haven’t a clue,” or even, “It doesn’t make sense to me.” The thing to do next is to look at some possible reasons why a person might behave that way. Why would a man not tell his wife about a letter? Maybe he forgot. Maybe the letter contains a guilty secret he doesn’t want his wife to know about. Maybe his wife is ill and he doesn’t want to burden her. Maybe he had something else on his mind that was so pressing that the letter seemed unimportant by comparison. It’s very helpful to look at as many possibilities as your imagination offers up.

Now what if the actor asks you a question about the letter, and you reply, “What do you think?”; then the actor responds, “I think it’s a guilty secret” — and you think that answer is wrong! Maybe in doing your script analysis you have considered the possibility of a guilty secret but decided that adding a guilty secret to the subtext would make the movie too melodramatic, and that the lighter choice of “he forgot” will actually add more to the mystery and suspense.

Well, at this point, you the director have some options. Your least attractive course would be to contradict him. Saying things like, “No, I think that’s wrong, here is the right answer,” or even, “Here is what I want” may work if you have a very close relationship with the actor, but usually they make the actor feel dampened and/or argumentative. It can be more helpful to say, “Yes, that’s possible. What else might it be?” Or, “Yes, that’s possible. Or maybe he forgot! That happens to me all the time; I forget the real reason why I do things, and get into all sorts of trouble.” Depending on your relationship with the actor and your own personal charisma, sometimes just saying, “Well, that’s possible” in a thoughtful way might induce the actor to wonder if

there isn’t a more provocative choice and to keep exploring and rethinking.

Sometimes it is tempting to go to the writer and ask the question, or even demand that the writer put the answer into the script. Try to resist! The fact that actors have questions is not a bad thing — it is a good thing. Questions can be truly magical. Sometimes you need to figure out the answer in order to solve the scene and unlock the choice that releases the actor’s attention. But sometimes just asking the question is enough. The character may not know the answer himself! The character may himself be wondering why the hell he didn’t tell his wife about the letter. Characters, like people, most of the time probably don’t know why they do what they do. The actor can use his own perplexity to engage his sense of belief.

If you think of answering actors’ questions as an obligation, your answers will be plodding explanations, probably dead-on the surface meaning of the lines. You will neglect to look for opposites.

OPPOSITES

“I’m interested in the flip side, the B-side of people. As an actor, your challenge is to get your mind around the psychology of another human being — and the bigger the polarity, the more dramatic that is.” — Ralph Fiennes

Opposites are an actor’s best friend. They are a great tool of script analysis — as soon as you come up with one idea, consider also its opposite. Whenever you’re not sure what to do with a line, find an opposite. If a scene isn’t working, do it wrong! An opposite choice keeps the actor in the moment because it is surprising, even to him. A good actor keeps himself entertained and alive — in the soup — by allowing a conflict between the words and his inner life. And if the actor is alive, the material will make sense even if the inner choice is not logical.

When a character says one thing and means another, that makes him complex. Best of all, the duality makes him more real. People are not especially logical. They often mean quite the opposite of what they say. We see it in real life: a person who says, “I’m very open to your proposal,” with arms and legs crossed, looking at you from the side of his eyes. His body language is saying that he is the opposite of open.

An actor who gets stuck in the logical, “on the nose” choice will never look like a real person. The off-kilter, illogical choice is usually the truest one. People don’t know who they are or what they want, and they don’t do the right thing to get it. One actor who uses opposites constantly and very effectively is Gene Hackman. He often says a line exactly the reverse of the way it might look on the page: for instance, “I’m going to kill you,” said with a smile (i.e., with the action verb “to charm”).

JUDGMENT

“It’s easy to sit back and judge someone, but I am not in a position to judge Nixon. As an actor, I can’t judge because moral judgment gets in the way of the characterization. If you start doing that, you end up playing the character like a zombie or a vaudeville villain.” — Anthony Hopkins

Obvious ways to judge a character are to decide that he is a “perpetual loser,” “weak,” “vicious,” “an anal-retentive type” or “stupid.” But there are tiny judgments that creep into an actor’s thinking almost unnoticed: a condescension to the character, an evaluation that the character is just a little less self-aware, or more naive, or more weird than the actor herself. Now these evaluations may even be true, but they are not playable. They cause the actor to stand outside the character and describe and explain her to the audience, to comment on her — to editorialize and to play at her — rather than to live her life moment by moment and allow the audience to draw its own conclusions.

Lili Taylor in the movie “Rudy” had the small role of the high school sweetheart who wanted Rudy to settle down instead of following his dream. With the words she was given to say she could easily have fallen into a stereotype of a clingy, manipulative suburban matron-to-be, and become “the person who doesn’t want Rudy to follow his dreams” instead of a real person with dreams of her own. Taylor found the character’s grit and humor instead of making a judgment and managed to make a not very deeply written character human and watchable.

Really good actors do not ever judge their characters. The imagined world is too fascinating to them, and the opportunity to leap into it too precious. Glenn Close says that she “falls in love” with every character she plays. This doesn’t mean that she must condone the character’s behavior or abandon her own values or personal ethics. But it does mean she creates the character’s behavior using her own impulses.

Sometimes a director in my Acting for Directors class complains to me when I ask him to try a certain adjustment, “But I would never do such-and-such.” Okay, I believe you. What I don’t believe is that you can never know the impulse to do such- and-such. Every one of us carries somewhere inside us the impulse (perhaps so deeply buried that it will never express itself in behavior) to do anything that any human being has ever done. It is the actor’s job to find that impulse and surrender to it honestly in the created reality. You see he finds the impulse, not the deed itself. Because it is not real reality, it is created reality, an illusion. We, as filmmakers, are not trying to make the audience believe that the events depicted in a movie are actually happening to the actors on the screen.

Ralph Fiennes has said of his performance in “Schindler’s List,” “People are always trying to think that in order to play a sadist you have to be one. I was not required to hurt [anyone] when I was playing Amon Goeth. I tried to put myself in a place where I could imagine what it was like to have a form of prejudice that was so extreme that

certain groups of people became equivalent to cockroaches or rats.” By not judging the character Fiennes gave us the revelation that the face of evil is a human face. This made the Nazi he portrayed far more chilling than the one-dimensional Nazis that are sometimes found in movies.

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