Managing e leading

If ideas are so important, why must new students disregard their ideas? Most actors are result-oriented; that is, they try to act an emotion directly instead of reacting to the other actor and letting out whatever emotion comes.

Too often acting students are taught to work from the literal meaning of the script. The Art of Not Knowing frees you from your self-imposed idea of what you should do. You may have decided from reading the script that you should be angry on a certain line. Now suppose you did not decide that, and, instead, you reacted with laughter purely from what the other actor did. That would be an honest spontaneous act, and the scene would become more interesting and believable. You might say that laughter at that point would be against the mean-ing of the scene and the intent of the character. But if your laughter comes from a genuine emotional response to the other actor and the circumstances, it is appropriate even though the scene may be no laughing matter.

Think of acting as steering a boat that’s going down a wild river. The river is the set for the movie. The current of the river is the script, which, without your doing anything, always carries you to where it is going. An action adven-ture has rapids, rocks, snags, pirates. A comedy has lots of stupid obstacles, like a leak in the boat, falling overboard, and being chased by alligators. A love story has beautiful scenery and moonlit nights along with the river’s regular obsta-cles. The director’s ideas determine the size of the boat and how it is propelled—whether by oars, sail, or motor. He decides how you are dressed, whom you are with, the route you will follow, and all the river’s obstacles. Your job is to steer down the river, engaging physically and emotionally with each obstacle as you come to it. The director guides you, but you are on your own.

You have to make the decisions about how to steer around those obstacles and how to deal with the feelings that come up. The director makes the choices of where you will dock, on which side of the river to proceed, which tributaries to follow, when to stop, and when to start.

If you are locked into a fixed idea of how you are going to steer your course down the river, even before you have faced any obstacles, you lose your intu-itive advantage. You have to deal with each sandbar, each submerged log, each snag when you come to it. If you fight the flow of the river by logically planning how you are going to deal with obstacles you have not yet faced, you may find

yourself stranded on a sandbar with no one, including the director, knowing where you are or how to rescue you.

Great actors diligently study and understand their scripts. Yet in TV inter-views and their personal statements, film actors like Tom Hanks and Gene Hackman tell us they learn their lines by rote and do their performances only when they are on camera. They prepare, all right, but they don’t prepare their actual performances. They know that as they proceed down river, their feelings need to be intuitive when they come to each obstacle. Steven Spielberg has said, as did Bernardo Bertolucci, Alfred Hitchcock, and other directors, that he does not rehearse his actors for performance.

Great actors sometimes spend months getting ready to play a role. But understanding a script, its characters, and the given circumstances is one thing, and performing the scene is another. In my workshop and in this book, my goal is to teach you to learn how to relate and act intuitively, but I also teach that there are other things to do and know. I don’t want you to think that all you have to do is get off the airplane, read a feature script once that night, and go on the set the next morning ready to give a great performance. There’s more to it than that.

Your on-camera performance is the end result. Good directors don’t want to set limits on what you might come up with. They won’t tell you how to read lines, or what to feel, but they do give you help, guidance, and support. When the camera rolls, the director expects you to bring more to the scene than merely what the script says, something great that comes from your emotional relation-ship with the other actors and the scene’s given circumstances. That is your job.

Summary

1. The director is responsible for ideas.

2. The actor is responsible for emotions and responses.

3. Pre-production means that before the actor is even cast, the director has worked for many months on script requirements and interpretation.

4. The director uses ideas to guide actors.

5. Good actors make things happen.

6. The director uses blocking to elicit responses.

7. The director does his scene preparation.

8. Physical movement can influence emotion.

9. The Art of Not Knowing helps your emotional responses.

Actor Practice

Watch the opening invasion scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan. Think of the preparation it took to capture that scene. How could you Actor Practice 115

possibly conceive of what the director wants you to do? The situation is as close to reality as possible. The only thing missing is live ammunition. All you can do is show up on time, get into costume, climb into the landing boat, and do what the director tells you. To make your performance real, practice the Art of Acceptance and accept the imaginary circumstances.

Here’s an exercise to show how physical action and position can change the performance. Two actors. One actor says a nondescript line such as, “I like your clothes,” and the partner answers with the same line, “I like your clothes.” Do this while both of you are in different physical positions.

1. One actor rolling on the floor.

2. Both actors rolling on the floor.

3. One actor sits on the other actor’s lap. Then reverse positions.

4. One actor kneels and one stands. Reverse positions.

5. Both kneel.

6. The actors hold hands.

7. The actors give each other a hug.

Notice how the feeling of the line changes when it is spoken during differ-ent actions or from various positions.

Choose an emotionally descriptive line like “I love you,” “I hate you,”

“You scared me,” or “That is so sad.” These are on-the-nose lines describing feelings. Change your physical positions and notice how the emotional mean-ing of the line changes.

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The Art of