DON’T intellectualize scenes.
Acting is about behavior. It is not about cosmic themes, it is not about deep meanings. It is about behavior. It may be The Matrix or it may be a Moliere comedy. But it is always about behavior. It’s about what we do.
Actors love to intellectualize. directors love to intellectualize. It is a total waste of time and we all do it.
First thing: Boil the acting moment down to a verb, an active verb e.g., seduce, not a passive one, e.g. be. A verb, what we do, is actable. Philosophical musings are useless.
In my Directing Fundamentals class at Chapman University one of my students presented a scene from sex, lies and videotape. It was good but unfocused. The rest of the class then made intellectual suggestions about the terrible childhood of the character, the state of the world, the dramatic thrust of the scene, the mindset of the characters, and so on for 15 minutes.
I finally stopped the student directors and asked, “Yes, but what are the characters doing in this scene?” They looked at me as though they understood and then went right back to asking the same intellectual questions.
Finally, I turned to the actors and asked them, “What have we said that you can use when playing this scene again?” The actress thought and then said “Nothing, really.” And the actor said “Not much of anything”. I asked them, “How about if I tell you that the married woman wants to have sex with her lover and the man wants to find out why she told her sister about them?” Both actors nodded affirmatively. “I can play that,” they said.
Now when they played the scene they were focused on what they were trying to do, not on unplayable intellectual dribble. Much more on this later.
DO encourage the writers to cross out “emotional stage directions.”
What the writer doesn’t know is that most actors take stage directions very literally… too literally. If the writer says “angrily,” actors will do angry like you’ve never seen angry. Only instead of being a specific anger it will be a clichéd, generalized anger. It works the same for crying, jealousy, or any emotions. Trust the actor to figure what the emotion is for himself, and see a much more interesting result. And if not, if all else fails, you can always be a lazy slob and just tell them to do it “angrily.”
DON’T make the cast say the exact words in the script if they really can’t make them work.
If it’s Shakespeare, or any great writer, of course we’ve got to respect the words as written. You want them to try to say the words as written in your screenplay. Often, nothing is wrong with the dialogue, it’s just that the actor is too lazy to figure out how to say it believably. But if after a sincere effort they can’t make it work it would be dumb to make them say something that sounds terrible. But don’t you write it. Make the actor come up with a new line. Or at least try to. Making them struggle to think of a new line is a quick cure for complaining.
Oliver Stone: “The script is not a bible to me. It’s a process. I think it’s dangerous to be too rigid about the script. Shooting has to be fluid. So I always start by rehearsing with the actors. Ideally, we’ve already rehearsed that scene before we even go into production. And because the actors have a memory of it, it usually leads to something new.”
Robert Forster: “You don’t want to hear from a director, ‘Say the words exactly as they are written.’ It does a terrible thing to the actor. It forces the actor to remember the exact words rather than the meaning of the scene. I’m not talking about big changes. Just a word or phrase change helps an actor roll the thought out of his mouth.”
DO make actors answer their own questions.
Remember how a shrink looks at you when you ask, “What should I do about my Mother?” Without taking a beat she comes back with “What do you think you should do?” She’s not torturing you, even though it feels like it. She’s saying, “You already know the answer, just dig inside yourself and find it.”
It works the same with actors. They want your help and approval with some matter. You can give a quick answer. But if you make them work it out themselves, that answer belongs to them. They own it because they thought of it. And possession is nine-tenths, etc. etc. If it disagrees with what you want to do, you can discuss it and work it out so you are both happy.
