You Can Act on Camera

by D. W. Brown

  For key moments without dialogue, especially in close-up, make that voice in your head shout the Truth. Make it blare a command for you to take action or embrace a stark fact (i.e. “Stop her! You’ve got to stop her!” or “You will never see home again! Never!”).

  “Facing it, always facing it; that’s the way to get through. Face it!” —Joseph Conrad

  23.DO NOTHING

  There will be times that the best performance you can give is a blank one upon which the audience can, without contamination, project what they want to be there. Respect the power of their connection to the full context of what’s been presented to them up to this point (including what will be added in postproduction) and, far beyond this, what they bring to it of their own. Nothing you can act will be as remotely strong as what they invest on their own.

  “Be a sheet of paper with nothing on it. Be a piece of ground where nothing is growing, a place where something might be planted: a seed, possibly, from the Absolute.” —Rumi

  24.BE FULLY SEEN

  A camera sees everything, so you might as well let go and let it in. Show it all your doubts and imperfections and shameful qualities, because there are no shameful qualities, there are only people. And people are interesting.

  “If I reveal myself without worrying about how others will respond, some will care and others may not; but who can love me if no one knows me? I must risk it or live alone.” —Sheldon Kopp

  25.BE LUCKY

  Get a charm, an incantation, or some self-esteem perhaps, but find a way to get yourself on the good side of the universe. Maybe you’re already in the groove or maybe every challenging and complicating thing up to this point has only been to set you up for your big breakthrough. One thing is for sure, if you’re reading this right now, you’ve got a chance.

  “What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient, but curious mind, of sacrificing one’s ease or vanity, of uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.” —Charles Victor Cherbuliez

  26.GO EASY

  You have to find a way to put all the pressure and madness of this world aside when you enter the imaginative world. You owe it that.

  “The butterfly doesn’t take it is as a personal achievement, he just disappears through the tree. It wasn’t in a greedy mood you saw the light that belongs to everybody.” —Jack Kerouac

  27.FLOW

  Establish for yourself what you’re expressing in each section of a scene so that, whether actually delivering lines or not, you know the basic message you’re sending out. When you’re performing and feel insecure, act that thing even more.

  There is no brake on this ride, only an ejection lever . . . and don’t you dare touch it. Welcome difficulties. They shake things up and open new doors. There’s no floating along passively with flow, only a leaning forward in openness. And the moment you’re sure you’ve got it, you can be sure you don’t.

  “The hearing of the ears is one thing and understanding something else. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to the ear or to the mind and demands the emptiness of all the faculties. When the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct contact of what is right there before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind.” —Chuang-Tzu

  28.RUN DEEP

  Stir yourself to your foundations. Odors, tastes, and skin sensations are good for doing this. Send messages to yourself that you’re all in, even admitting you don’t really know what that is.

  “In each of us there is another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves.” —Carl Jung

  29.GO SIMPLER

  Whatever you’re doing, do it simpler. Be ruthless about stripping one more layer away. Get in even closer contact with the world, express yourself in a still plainer way, be all the more in your body.

  “Human life is meant for a little austerity. We have to purify our existence; that is the mission of human life, because only then we will get spiritual realization and real pleasure, real happiness.” —A. C. Bhaktivedanta

  30.DIE AND BE REBORN

  Every moment is new and waiting for you to surrender yourself to it without the husk of what you once were a moment before. Don’t even think about wanting it any other way.

  “It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.” —Tennessee Williams

  31.GET OUT OF THE WAY

  Your work is to channel into a fiction and become as transparent as possible so your audience can clearly see the show through the opening you’ve created. They are seeking intimate contact with that world, like a lover who’s been separated from their soul mate. You must remove yourself so they can share their secrets.

  “To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually, but in the imaginative part of our soul, is to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to give up being the center of the world, to discern that all points in the world are equally centers and that the true center is outside the world, this is our free choice. Such consent is love. The face of this love is the love of our neighbor and the love of beauty.” —Simone Weil

  32.DO WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO DO

  Make it happen. No excuses. Go hard . . . and let it come to you, both. Nobody cares what you have to do to get where you have to get, just that you do, and as long as it’s properly recorded, you only have to get there once.

  “You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that created the world.” —Sheila Graham

  “ON THE DAY”

  An Essay on Getting Your Best Performance Recorded

  “On the day” in filmmaking lingo refers to when you’re actually there on the set and trying to make it happen. It’s when all the elements are present, either set up and shooting, or in the immediate process of setting up to shoot. It isn’t literal in that in the morning you can talk about something that’s going to be shot later that same day saying, “They’re delivering the crane after lunch, so we’ll have it on the day.” It’s often used when referring to unanticipatable issues, the known unknowns and unknown unknowns, both artistic and technical, associated with recording material that can be used in the final product. On some shoots with a lot of moving parts, what happens on the day is going to include something of the sense of another expression, “the fog of war.”

  On the day is a special place. It’s the proving ground where everything meets and must bow down in subservience to reality. Unimagined opportunities will emerge and things thought to be a slam-dunk become a complicated mess or altogether impossible. You might get a cool idea to do a thing with a thing, but then on the day it won’t work because there’s a problem with the lighting or the sound or the desired framing or something’s been added so that part of the original script no longer makes sense. It could be that the edge of the counter is two inches too close to get clearance with your bag, or maybe the costume is so stiff it looks weird when you sit, or if you can see the bruise, it doesn’t make sense that you’d just ignore it, and on and on.

  I once had to deal with an interior security window in a school that was passing for a jail visiting area, and it wasn’t until on the day we discovered that, because the phones were just props and didn’t actually work, the actors couldn’t hear each other through the heavy glass. Because of this, in playing the scene the actors had to take on a concern for not turning their heads in a way that would reveal the wires to the earbuds they were wearing.

  It might be there’s too little rehearsal or because an actor you’re playing opposite chang
es things subsequent to rehearsal, but there will be plenty of challenging situations arising between actors on the day. I was acting in a film where I said a line with a particular legal term and the actress in the scene then responded with such obvious alarm it made it silly for the actor playing her husband to deliver his line explaining the gravity of the situation. I watched the poor guy squirm for a while before pushing through his discomfort to delicately point this out, and I wish I had a happier ending for this story, but his remark was not especially well received by the actress who blustered and insisted her character would certainly know what the term meant. I personally thought her choice misguided and her desire to be seen as intelligent a lost opportunity to instead show her character’s innocence (a quality vastly more endearing than intelligence). But she was the star and carried herself as such and the director stepped in and told the actor to cut his line.

  The point is, on the day you have to be prepared for all kinds of things to go sideways. It’s all part of the adventure. Maybe you can compromise and get part of what you wanted or maybe you’ll have to abandon your plan altogether. You’ll have to decide whether to speak up and try to finesse or force what you had in mind through the obstacles, or whether to abandon it altogether and maintain your faith that there’ll be wonderful opportunities revealing themselves in the future. Wonderful opportunities that are less likely to reveal themselves if you’re still tortured by what you had to give up.

  Not only will there be surprises out of the blue, but there’s also going to be stuff being done just as it was described in the script that you didn’t grasp the reality of actually doing until you were there and everyone was getting ready to shoot. You might have read where it said a rat crawls up your arm and sniffs your ear or that your dead body is discovered, but it’s another thing to keep it together when that little furry devil starts going after the peanut butter they put behind your ear or when they start sprinkling live maggots on you (as they once did with my wife).

  With nearly every situation on the day you almost certainly will be forced to deal with a monster that looms over everything: TIME. The production of a film or television show has some of the characteristics of a military operation, and it’s been said that every military defeat can be described with the expression, “too late.” You’re losing the light, you’re losing the location, you’re losing the child actor who can only work a certain number of hours. You might get a great idea for something on the day, but it was only a great idea if you’d had it in time to work it out in preproduction, because now you just don’t have that time. Oh, the pain.

  With low-budget projects the time squeeze is almost always nuts, but even with productions that have huge budgets there are going to be situations where you have unbelievable time pressure. Stars may have professional or personal obligations taking them away, weather may be changing, hard release dates must be met, and the reality is only a small percentage of projects spend their money on making time a luxury. Nearly everyone spreads the margin as thin as they can so every penny shows up on the screen.

  MAKE IT WORK ON THE FLY

  Because of the many unexpected and unique contingencies that come up on the day, the skill for finding ad hoc solutions and the ability to adapt to issues as they arise out of the moment is one of the most useful talents an actor working on camera can develop. There are all manner of wild cards you’ll be asked to manage.

  It may be a last-minute rewrite or maybe the director has decided to go for a particular effect and now you’re being asked to stand up and walk over by the window because, regardless of whether it makes sense for your character to do that, they want to establish that it’s raining outside or the production values are better over there. It doesn’t matter. They want you to do it and it’s on you to implement the direction.

  This skill is really just an extension of the actor’s basic job description—to make an entire role work. If you have to betray another character in a scene, you’ve got to come up with a way to emotionally support that behavior, perhaps as an act of revenge or maybe by making your character a psychopath. If your character says something foolish, then it falls on you to justify this, maybe by having a low I.Q. or by being drunk. The particular challenge on the day is for an actor to compress that process to within minutes, perhaps seconds.

  If you’re asked to stand up and go to the window, you have to be able to quickly catalog your options and select the best one. It could be your character is not being so directly accusatory as you planned and is instead going to the window to demonstrate that these are simply inarguable facts being laid out; or it’s possible you want to check the weather because someone you love is driving on the freeway (the audience won’t know that, of course, but they can nevertheless sense you have a genuine purpose); or maybe your character’s situation in life has become so burdensome that the moment prior to this move put you over the brink and you feel compelled to look out the window and catch your breath.

  An actor has to constantly think and live outside the box. You must not fall too much in love with the way you visualized things happening. On the day, when your plan must be changed, you must free yourself from your natural inclination toward “anchor bias” and “confirmation bias.” These are the strong tendencies we all have to develop beliefs in support of prior beliefs and to resist change. In formulating the best adaptation, you’ll first need to overcome your clingy affection for what you thought was going to be the case and replace it with a willingness to “murder your darlings.”

  When test subjects are hooked up to a polygraph and shown ambiguous pictures (e.g., something that could either be a duck or a rabbit), some people will show more stress response than others. (Republicans tend to be more stressed than Democrats.) It seems this is just the way we’re built as individuals and if you’re one of those people who like things more definite, then you’re probably going to be more resistant to changing your plan. Knowing this about yourself, you’ll have to especially compensate for that and aspire to be the loosest, most easy-breezy adaptable actor possible.

  It’ll be to your benefit if you can maintain a clear head and a philosophy of flexibility, accepting this necessity to think on your feet as a constant factor in the undertaking you’ve chosen. I recommend approaching every project with pluck, spunk, pep, and good humor; and, when you begin to feel your teeth grinding because something must be lost and it’s fallen upon you to put something wonderful in its place, reflect with gratitude on the fact that these are the kinds of problems you have.

  I’m not saying it won’t be aggravating and at times heartbreaking to lose something you loved about a scene. I once heard an actor in their pain of having to give up some little bit of character business say, “That’s why I wanted to do this character in the first place!” But, come on. Steven Spielberg says that because the mechanical shark wouldn’t operate properly on his film Jaws, it became a much better movie. If it had worked, they would’ve felt compelled to include a lot of shots of the robot shark going through the water, but, since they couldn’t get the damn thing to look right, he had to come up with a work-around where they just used shots of the ocean and a cello playing. This adjustment made it much more scary by getting us to imagine the shark moving there below the surface, rather than if we’d seen the actual thing swimming around. And . . . if you haven’t heard this fun fact: to write “crisis” in Chinese you use both the symbol for danger and the one for opportunity. Problems are messages. You get the idea.

  JUST DO IT

  While integrity and a sense of ownership about your contribution play a key part in meeting and mastering artistic challenges, you still need to allow for other interpretations and appreciate the massive transformations that can take place in postproduction. What I’m saying is that sometimes, as long as it’s not too ghastly painful, it’s best to just do the thing and trust that it will work out.

  Trust plays a huge part in acting. Just as you have to trust yourself, you have to trust the talent
of those you’re working with. What’s the alternative? Not to trust them? It’s a matter of degree and subject to your specific situation, but, by and large, second guessing your collaborators takes a toll on your ability to wholeheartedly slip into the imaginary that is an unacceptable trade-off for whatever acts of bad taste or carelessness you can catch and remedy through your vigilance and calculation.

  This stuff about trusting the artistry of your filmmakers does not apply, sadly, to either physical threats (stunts) or nudity. The enthusiastic and outright crazy people you encounter who create shows might be all too willing to risk your life, limb, and good name for the sake of a sensational shot. There are many, many stories of actors who’ve been gravely injured, and stories, lesser known perhaps, of modesties compromised. I worked with an actor on a movie who was sitting at the premier with her mother and father when she discovered that she had not, in fact, been framed just below the navel, as she’d been assured on the set, but well down the thigh of her totally nude body.

  If you work for the camera you need to face the reality that, unless you get final cut (supremely rare for even the most successful actors), you simply can’t be sure how your performance is going to be used in the final product. If you can’t deal with that profundity, you better stick to acting for the stage. Good or bad, you can’t possibly predict what the results of postproduction might create and you have little to no control over the way what you do in front of the camera gets used. They can take a reaction you had on one line and use it as a response to a different line. They can keep that camera running and use anything they catch you doing before “Action” and after “Cut.” They can play with the image and sound and even get someone else to come in and dub your whole part if they want.