You Can Act on Camera

by D. W. Brown

  To commit one’s life, as these people have, to the art of cinema is a reckless and noble thing. Reckless because it is extremely unpredictable as a career, and, in practice, a kind of answering to “the call of the void” (that irrational impulse one has to jump from a great height or into dark water, or to eat the whole pie). Noble because they go into that void, for us all, in search of meaning to the fantastic and terrible realities of existence.

  I learned a great deal from these conversations. I think you will, too.

  PETER BOGDANOVICH INTERVIEW

  Director (The Last Picture Show; Paper Moon; What’s Up, Doc?), writer, actor, producer, essayist.

  D.W. Brown: What would you say it is that makes a film performance effective?

  Peter Bogdanovich: I think the most effective movie performances are those where the line between the actor and the character is erased. There should be no sense of it being a character, but rather a real person.

  D.W. Brown: When James Cagney was asked what’s most important in acting he said, “Don’t get caught doing it.”

  Peter Bogdanovich: That’s right. You find the character in yourself.

  D.W. Brown: You’ve worked in a lot of different styles. What would you suggest to an actor about playing the difference between, say, realistic drama and screwball comedy?

  Peter Bogdanovich: When you’re doing comedy, generally you should go quickly. You want to pick up the pace. Let it go by fast. You have to be believable, but you also have to speed up. You have to find the style that the screenplay and the director are taking you toward. If it’s a screwball comedy, that’s one thing, and, if it’s a drama, that’s another thing. If it’s a western, that’s different than a crime picture. Everything has a different style and a different tempo. The thing is you need to be believable in whatever you’re doing. Be real. Find ways to make things happen faster, if that’s what you have to do because it’s a comedy, but that doesn’t mean you’re not focused within each moment. Just, sometimes you have to go faster.

  D.W. Brown: How would you address that old question of what you should do if someone is giving you a direction you disagree with?

  Peter Bogdanovich: Well, that is a difficult situation.

  D.W. Brown: Yes, and I know it’s hard to speak to this because these situations usually have unique political and psychological components all their own.

  Peter Bogdanovich: If you don’t think what the director is telling you is right, just tell him OK and do whatever you want. Tell him you understand what he means, and then do what you want, and by and large he might think that’s exactly what he wanted. A lot of times the director doesn’t know what he wants. He won’t know until he sees it.

  D.W. Brown: Right.

  Peter Bogdanovich: That’s why they ask actors to do it again and often don’t even give direction. They just say, “Do it again?” because they hope that, this time, it’ll be right. They don’t know what they want, because they haven’t heard it yet.

  D.W. Brown: Or if they do have a vision of it, they don’t know how to address it to an actor. They’ll talk about it in intellectual terms, which usually doesn’t help anybody.

  Peter Bogdanovich: An actor really needs to know what’s required without the help of a director. You can’t count on the director. You just can’t. Often times the director doesn’t help you at all.

  D.W. Brown: I’ve started telling my students that they need to think about themselves the same way the electrician does. Nobody understands what you’re doing and they don’t want to talk to you. Then, if they encounter a director who knows how to talk to actors, they can be pleasantly surprised.

  Peter Bogdanovich: That’s a good way of putting it.

  D.W. Brown: With television and even a lot of high-budget filmmaking now the schedules are so tight, what kind of advice can you give an actor when they want to do quality work, but they’re facing this constant pressure to move on?

  Peter Bogdanovich: Well, it’s true, a lot of times now a director will say you’ve got one or two takes and that’s it, so you have to be ready to give it to them on the first take. You don’t know how many you’re going to get.

  D.W. Brown: Would you caution actors to be careful not to try to do too much with a part, and to keep it simple and economical, because there just isn’t going to be the time to explore a lot of possibilities?

  Peter Bogdanovich: I think you have to hone it down to the best ideas rather than going off in too many different directions, but I think it’s always good to have a lot of ideas. If the director doesn’t like it he can always tell you not to do that. But I think it’s always worth bringing in as much as you can.

  D.W. Brown: How much do you think an actor should concern themselves with continuity?

  Peter Bogdanovich: Well, you’ve got a script supervisor to help you with that, but I think it’s important. If it’s a scene that requires a lot of business, you ought to plan out and get comfortable with the business before you do it. Get very comfortable with the business. If you’re cooking a meal and you have dialogue, you better work on that for a while. Get to know the business, get it out of the way so it’s second nature. You won’t have time to work on that on the set, so you have to practice that at home.

  D.W. Brown: How about matching in terms of emotional tones? You’ll hear different opinions on this. Some will say if you don’t peak in the same place in a given scene, you’re hurting yourself. Others will say you shouldn’t have your attention on that, and that you should, more or less, just let it rip.

  Peter Bogdanovich: I think it is a question of making everything fresh each time. The camera captures freshness. If it seems rehearsed and polished, it’s not going to read right. It should feel like what John Ford called the “first time emotion.”

  D.W. Brown: What traps do you see actors fall into?

  Peter Bogdanovich: An actor should pay as little attention to the camera as possible, because he doesn’t know what to do with it, and it’s not going to help him to know it. Forget it.

  D.W. Brown: Don’t worry about your coverage.

  Peter Bogdanovich: You can’t start thinking about that. That’s none of your business. That’s the director’s job. Know your words and have a sense of how you want to play the scene. Then listen to the other actor and play off of them.

  CATHERINE HARDWICKE INTERVIEW

  Director (Thirteen, Twilight, Lords of Dogtown), writer, producer, production designer.

  D.W. Brown: I know a lot of sets are pretty hectic places and don’t feel like very creative environments. What would you say to an actor who has to come onto the set and get in flow?

  Catherine Hardwicke: Oh, I have some days that are absolute disasters. Everything goes wrong and you’re way behind. So, how a person can find their own center in that can be very difficult. That’s the challenge, you know. And we have to try to find that, all of us. Try to leave the stress outside, avoid the stresses. Maybe do visualizations. Some way to try to get back to a good place.

  D.W. Brown: An actor has to allow for all kinds of things where they’re trusting in the filmmakers, don’t you think?

  Catherine Hardwicke: Absolutely. Maybe the actor will do something that isn’t consistent with the arc of the character and the editor has to remove it. I’ve had situations where the actor will get too emotional, where there’s too much emotion and it has to be pulled back at that point in the scene. The actor may feel very honest, that they’re being very truthful, but it’s too much at that point in the story. That character may have many more scenes they have to get through.

  D.W. Brown: I think performers may be prone to having that situation because they come into acting for the very reason that it’s a place to get out their feelings. So, when they feel those feelings, there can be this, “Ah ha! I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.”

  Catherine Hardwicke: Yes. But we don’t necessarily want to see somebody just crying, crying, crying.

  D.W. Brown: How conscious do you thin
k an actor should be about continuity?

  Catherine Hardwicke: There are two sides to that. An actor should have the freedom, but on the other hand if we’re doing a long scene and the glass keeps changing hands we’re going to have a problem. You do have to sometimes sacrifice moments that you love because the continuity would be just too outrageous. But still, I really do not want the script supervisor to be, you know, crazy pointing out every single little thing. I’d rather the actor be fully in it.

  D.W. Brown: Heath Ledger was such an amazing actor and you worked with him making Lords of Dogtown. What was your experience with him like?

  Catherine Hardwicke: He was very excited about playing the part. And then, at a certain point, he decided he couldn’t do it and said he was going to have to back out. His insecurity level spiked. Then he came back and said, OK, I’m in. Then he came to the little monkey rehearsal I had at my house and he was very embarrassed, very shy about showing what he was doing. The thing about him was that when he finally did surrender himself, he went into an entire body thing, you know, he was very physical. He became this very loose, wild surfer kind of guy. He had teeth made that matched the guy. He thought that that would help in getting to the character. He did his hair this wild way. He slowly built up this very full feeling for the character and his entire body language became that loose way and it was very special and six days later he was shooting Brokeback Mountain, six days after he finished ours and he had an entirely different physicality and his voice was completely different. And he only had six days to do it. I know because he was on my set six days before that. It just blew my mind that he could make such a physical transformation. And I think being grounded in your body is a great, beautiful lesson there. Your body movement, what that can tell you. I see a lot of actors who don’t have that. He was also very creative every minute on the set. He was very encouraging of all the younger actors. He would be very unpredictable and the way he would do things it would be like, ‘I’m just going to try this.’ A lot of the things he did were unpredictable and even a little scary. Almost dangerous. But alive, just so alive.

  D.W. Brown: Maybe that in part explains his initial fear. He knew that once he got to the edge of the cliff, if he jumped, he was all in and there was no going back.

  Catherine Hardwicke: Yeah, I think so. He was such a mysterious person in so many ways.

  D.W. Brown: How do you help the actors get a feel for the style you’re going to be going for?

  Catherine Hardwicke: I’ll try to establish that in the rehearsal. If it’s a very small part and they haven’t had a chance to be part of the rehearsal process, I try to do it in the audition itself. For me, during the audition, if an actor can hear what the director is saying and can make it their own, an internal, personal adjustment, it makes a huge difference because then I know they can take the note and make something beautiful and individual out of it, not just take a note on the nose and literal. If they just can’t take an adjustment in a fluid way, or they can’t take it at all, then they’re not coming back.

  D.W. Brown: I can understand that, because it’s scary to imagine that they would be there on the day with you and they get locked up.

  Catherine Hardwicke: That’s right, and why would I want to have that person there when there are so many talented actors who can do the work. They can take the note and find some way of incorporating it and feel it for themselves. I really believe the best kind of training is improv training. It’s really even the best thing for writing, the best thing for pitching, everything really, life.

  JON GRIES INTERVIEW

  Director, actor (Napoleon Dynamite, Taken, Will Penny).

  D.W. Brown: What do you think the distinctions are between stage and film acting?

  Jon Gries: I would say the first thing is that because on stage you’re running the continuum of your performance all the way from the beginning to the end, there are obvious technical differences. Stage is more language oriented, whereas the cinema is a visual medium. Having the opportunity to live the life of the character you’re playing from the beginning to the end at the curtain is much more organic than shooting a fight with your mother in one room and then stepping into another room and maybe not acting that scene, which will appear as if happening a half second later, until maybe weeks later, or maybe you’ve shot it weeks earlier.

  D.W. Brown: What do you think makes a film performance effective?

  Jon Gries: You try and find those moments. Sometimes I think in terms of music. I think in terms of the beat. The actual beat. You know, Paul Newman said he tried to throw the beat off a little bit, but still keep it in the measure. I think that’s pretty much what I’m trying to find, especially in close up. Feeling the beat, but working between those beats.

  D.W. Brown: Like syncopation.

  Jon Gries: Yeah. You can come early with an idea, maybe before something is actually revealed. Maybe your character can have a moment not understood by them fully, but where they’re ahead and figuring it out before it’s actually proven. They may have a dawning ah-ha moment even before the evidence has been presented to them. And it’s a personal, private thing. An intuitive anticipation. I certainly don’t mean the bad kind of anticipation where you brace before getting sucker punched. It’s your job to hide the fact that that kind of shock is coming. I don’t want to say anticipating in the sense of being not surprised. But there are times when there can be perhaps anticipating in the sense of having a gut feeling that this moment is primed.

  D.W. Brown: That’s really interesting, because that moment of emotional impact is so important with film, then, if your character has some kind of prescience, I don’t know, they had a dream about it, but a kind of deep sense that this event was somehow in the cards. Then when it happens you can really have it come crashing in. Surprised, yes, because everything in the moment is surprising, but your worst fear realized or the greatest thing possible you secretly dared to hope for now getting confirmed. Boom, it goes right to your center.

  Jon Gries: Yes. It’s a different choice than when you’re surprised out of the blue and had no clue something like this could happen. But it doesn’t have to be any less impactful to have it be a kind of “damn, I knew it.”

  D.W. Brown: There’s a lot of recorded material that will get used in a movie in a way that an actor can’t predict. Do you have any awareness of this reality during filming?

  Jon Gries: There are some directors, and I personally love those kind of directors and I try and emulate that kind of director when I direct personally, who are very much about capturing what’s going to happen around the scene’s dialogue, before and after what’s written down. Whenever what’s written is done you can watch actors and feel their anticipation of the director saying, “Cut.” I tell myself never, never cut the scene in your mind. Keep playing it all the way through. Even to the extent that if you hear “Cut,” stay with it. Especially now in the digital age, where they may say “Cut,” and right away go back to one and they just keep running the video. You want to stay in it, absolutely.

  D.W. Brown: How about style, which is so tough to nail down. What’s your best advice for how to get a feel for the style of what the presentation is going to be?

  Jon Gries: This is actually a great question. When, as an actor, I come onto a film and I’m going to go to the location somewhere, invariably they’ll say, “All right, your start date is on the twenty-fifth, so we’ll fly you out on the twenty-third and you can do your costume and get situated one day before and then shoot the next day.” I’ll say I’d like to be there on the twenty-first, or the nineteenth, even, so I can spend a couple days on the set watching. Just watching how this film is being shot. It can totally impact my choices. I want to see what’s being done because sometimes directors can’t explain it in a way where you can get a feel for it. Sometimes all I need is ten minutes just watching the monitor. Watching what the approach is.

  MICHAEL RYMER INTERVIEW

  Director (Battlestar Galactica,
Emmy nomination; Queen of the Damned; Angel Baby), writer, producer.

  D.W. Brown: What makes someone effective on screen?

  Michael Rymer: I would say that the most basic thing is to be excited by someone. If they bring the text to life. This is not always obvious. Perhaps a character is set up a certain way, but, specific to the role, you’re looking for someone who can play around the notes. If it’s a soft character, you might want someone who can bring a little edge to it. If it’s a very strong person, you want someone who can show some vulnerability through that. You want an actor who has some dimensions. I guess in the audition I’m, in part, looking for an actor’s process. A lot of actors come in and can do a good audition, but then, on the set, that’s all you ever get. You always want to keep the process continuous, to have more development and more progression to it. You want to get to the bottom and to the edges of the scene and the material. You don’t want it dead on arrival.

  D.W. Brown: On the other hand, you know the incredible time crunch happening with many projects. What can you say to an actor who feels that pressure of the clock ticking, but still wants to express something special?

  Michael Rymer: To me, if I was looking for the common quality amongst really good actors, the excellent actors, it begins with a sense of entitlement. That works on many levels. One is that they believe that, as an actor and a character, they have enough to hold your attention. And that also applies to the understanding that, while you do have to do it quickly and only have so many takes, you have to make sure you leave the psychological space for yourself to do your best stuff. You can’t be rushed and panicked and out of body and not in the moment.