My tricks of the trade
In any walk of life, there are the big lessons, and then there are the little tricks of the trade that no one ever tells you and that can give you that extra edge. Well, I’m going to tell you my little tricks of the trade. Most of them are about the ways we use our bodies and our voices to make an impact. That’s crucial in my trade but also comes in quite handy in all kinds of other scenarios.
If you get the big things right, your acting will come out through your eyes. (And, by the way, this is impossible if your eyes are rolled backwards in your head, searching your brain for your next line. You have to know your line so well that you can say it as if you’re minting it fresh, not hauling it out of your memory. Did I mention that it’s important to learn your lines?)
When I’m doing a close-up, I make sure I don’t switch my lead focus from one eye to the other. The camera will pick up the tiny eye movement and it will make me look shifty. Marlene Dietrich taught me that, at a party. (How to choose which eye? Choose the off-camera actor’s eye that is closest to the camera, and look at it with your eye that is furthest from the camera. That will keep you in eye contact with the off-camera actor, but also put your full face in shot.)
In real life, when we’re listening closely to someone, we might not keep eye contact endlessly (that would be unnerving) but we don’t flick our gaze all over the room. If we do, the other person quickly gets the message that something more interesting is going on over their shoulder.
When you blink on camera, especially in close-up when every blink is eight feet wide, it makes you look weak. Look at Hugh Grant blinking away in his romantic-comedy roles, then contrast with his more recent, brilliant portrayal of Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal—when I don’t think he blinks once—if you want the proof of that. So, I try not to blink, unless I’m supposed to be weak, or shocked or concerned, or have something in my eye. (Try this at home if you want to come across more assertively. Don’t take it too far, though: you’ll upset your friends or contract an eye infection.)
I never look down to find my mark, because then the camera loses my eyes. Instead I work out beforehand exactly where it is, then sense it with my peripheral vision. Spencer Tracy, indirectly, taught me that. Watch him and you’ll see that he walks, looks down, then speaks. That’s because he’s always looking for his mark. If you have to hold an important conversation, make sure you can focus on that, and are not going to be distracted by having to shuffle around to find the right piece of paper, or whatever your particular “finding your mark” is.
I don’t overreact. From observing people experiencing enormous emotion in real life I have learnt that in times of great stress or disaster, and often even in times of great joy, we don’t react immediately. There is usually a moment or two of blankness while we register the shock. Only after that do we start to get to grips with our new world.
Unless I have to do an accent because that’s part of the performance, I stick with my usual voice. When I was playing German characters in The Last Valley and The Eagle Has Landed, or Stalin in Then There Were Giants, or Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules, the accent was part of the performance. I always prefer to use my own voice because focusing on an accent will take at least 50 per cent of my concentration, which would be more usefully directed somewhere else. In any encounter, the energy and effort you put into hiding your true self is energy and effort that could probably be put to better use. There are times for all of us when we elect to be less than fully authentic to fit in, but when you can, take pride in being precisely yourself.
Accent or no accent, I would advise everybody to learn how to produce their voice correctly. Breathe from the diaphragm: it’s right down there, below your lungs and above your stomach. There’s a technique to it, which my first wife taught me. Cockneys tend to speak from up there, stuck in their throat, which makes for a completely different kind of sound. When you produce from your diaphragm, your sound will be richer, and more versatile. That—not speaking the Queen’s English—is what will make your voice comfortable to listen to.
Be real
My biggest single piece of advice to someone wanting to know how to do movie acting—and, in fact, to anyone wanting to make a good impression, or feeling they have to perform in some way—would be this: be real. Don’t act. Don’t perform. “Performing” works in the theatre, where everything has to be big and broad, and you have to project your voice to reach the back row even in the quiet scenes. But in the movies, where the camera picks up every tiny blink and twitch, and the microphone picks up every whisper, “acting” or “performing” will blow your cover and spoil the illusion. Now you look like someone being paid to say their lines, someone trying to smash it out of the park, rather than a real person thinking real thoughts and living their real life. You have lost your credibility, your believability. In the movies, everything has to be small and natural. Movie actors who “act” are always obvious and fail to convince.
To be real in front of the camera, you have to be so in tune with the life of your character that you’re thinking his or her thoughts. You are not you-pretending-to-be-him. Or you are, at some level. That’s unavoidable. But at another level, you just are him.
The careful observation you have done as part of your preparation will help: the thought you have already put into things like how you walk, how you hold yourself, what you do with your hands, how you use your voice. Powerful people walk from their centre with purpose and ease. Slouch, stoop, poke your head forward, and your power dissolves. Stand straight and you look younger; round your shoulders for instant ageing. Talking slowly can imply power—because you know people will stop and listen to you—or dishonesty: you work out the lies as you go along. Hands can show a tremendous amount of character. A tiny hand gesture can convey neuroticism or nerves much more effectively than urgent pacing to and fro or a physically demanding pratfall. Those physical decisions, with your costume, hair and makeup, can really help you change your mental state.
Similarly, if you’re looking for a promotion at work, it can be helpful to observe the people you want to be. How do they behave? Don’t go overboard. Your co-workers will think you’re taking the piss if you start walking around imitating your boss. But little changes in behaviour can start to help you to see yourself in a different light. And that is the first step to making others see you in that light too.
Deep empathy will also help you to be real. As an actor, you have to understand who your character is and what they do from inside their heads. Jack Carter in Get Carter and Harry Brown in Harry Brown both go on nasty killing sprees. People are dropped off the sides of buildings, drowned inside car boots, or lectured while they bleed out from stomach wounds. But neither Jack nor Harry is a psychopath. From inside their own heads, they have their reasons for what they’re doing. In real life, everyone is in sympathy with his own motives. Jack is defending his family’s honour—a concept that is every bit as important to him as it is to members of the British aristocracy or the Sicilian Mafia. Harry is seeking vengeance for his friend’s senseless death, scaring the people who scare him and cleaning up his estate of a bunch of undesirable gangsters and drug dealers. To them, they’re doing the right thing, killing people who deserve to be killed. Even Joseph Stalin made sense to himself.
Funnily enough it was not the murderous hard men I had the most difficulty empathising with. The biggest challenge for me was when I was cast completely against type in The Romantic Englishwoman as Lewis Fielding, a rather ineffective and passive pseudo-intellectual wimp who lets his life fall apart all around him. Lewis’s wife, played by Glenda Jackson, goes off on a romantic adventure and he does nothing to stop her. I managed then by trying to imagine what I wouldn’t do in any given situation, and then having Lewis do exactly that.
We can intellectualise empathy. We have to think through our characters’ motivations. But to feel the emotion I have decided my character is going to feel at any given point, I rely on sense memo
ry, going back to my own real-life experiences to access emotion, as taught to me by Joan Littlewood.
For rage, I go back to when I was evacuated as a child and locked in a cupboard. I instantly feel a hatred of all adults and, bang!, I’m on the rampage. For fear, I remember Korea, being surrounded by the enemy and certain I was going to die.
Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for my acting career, I have a wide choice of memories I can call on when I have to cry: walking away from my first marriage when my elder daughter Dominique was a baby; being told when she was a few hours old that my younger daughter Natasha had a 50 per cent chance of making it; sitting there for two weeks with her tiny hand gripping the finger I had managed to slip through the little hole in the side of her incubator. There’s also a memory I go into that is so personal I haven’t even told my wife about it. I worry that if I tell her, the memory will be lost: it will be mixed up with my memory of her reaction to it. So I’ve held that one close.
And, most of all, what will help you to be real and truthful in your performance is doing less, not more.
In Educating Rita, I remembered my old repertory director’s advice about playing a drunk. Watch Frank in that movie and you’ll see that he isn’t reeling and staggering around. It’s smaller than that. He’s struggling to appear sober, fighting to maintain his dignity. What gives him away is what gives all drunks away. You can see in his eyes that his thought processes are slowed. Everything in the chain of listening, thinking, speaking is getting delayed. And you can see from the way he is holding himself that his muscle tone is compromised. It takes a supreme effort to make his neck hold up his head and stop it dropping onto his chest.
That director from Lowestoft Rep gave me the same advice about crying. “You, Michael,” he said, after he had stopped me once more and asked me what on earth I thought I was doing, “are giving me an actor trying to cry. I want a real man. A real man is someone who is trying desperately not to cry.” Spot on. In real life people tend not to turn on the waterworks in a great grief-stricken dramatic way. So when we’re acting it’s more truthful and more powerful to fight the emotion, to struggle with the feelings, to hide the tears.
Some actors will try to steal a scene by being bigger and louder than everyone else. (Or sometimes they’re slumming it from the theatre and haven’t adjusted. That’s true particularly for the post-war generation of actors who do a film to buy a new car, then return to their art.) Their gestures are semaphore. Their lines are bellowed proclamations. These actors are using their bodies and voices rather than their brains. Don’t try to compete. Do your thing and come in underneath them. When they go big, you go small. When they shout and scream and pull faces, you stay centred and calm. They are the ones who will end up looking stupid.
Put it another way. Don’t blow up the whole car. No one needs that. You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.
As in life, quite how small you make it will depend on the set-up. In the movies, there are master shots (or long shots), medium shots and close-ups. The closer the camera, the smaller your performance needs to be. The same in life. You can afford to be a bit bigger when you’re addressing a roomful of people, but the general point still applies. You will have more impact if you pare things back—your reactions, your presentation, your interventions. Avoid being loud or grandiose or verbose. Remember how devastating and impactful one perfectly nuanced inflection or expression can be. People can interpret and infer more than we realise without us needing to over-stress. Stay interesting and stay real.
Jack Lemmon told me this story when I first went to Hollywood. In his first film he was being directed by George Cukor, and in his first scene, Cukor kept cutting as soon as he started speaking. “Do less, Jack,” George said. He started again and George cut it again. “Do less, Jack.” They did the scene over and over, with Jack doing less and less each time. Finally George cut again and asked Jack to do less again and Jack said, “If I do any less I’ll be doing nothing.”
“Now you’ve got it, Jack,” said George.
It needs to be very small, but it’s not nothing. Do not make the mistake of thinking that being natural is doing nothing. The effort is huge. The intensity is huge. Your brain is in overdrive, thinking every moment. You are working very hard to get through acting and out the other side back to reality.
When I was coming up the people who did this brilliantly were Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath and Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront. At that time their more relaxed and underplayed acting style was revolutionary and a revelation to people like me in the audience. Clark Gable had always played Clark Gable, Robert Taylor was always Robert Taylor and Charles Boyer was always Charles Boyer. Now the naturalistic acting style is the norm. We don’t want our movie actors to be big orating stars. And we don’t want them always to be glamorous versions of themselves. None of the parts I have played—not Alfie, Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File or Harry Brown, any more than Wilbur Larch in The Cider House Rules or Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American—have been me. They have all been people I knew, not people I am. We want our movie actors to be real other people. You can watch brilliant examples of this real style of acting every day now, but if you really want to learn from the best, I’d take a look at Benedict Cumberbatch giving an extraordinary performance in Patrick Melrose, or Gemma Arterton, or Idris Elba, or Clare Foy, or Hugh Grant, or Tom Hiddleston, or Lily James, or Damien Lewis, or Matt Smith. This is a difficult industry and you never know what will happen but they’re all wonderful screen actors, and they all have star quality.
The art of listening
When I’m learning my lines, I put as much thought into the parts where I’m not speaking as I do into the parts where I am. Sometimes more.
Remember that wise old director from my repertory days in Lowestoft? The one who was always stopping me to tell me what I was doing wrong? One day we were rehearsing and he called for us to stop. “What are you doing in this scene, Michael?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, slightly indignantly. “I haven’t got anything to say for ages.” I couldn’t see how I could possibly be doing anything wrong this time, because I didn’t have any lines at all.
“That, Michael,” said the director, “is where you’re wrong. Of course you have something to say. You are listening to what is being said, and thinking of a thousand wonderful things to say. You are standing there and thinking these wonderful thoughts. And you are deciding not to say any of them. Half of acting is listening. And the other half is reacting. Listening and reacting,” he said, “not ‘nothing,’ is what you are doing in this scene.”
It was great advice. Listen and react. Don’t stand there thinking about your next line. Don’t stand there thinking about nothing. Really listen to what the other person is saying. Really tune in to what they’re doing. (And don’t move about: people don’t move about when they’re really listening.) And then give a truthful reaction.
Escape to Victory is John Huston’s 1981 cult classic about a group of Allied prisoners of war trying to break free from their captors while preparing for an exhibition soccer game against them. I had enormous fun shooting that movie. Sly Stallone co-starred as the goalkeeper, my hero John Huston was directing and I got to play football alongside footballing giants Pelé, the Brazilian football genius, Bobby Moore, who had captained the England 1966 World Cup winning team, and Argentina’s Ossie Ardiles. It was like a dream come true. There’s one little scene where Pelé—playing one of the prisoners of war—starts to play with the ball, and I, as Captain John Colby, the captain and coach of the PoW team, first realise he has some skills. On paper, I do nothing in that scene until the end, when I have one line: “Where’d you learn to do that?” But if you watch the scene you’ll see that while Pelé is doing what he does best, picking up the ball with the top of his foot then bouncing it from his foot to his shoulder to his head, I am doing my thing, with the saying nothing. I’m not just standing there. I’m noticing him. I’m watchi
ng him with growing interest. My mind is turning over what I’m seeing and what it means. What I am definitely not doing is standing there doing nothing.
In life, we don’t listen blankly to someone else making a speech with no thoughts in our heads, simply waiting for them to stop so that we can say our piece. And we don’t interrupt every time we do have an interesting thought. Or if we do, we don’t end up with many friends. In life, we are always thinking our thousands of wonderful thoughts, and the thought that inspires our next words usually occurs when the other person is still speaking, often provoked by something they’re saying.
OTHER ACTOR: I’m going out to meet Freda. I’ll back in an hour or two but don’t wait up.
YOU: Freda? Really? That’s funny. She just called me to ask why you had cancelled.
The key word here is “Freda.” When the other actor says “Freda,” that sets off your next thoughts: How can she be going to meet Freda, when Freda just told me she had cancelled? Why is she lying to me? And so on. The other actor doesn’t stop talking at “Freda,” so you don’t start talking then. But you can show by your reaction—not a dramatic gasp, but a microscopic tightening of the jaw, a lowering of the eyes perhaps, it depends on what you’re trying to convey—that you already know what you’re going to say next. Realistic performance comes from intense listening and truthful reaction.
In the movies, you earn your living and learn your craft by listening. To the extent that a lot of experienced actors actually try to cut down their dialogue, rather than counting their lines as theatre actors tend to do. Look at Sylvester Stallone as Rambo, or Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin, or Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. Look at Sally Hawkins in 2018’s Oscar-winning movie The Shape of Water. A hugely impactful performance with no spoken lines at all.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 9
