Acting in Film

by Michael Caine

  People say, "Isn't it boring just sitting there for hours?" Well, I don't just sit there for hours; I sit there for hours thinking about what I need to do next.

  THE ART OF SPONTANEITY

  Movie acting is a delicate blend of careful preparation and spontaneity. The art of new-minting thoughts and dialogue comes from listening and reacting as if for the first time. When I was very young and in repertory theatre, I was given some advice by a clever director. He said:

  "What are you doing in that scene, Michael?"

  "Nothing," I said. "I haven't got anything to say."

  "That," said the director, "is a very big mistake. Of course, you have something to say. You've got wonderful things to say. But you sit there and listen, thinking of wonderful things to say, and then you decide not to say them. That's what you're doing in that scene."

  And that's the greatest advice I can give to someone who wants to act in movies. Listen and react. If you're thinking about your lines, you're not listening. Take your response from the other person's eyes, listen to what he says as though you have never heard it before. Even if you're rehearsing. Actually, rehearsing can be a good test of your spontaneity: if you're running lines with another actor and the assistant director comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your rehearsal," you've failed. If he comes up and says, "Sorry to interrupt your chat," then you're on the right course. Your lines should sound like spontaneous conversation, not like acting at all. And that comes from actively listening.

  Movie actors earn their living and learn their craft through listening and reacting. I noticed that American actors always try to cut down their dialogue. They say, "I'm not going to say all this. You say that line." At first I couldn't figure out why; I came from theatre, where you covetously count your lines. But it's a smart approach for an actor to give up lines in the movies because while you wind up talking about them, they wind up listening and reacting. It's no accident that Rambo hardly speaks. Sylvester Stallone is not a fool. I remember when I first went to America, right after I made Alfie. I met John Wayne in the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel. He'd just got out of a helicopter, he was dressed as Hondo and he came over and introduced himself to me. I said:

  DEATHTRAP

  Directed by Sidney Lumet. Warner Brothers, 1982.

  Pictured with Christopher Reeve.

  "I do know who you are, Mr. Wayne."

  He said, "You just come over?"

  "Yeah."

  He said, "Let me give you a piece of advice: talk low, talk slow, and don't say much."

  When I said I was going to do Educating Rita, my friends said:

  "Educating Rita? That must be about Rita; what are you playing?"

  I said, "I'm playing a guy named Frank."

  "Well," they said, "you should be doing a picture called Educating Frank if you're going to star in a movie."

  Everybody thought I was nuts. But I knew that while in the theatre the audience might have looked at Rita because she has so many lines, in the movies the camera has to cut to Frank to get his reactions; otherwise what Rita says has no further meaning. I can't say it enough: one of the most important things an actor can do in a motion picture is to listen and react as freshly as if it were for the first time.

  Of course, you needn't stare at people too intently when you're listening to them. In real life, when you listen to people, your eyes go up and down, you look around, you play with your glasses, and then look back at the person. One of the finest practitioners of this technique is Marion Brando. He denies the camera his eyes. Half the time he's looking down or away. Then suddenly he looks up, and you are absolutely fascinated by his eyes.

  Freshness becomes a perishable quality after several takes. I'm known as One-Take Mike. That's because I gear myself up to take the risk on "Action!" and it's difficult for me to get the same sense of danger in the very next take. So I usually go off a bit in take two and later I get better again. But I have worked with actors who never get it right the first time but improve with each take. The director has to juggle each actor's different capability to strike the balance that's right for the whole.

  Often you may be asked to do a scene again and again, either to get you to the heart of an emotion or to simply exhaust you. The director keeps at you relentlessly until you're totally exhausted. The remarkable thing about exhaustion is that it leads naturally to relaxation. During each take, you change your interpretation by a whisker to keep your performance from getting boring or stale. (I never change physical movements, though, to avoid continuity problems.) It can be bloody annoying when you think you've been great and the director says, "Go again." But the art of the game is to, at least, not get any worse. Most sensible directors, once they've got what they want in the can, say, "Right. We'll print that one. Now we'll just do one for the hell of it. Let yourself go. Have fun, relax." Usually that's the take that's finally used because everyone is so relieved to be free of the responsibility that they give their best performances of all.

  THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

  Directed byJohn Sturges. Columbia, 1975.

  Pictured with Donald Sutherland and Jean Marsh.

  Less is more. That's one of the hottest tips I can give any young film actor. To do nothing at all can be very useful in extreme reactive situations. For example, if something terrible happens to you in the script, like you find your wife murdered, and they cut to your close-up, very often you can do a completely blank look. The audience will project their own emotions on your face. The acting is in the buildup to that moment, not in the moment itself. You don't have to do anything, and the audience will go "Blimey!" For the final shot of Greta Garbo in Queen Christina, the director told her to remain impassive and the result is an absolute tearjerker. The audience knows what Christina is feeling because the actress has led them through Christina's emotions earlier in the film. At the end, the audience does all the work.

  VOICE, SOUND, LIGHTING, MOVEMENT

  Voice and Sound

  However your voice sounds, use it. It's yours and there's no reason why the character you play shouldn't sound like you. You might need to adopt an accent for a particular character, but that is another subject. Voice consciousness is the pits; it dispels all illusions of reality. If you try to smoothe your voice out-beautify and mellow it-you will no doubt produce a sound like "acting" in the worst old-fashioned sense.

  As in theatre, however, learn to produce your voice correctly. Breathe from your diaphragm. If you breathe properly, your voice will be comfortable to listen to because you will not have to strain to get your voice out. Strained speaking makes for strained listening. Some actors speak correctly but their voices are strained or strangulated because they are speaking only from the throat. Where the voice comes from is all you have to worry about-really. Breathe from your diaphragm and your nerves won't have a chance to strangle your performance.

  On Zulu I was incredibly nervous from the start, as you can imagine-my first big movie, my first big chance. The memory of the first day on location still makes me shudder. The uniform was uncomfortable in the boiling hot South African sun. I had to speak in this clipped upper-class accent-an effort, to say the least. Then, to cap it all, my horse threw me into the river three times and I kept having to change my clothes. Finally the damned horse behaved well enough for me to get out my line: "Hot day, hard work." The director, Cy Endfield, shouted:

  "CUT! Why is your voice so high?"

  I said, "It's the character."

  "No!" he said. "I heard you in rehearsal and it was different. It's higher now."

  He had the sound technician play my line back. I was so nervous that my throat had tightened, my shoulders became tense, and my voice was about an octave higher than usual. I had to ride that bloody horse across the river again; but this time I forced myself to relax, and I got it right.

  Stage actors have to calculate when they can take a breath because they need to control the pacing of a speech. But in film, the pacing comes in the editing. The
editor can shorten a pause if it goes on too long or lengthen one where it's needed. So in film acting, space your words as the thoughts dictate. Hesitate if the mental process is hesitant; push on if the ideas are flowing fast and fluently. If you are thinking as the character and have made yourself relax, your lungs will instinctively do their work. If they won't, then the character must be having breathing difficulties anyway. Use it; it's naturalism.

  Voice projection is necessary in a theatre, where you have to be heard in the last row of the balcony. In the movies, projection isn't usually required. (Pay no attention to the sound technician; he always has a problem.) Sensitive microphones can pick up the softest delivery. There may be a boom mike on a pole over your head or you may be wearing a body mike connected to a transmitter. Either way, as the occasion calls for it, you can speak in a barely audible whisper or you can let it rip and be as loud as you want. The sound technician, however, has to know in advance because he's wearing the earphones. I remember I was doing a little sound feature picture in which I played some sort of hoodlum. I had to come up behind a guy and whisper, "You're gonna die," and then shoot him in the back. The sound technician had his equipment turned up high so he could hear the whisper. I forgot to say the line and fired the shot. The sound technician had full volume on his earphones, and the sound of the shot nearly burst his eardrums. Ile went away and took a lot of aspirin.

  Don't get infected by the pace or energy level of another actor's speech. Sometimes underplaying can spread like an epidemic. Keep your own sense of the volume and energy levels you're on. This awareness will also help you to match your previous delivery during a retake because unless the director asks you to change your delivery, you have to be able to reproduce it again and again.

  Accents

  Approach with caution. If you decide to use an accent, you will be bound to expend at least 50 percent of your concentration on that accent, sapping valuable energy that won't be available when the moment most needs it. If you possibly can, play a part in your own manner of speech. That's always preferable to adopting an accent, unless, of course, the accent is the performance. In Treasure Island, for example, Robert Newton made his manner of speech the entire performance, and it worked.

  BULLSEYE!

  Directed by Michael Winner. 21st Century Productions, 1990.

  Pictured witbSally Kirkland, Roger Moore, and Deborah Barrymore.

  And about British accents: it's not that Americans don't understand them; the real problem is that we speak twice as fast as Americans do. If you are British and do a picture that is going to be shown in the States, speak slower. I've trained myself to speak very slowly, and Americans accept me, even in an American part. I'm accepted in a Woody Allen picture set in Manhattan because I say "elevator" instead of "lift," "sidewalk" instead of "pavement," "apartment" instead of "flat," and I don't clip along at the British rate of speech. I use their phraseology and I slow down.

  It has always annoyed me that people think a Cockney accent is the whole performance. I played three entirely different kinds of Cockney in Alfie, The Ipcresss File, and Get Carter-totally different characters-but everyone said, "Here's his old Cockney performance again." No one says, "Here's Laurence Olivier's old Shakespearean king again." So I played a German in The Last Valley. I thought that the obvious trap was to play a German like a man trying to do a German accent; so I decided to play my character like a German trying to speak perfect English. I hired dialect records and listened to them non-stop for a few days. Then I put it out of my mind and tried to speak good English but with a German's basic speech pattern. I think it worked out pretty well.

  Another German accent was required for The Eagle Has Landed, but this posed an interesting variation. I needed two versions of a German accent. In some scenes, my character was supposed to be speaking German to other Germans, but the script was in English, so any "accent" had to be almost subliminal. Then in other scenes, the character was in England passing himself off as an Englishman, speaking what for him was a foreign language. For that accent, I invented a sort of brusque, clipped sound (which, I hope, was a fairly subtle solution).

  Sound and Dubbing

  In British films, the sound technician tries to get rid of any extraneous noises on the sound track-for example, the noise of cutlery on a plate. He puts bits of putty under the plates and all that. The Americans just live with the clatter. That's because the British make talking pictures; Americans make moving pictures. We British filmmakers have a theatre tradition, whereas Hollywood was about 3,000 miles away from America's theatre center. In the wide open spaces around California, they first put Westerns on film, while in Europe we started out with Sarah Bernhardt doing bits from the classics. So an American sound technician says, "That's the sound it makes when you put a knife down, so we'll leave it like that." But as an actor, you can help yourself by not putting the knife down just when you say, "I love you, darling." And never shut a door or open a drawer on your own line.

  After a film is finished, you may be called in to do some post-synching or dubbing-fitting a new sound (such as a section of your speech) in place of what they've got. Maybe an airplane went over when you said one of your lines or maybe the director wants a different inflection. For me, post-synching is a laborious pain in the neck and a great deal of hard work that ends up diminishing my performance in those bits by about 25 percent. Dubbing always happens a long time after you've finished shooting. You've probably done another picture by then. Then, suddenly, you're back in your old character. You see this completely strange person on the screen with funny hair and a moustache, and you think, "God, how did I sound at that time?" I just listen to a bit of it and impersonate myself.

  01978 Warner Bros Inc.

  THE SWARM

  Directed by Irwin Allen. AIP/Warner Brothers, 1978.

  Dubbing is the ultimate control over voice in films, even to the extent sometimes of matchng one actor's voice to another actor's face. One legendary purpose of this phenomenon was to give the producer's mistress a better voice. Sometimes what is called "a scratch track" is recorded on location. It's not of a high technical standard but serves merely as rough guide. You're called back after shooting to dub in your whole part in the controlled environment of a studio. In these circumstances you can sometimes improve on your original delivery a bit. But, generally, post-synching is quite tough. You may have to try several times before you can accurately synchronize sound and image, and it can be difficult to recapture your entire performance. It's harder still if you are dubbing someone else's performance and hardest of all if you didn't like what you did in the first place.

  But most directors prefer to record on the set because those extraneous sounds, the ambience, and spontaneous performances have a power of suggestion that you just can't equal by dubbing. Most microphones are much more sensitive than the human ear, and there is a mass of small noises that enrich a sound track that has been made on the set.

  Richard Widmark once gave me a piece of advice about large noises in film. Ile said:

  "Watch the special effects when you're working, especially in Westerns."

  I said, "Why is that, Dick?"

  "What?" he said. "Can you talk into my other ear?"

  So I said, "Why is that, Dick?" into his other ear.

  He says, "You know all those scenes in pictures where you see the cowboy and he ducks back, and the explosive goes off in the rocks? You talk to any one of us. We're all deaf in one ear."

  I lenry Fonda, who was also there, joined in then and asked, "What did he say?"

  So I said, "You made a lot of Westerns, too, didn't you, I-lank?"

  "Yeah, I did," he said.

  All those fellows really were deaf in one ear. It was the price they paid for being in Westerns.

  Lighting and the Inky-Dink

  Most stars have a grip on the technical side of filmmaking because it's in their best interests to know. Making films is a technical process first; any mystery involved comes in wit
h wishful thinking. You need to know what kind of lighting is most flattering to you and most appropriate for each scene; and you must cooperate fully with the lighting technician.

  Some stars are very particular about what they want from lighting. One day I was doing the off-camera part for Hank Fonda during his close-ups. I was standing there and we're about to do the scene, and Fonda says, "Where's the inky-dink? Where's the tiny light?" The lighting guy says, "Oh, I forgot, Mr. Fonda. Sorry." And he goes and brings it in. You always wondered about the wonderful way Hank looked in close-ups? He had a gleam in his eyes and a slightly watery, sad look. Well, it was thanks to the inky-dink. Instead of looking at my face, he put this tiny light where my face was and stared straight into that light while I talked behind it.

  Movement

  Obviously the way you move will be affected by the character you are playing; but natural movement comes from your "center," from the same place as a natural voice. When you walk from your center, you will project a solid perspective of yourself. Walk with that certainty and ease, and your path becomes a center of gravity. Your force pulls all eyes to you. Slouch or poke your head forward, or pull your shoulders back uncomfortably, and that power seeps away. Only a relaxed, centered walk creates a sense of strength. A centered walk can be very menacing, too. Even if you don't get film work on the basis of this advice, follow it and you'll never get mugged, either. Mind you, if you look like I do you'll never get mugged anyway because people generally think I just have been mugged.

  One important piece of technical advice about movement: don't rush it. Give the camera operator a chance. James Cagney gave me this tip about running: "When the director tells you to run from over there right toward the camera and past it, run like hell when you're far away, and as you get near the camera, slow down. Otherwise you'll go by so fast, they won't know who the hell went by." Another point: if you're sitting down for a close-up and have to rise, stand up slowly. Don't make any violent movements or you'll pop out of the frame. In other words, always take the camera with you; give the camera operator a chance to crank his wheels and follow you.