3. Feeling versus seeing
We talked some about this third vulnerability when we discussed the scientific principle of confirmation bias. For actors it’s our tendency to trust what feels right, the idea being that if it feels right it’s good. Although actors work with emotions, your audience can’t and won’t care what you’re feeling if it doesn’t translate on screen. Screen acting is a visual medium. It’s an art for an audience. The aim is not, as some treat it, therapy. First and foremost, what you feel must be transmitted visually in order to evoke a response in your audience. Yet actors are susceptible to overrating their own subjective experience when estimating the strength of their performance. If this admonition sounds counterintuitive it’s because I am advocating trying what feels wrong. What feels right doesn’t always work for the camera, and what feels wrong will often surprise you. How a performance feels is a risky yardstick for how it actually translates on screen, and ultimately, what emotions it stirs in your audience.
You may be just starting out, booking roles small enough that the director will not give you much direction or notice. Or you may be a series regular on a show where episodes have a rotation of directors and limited takes. In either case, you likely won’t have the opportunity to build much of a relationship with your director. And you cannot rely on what feels right. You are flying blind unless you’ve developed a working relationship with the camera.
Working with a camera provides a system of checks and balances for you and your coach or director. Trust built on a mutual appraisal of your work allows for a more professionally constructive relationship both on and off-camera. The camera is an indispensable collaborator. I advocate embracing it and tailoring everything you do to it.
A place for analytic work
I have found the best time for analysis is when appraising your work during playback, making adjustments based on what you see on screen. Experiment, analyze, experiment, analyze, rinse, repeat. Yet this is not verbal, conceptual, intellectual, abstract analysis. It is visual, auditory, physical analysis. I have heavy doubts about how much, if any, traditional analytic work actually translates on-camera when creating a character in a fictional story. Of course, some analytic work in the form of research is necessary in instances where you may be playing an historical figure with characteristics that have been documented and for which you will be held accountable in your portrayal. Or perhaps the character is fictional but exists within a particular culture, like the navy. A note taped in the casting office of NCIS reminds actors that if they are auditioning for any character in the navy they must be conscious of their posture: shoulders back, head up. This is when creating relies heavily on recreating, when elements of your performance are learned by observing navy personnel or reading the note in the lobby of the CBS casting offices.
Perhaps analytic work has its uses elsewhere too—if you factor in the rarely allotted time needed to process analytic work, to refine the analytic fuel into a serviceable means of inspiration. When you only have a day or so to prepare a role for an audition or last-minute booking, analytic work ignites your working memory to white-hot temperatures that must simmer to be used effectively. For this reason, especially when working with time constraints, I recommend keeping all necessary analytic work to the bare minimum. With a brain full of research it can be difficult to know how and what best informs your character until you’ve had time to process. With analytic work, more time helps you feel sure-footed. Less time may knock you off balance.
You may feel strongly that your analytic approach has worked for you. Yet you may still be curious how much of the approach, how much background and research, translates into anything tangible on-screen. The effectiveness of any element of any approach, analytic or otherwise, can always be tested for on-camera. Try it. Try something else. See what reads on-camera.
Cultivate your mind
The best way to make great creative use of your analytic mind: read. Read history, philosophy, science, etc. In particular, read narratives of any kind, screenplays, plays, short stories, poetry and novels. Actors need to read at the very least to understand the stories they are being inserted into. The joke goes, actor flips through script, “Bullshit… bullshit… bullshit… my line… bullshit… my line… bullshit… bullshit.” A handful of techniques for actors emphasize reading. Stella Adler’s is the first that comes to mind. You will become a better actor and deepen your intuitions about story and character by reading plays and novels. There isn’t much need to overthink this directive. Absorb through osmosis. Enrich your brain through passive acquisition. Read.
Chapter Endnotes
1 Sides are pages of a script given to actors for the purpose of auditioning.
2 In the beginning I’d alter the octave of my voice in GarageBand when reading the other character’s lines, but it soon because clear this was an unnecessary step. No one noticed or cared.
3 “Practicing alone is considered the single most important activity for improving violin performance.” Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch-Romer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Psychological Review, 1993
4 Coyle, Daniel, The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Skills (New York: Bantam Books, 2012).
5 “Testing” is short for “network test” and is the last step in the audition process when an actor is in the mix for a major role in a TV series.
6 Showfax, a service offered by BreakdownsExpress.com, the official website where the bulk of casting notices are posted, allows actors in North America to download their sides for auditions.
7 Seneca, Lucius Annaeus, and Sir Roger L'Estrange, Senecas Morals by Way of Abstract. To Which Is Added, A Discourse under the Title of An After-Thought. (London: Printed for T. Osborne, 1762).
8 Nordqvist, Joseph, “Intelligence Agents More Likely to Make Irrational Decisions Compared to College Students,” Medical News Today, July 10, 2013, www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/263107.php, accessed March 7, 2014.
9 Engelmann, Jan B., C. Monica Capra, Charles Noussair, and Gregory S. Berns, Expert Financial Advice Neurobiologically “Offloads” Financial Decision-Making under Risk, PLOS ONE, March 24, 2009, www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004957, accessed March 7, 2014.
10 Parker, Corey, “Paula Strasberg, Coaching Marilyn Monroe,” memphisactor.blogspot.com/2012/12/paula-strasberg-coaching-marilyn-monroe.html, accessed July 6, 2014.
Talent
A definition of talent for screen actors
Most actors claim they are talented because of a few great performances in their past. Yet if most actors claim talent because of a few great performances, it’s more of a common characteristic than expertise. When do a few strong performances best fleeting greatness and take on the characteristic of exceptional talent for the screen actor?
People talk about great actors as having erased all indication of their own personalities to become their roles. The flip side is actors who are so themselves, so open, vulnerable, truthful, that they move us with such self-exposure and authentic charisma. Many stars receive accolades for playing themselves but often go out on a limb for “Oscar bait,” that is, roles challenging enough to get the attention of the Academy.
Another criteria for talent applies to the auditioning actor. Actors who must audition are expected to consistently deliver strong on-camera auditions, regardless of how challenging the role thrown at the actor with only one night to prepare. A simple and comprehensive definition of “talent” for screen actors can be summed up as requiring:
Breadth: the ability to “play yourself” as well as a broad range of characters and genres.
Consistency: consistently delivering high-caliber auditions and on-screen performances.
Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, and researchers/writers Matthew Syed, Malcolm T. Gladwell, Daniel Coyle, and many others in Amazon’s growing section of books on meritocratic human excellence, have documented studies touting talent as something predicated
(in part) on ten thousand hours of results-oriented practice.1 One major caveat of this principle is that copious practice only leads to improvement if you have the ability to measure and verify your results.
With the approach outlined in this book, even a novice can develop expertise on-camera, mastering breadth and consistency. You can make great strides toward becoming a talented screen actor before ever booking a paying job.
Steps to cultivating talent
The protocol outlined in this book minimizes reliance on language, concepts, and working memory when preparing for a role by using techniques that rely on impulse, emotion, and intuition. These are soft skills for preparing a role for an audition or a job, that is, when you are being subjected to external pressures. Hard skills—skills that are technical and pull more from working memory—are used to master the mechanics of working on camera when you are experimenting on your own, that is, in the absence of external pressures. The hard skills form the underlying foundation that supports the soft skills, creative impulse, and strong intuitive on-camera work.
Chapter Endnotes
1 Although practice is instrumental in cultivating talent, recent findings indicate practice alone is not the sole predictor. We will discuss the most esoteric criteria that underscore the definition of talent for actors in a later chapter of this book. The backlash to the ten-thousand-hours principle is documented in the article in Fast Company, “Scientists Debunk the Myth that 10,000 Hours of Practice Makes You an Expert, March 12, 2014, www.fastcodesign.com/3027564/asides/scientists-debunk-the-myth-that-10000-hours-of-practice-makes-you-an-expert, accessed March 12, 2014.
Part II
Preparing the Role
Naturalism—Playing Yourself
* * *
“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”
Dr. Seuss1
* * *
For centuries prior to the advent of film, character acting was the only kind of acting.2 The trend was caricature acting and melodrama, something that enervated Russian actor Constantin Stanislavski and impelled him to invent a new system for actors based on naturalism and psychology. It’s no coincidence that a naturalistic acting style started to gain popularity in the decades that followed the birth of moving pictures. Film was a new medium where audiences could see performers with such magnification it was almost like they could see inside them. The close-up shot enabled audiences to detect micro-movements of the face that revealed universal truths that each of us is innately equipped to recognize both consciously and unconsciously. Audiences were beginning to discover they craved a new, intimate experience. The popularity of naturalism that eventually became the modern standard in film suggests audiences wanted to see something exposed and vulnerable, an honesty that would allow them to observe the human condition void of the thinnest of veils. They wanted to see people take off the mask.
***
Author to Dr. Ekman: “You’ve discovered three thousand different facial expressions that reveal emotions?”
Dr. Ekman: “We are capable of making about ten thousand different expressions, of which only about three thousand have any relevance to emotion, of which in any emotional conversation you’re likely to see less than a hundred of them. So it’s a very large vocabulary, most of which isn’t used. Much of the variations are variations in the strength of a particular part of an expression. So when these muscles contract they can produce a very big expression, but the expression can vary quite a lot. I also take a look at the symmetry. How balanced it is on the left and the right side of the face. And that can vary also. When the movement is put on deliberately it tends to be a bit asymmetric. As the emotion becomes more genuine, it becomes more symmetrical.”
***
As Dr. Ekman explains, a large part of your brain is dedicated to decoding the facial expressions of other human beings. Humans display something called left-gaze bias. When looking at a human face, our eyes drift left to scan the right side of the person’s face. This happens because the right side of a human face better expresses emotion. Even dogs, our interspecies companions, have evolved at our side to display left-gaze bias when looking at human faces.3
Not only do audiences seek to decode what characters are truly feeling and thinking, but screen actors also function as avatars for audiences. Camera angles such as CU (close-ups) ECU (extreme close-ups), as well as over-the-shoulder and POV (point-of-view) shots allow audiences to slip into a character’s perspective and peer into another’s face without any of the psychological pressures of having to participate. Film is celebrated for granting audiences this penetrating and unparalleled experience.
The majority of roles you’re likely to book require that you play yourself. This style of acting has become so ensconced that I’ve heard professionals insist it’s the only kind of good acting. It’s a postmodern performance style that is antistyle. It is widely encouraged in the current creative climate for a number of reasons. Most commonly, directors like to cast actors who are the character. It makes their job easier. It’s a safer bet they can get the performance they need.
* * *
“Don’t act, be.”
Lee Strasberg2
* * *
Actors who frequently play themselves are widely considered to be inherently winsome personalities. They include Julia Roberts, Michael Cera, Bruce Willis, Sandra Bullock, Will Smith, Cameron Diaz, Owen Wilson, Woody Allen, Whoopi Goldberg, Vince Vaughn, Clint Eastwood, Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey Jr., and Marilyn Monroe to name a few. Audiences are drawn to these people. They want to see them in different situations, combating different sets of obstacles, and fans pay to see this as long as the actor keeps it up. “Stars tend to be defined by their immutability. John Wayne was always John Wayne. Cary Grant described the secret of star acting as becoming ‘as familiar in people’s lives as their favorite brand of tea or coffee.’”5
The style of naturalistic acting requires that you do no more and no less than exactly what you feel in the moment. This produces a perfect symmetry between what you are experiencing, thinking, and expressing. Similar to the bilateral symmetry Dr. Ekman speaks of when talking about the muscles of the face, human expression that directly reflects human experience imparts a symmetry that communicates honesty to your audience. This is honesty void of filters, buffers, and affect. It’s an openness that endears the audience to the actor who sheds the pretenses or personas we come up against in everyday life. Most of our daily interactions are varying degrees of dishonesty—boilerplate answers to, “How are you?” posturing, defensiveness, trying to appear happy or successful, feigning interest, or holding your cards close to your chest. It’s wearisome having to play and react off the protective layers used to sheath our vulnerabilities against the critical eyes of others. Opening up to your audience shows audacity in exposing yourself. Acting on your moment-to-moment impulse divests the tip of the conscious iceberg to the deepest, coldest waters of that figurative Freudian id.
It’s easy to overthink anything to do with acting, and playing yourself is no exception. “How do we know who we are?” asks Richard Hornby in The End of Acting, a treatise that challenges the dominant style. “When a Strasbergian acting teacher demands that his student play himself on stage, he implies the self is a given, but is it?”6
Hornby’s critique points to why so many analytic approaches get actors caught in their heads. I don’t think anyone can give a comprehensive definition of who they are. Such a concept is certainly far from given.
Yet in a nonconceptual sense we know exactly who we are, and others know us too. There is a consistent energy, a unity that can be recognized. It is a youness. I’ve never met an actor who couldn’t understand playing themselves in terms of just being—of honoring impulse in the moment. The screenplay strips you of the analytic component of your identity replacing it with made-up past and present circumstances. What remains of yourself is an energy, emotions, physicality, impulse, and perhaps other elemen
ts that don’t have names. As you follow the stage direction of the screenplay and speak the lines, playing yourself boils down to the energy and honest moment-to-moment impulse that breathes life into the script.
Honor everything. Deny nothing. Do not try. Do not push, trim, fluff, or suppress. Again, you simply must allow, experience, without imposing your will. Do not play your idea of how it should play. Just be. To simply be means to trust that you don’t have to show the camera anything. It will find what it’s looking for all on its own. The art of screen acting lies in something simple, honest, and largely nonanalytic. Yet due to such a lack of control in the business of acting, we exert control where we can—on the art itself, making it a lot more convoluted and taxing than it need be.
For actors who have trouble simply being, a side coaching is helpful: “You’re showing. Just feel it.” Anytime the actor’s doing anything more than reacting to the impulse, I’ll remind them. Reminders in real time allow you to course correct whenever you are doing anything more than just being. And it doesn’t take long for being to be accepted and become habit.
If you’re experiencing anxiety in the moment, honoring impulse means embracing, feeling, and expressing that impulse. The honesty is compelling and simultaneously defuses anxiety by allowing it. Playing yourself is akin to when you’re completely alone, in private, at home, relaxed, feeling and being effortlessly in the moment. It’s all this…in front of a camera. The challenge and bravery lie within that antipode.
The Science of On-Camera Acting Page 4
