Playing yourself has been taught for decades, and different schools have different ways of instilling this. At the school for the arts I attended as a child, we were drilled on being honest, honoring the impulse, doing no more or no less than what came up for us in the moment as we read through the pages of our script. It wasn’t until I came out to Los Angeles that I met the champion of what he’s termed the being-state movement. I highly recommend these books by Eric Morris (no relation): No Acting Please7 and the workbook Being and Doing8 that provide many stream-of-consciousness exercises to overcome any blocks to simply being. As I said, I have found minor side coaching is usually all that’s required, but his exercises are also effective and fun.
Experiment with honoring impulse when preparing a role that involves naturalism or playing yourself.
Chapter Endnotes
1 Seuss, Dr., Happy Birthday to You! (New York: Random House, 1959).
2 Hornby, Richard, The End of Acting: a Radical View (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992).
3 Racca, Anaïs, Kun Guo, Kerstin Meints, and Daniel Mills, “Reading Faces: Differential Lateral Gaze Bias in Processing Canine and Human Facial Expressions in Dogs and 4-Year-Old Children,” PLOS ONE, April 27, 2012, www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0036076, accessed May 21, 2014.
4 Hornby, Richard, The End of Acting: a Radical View (New York: Applause Theatre Books, 1992).
5 Macnab, Geoffrey, “The Madness of Daniel Day-Lewis—a Unique Method that has Led to a Deserved Third Oscar,” the Independent, www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/the-madness-of-daniel-daylewis--a-unique-method-that-has-led-to-a-deserved-third-oscar-8510704.html, accessed July 6, 2014.
6 Ibid.
7 Morris, Eric, and Joan Hotchkis, No Acting, Please (Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 2002).
8 Morris, Eric, Being & Doing: A Workbook for Actors (Los Angeles, CA: Ermor Enterprises, 1981).
Troubleshooting Naturalistic Acting
There are several impediments to naturalism that this next section addresses.
Being “small”
It is overly simplistic to talk about being big or small. Issues that often arise have to do with the actor’s behavior being disproportionate to the underlying impulse. As we discussed, authenticity is determined by the natural balance or symmetry between what you’re experiencing and what you’re expressing. The camera picks up if anything’s the slightest bit out of sync and broadcasts the imbalance for your audience, who will be disappointed that you shattered their suspension of disbelief.
That said, if the impulse is big, corresponding grandiosity can play just fine. Screen acting does not prohibit big movements. Consider Al Pacino in the Attica scene from Dog Day Afternoon. Largeness must simply be grounded in strong impulse as the camera catches when an actor colors even the slightest bit outside the line. You must also be aware of the parameters of the shot—whether large impulse and movement fits coherently inside the frame.
Although less may be more, being small does not mean small energy. Being relaxed does not mean low energy. There is often a misunderstanding in translation from the conceptual to the physical. When asked to be small, don’t deflate. Like sticking a pin in a blow-up raft, don’t exhale deeply and purge your energy, mumbling unintelligibly through barely parted teeth. Practice exhaling lightly while remaining alert, both mentally and physically.
The camera picks up physical energy. A friend of mine was describing laser eye surgery, where a laser is shot into your eye and ablates part of your cornea returning 20/20 vision. During the procedure the patient is asked to hold perfectly still and look straight ahead without the slightest movement while the laser eye surgeon shoots a white-hot laser into the patient’s eye. Most people panic about having to hold so still. The thought “Must. Not. Move.” can make it virtually impossible to restrain yourself. Yet, in the time it takes for the irritation of a particle of dust or a thought to hit your brain and send a signal to prime the muscles in your eyes that would allow a flicker of eye movement, the laser machine senses your body priming to move and shuts off. It detects the physiology that predicts a reflexive movement within fractions of a second. Although none of us are laser-eye-surgery machines, thousands of years of evolution have endowed us with the ability to detect priming, or absence of priming, of the muscles of the face and body. Yet another similarity between acting and the practice of meditation is that you must remain relaxed but alert. When a person’s face and posture do not appear primed to react to external stimuli or internal thought, your performance flatlines and you lose your life. This is perhaps why it is commonly said that acting is reacting.
A well-known TV actress and I were running lines in a hotel room while on location in Washington State. She exhaled deeply and caught herself, saying it was a bad habit she was trying to correct. She had an urge to relax with a full exhale, and demonstrated how, with the deep exhale, she lost the life of her character.
Another friend of mine stopped by after an audition, flopped down in my papasan chair and lamented, “Ever notice sometimes you think you’re being real but you’re actually just boring?” I had indeed seen him deflate into boring when being small and real and I’d been guilty of it myself.
If you are finding you are boring and losing your life when being small on-camera, keep breathing but do not expel your energy by exhaling a deep breath. Keep some adrenalin in your body by not over-relaxing and over-exhaling. Adrenalin produces different degrees of tension in the body. Unless you are playing someone who is seriously impaired, some degree of tension in an actor makes them riveting to watch. Too much tension produces anxiety and can become painful to watch. It’s best to aim for the adrenalin balance of alertness. Alertness is tension without anxiety. Adrenalin release happens along a physiological continuum. You must become a master observer and maestro of this continuum. We will talk more about this in coming chapters.
Tears and laughter
Tears
Intense dramatic scenes often call for tears. Even if braying sobs aren’t explicitly stated in the stage direction, you might feel the flow of tears to be the most appropriate response to the circumstances of the script. Perhaps it’s a scenario where your children or the love of your life have been murdered. Usually the writers come up with something spectacularly devastating. Even if the writing is really good, an artificial environment and repetitive takes make it difficult to reproduce tears. It’s not a failing on your part as an actor. The more aware you are, the more engaged you are with the truth of the moment, the more challenging this becomes. Your natural being-state may not get you to this emotionally heightened place, and it’s death to start trying.
Fortunately there are two physical cues that can defuse effort and leave you in the moment with authentic tears.
When a scene requires reaction to tragedy, the first stage of the five stages of grief is denial. The first stage of grief also happens to be the height of drama, more powerful than the tension released with the flow of tears. The onset of grief is often a protracted moment before the breaking point. It’s a moment when the character is in shock, overwhelmed, and allowing the flow of tears would mean acknowledging the reality of the unspeakable. Denial may last a brief moment, though sometimes it forges on for excruciating durations. Denial is intense. Your audience holds their breath, imagining this moment happening to them, being horribly ill prepared for an emotional onslaught of this magnitude. The immediate reaction to the first stage of grief—denial—isn’t a gush of tears. In fact, a reaction vacant of emotion often reads on camera as a state of shock so profound, a calm before the storm so quiet, that what comes next could rock us to the core. It brings your audience to a point of such empathy and compassion, we are likely to break down if you do. So don’t give in to relief too easily. Do not encourage tears, resist them. Resistance reverse engineers a buildup of tears. Resistance is also the state a person naturally finds themselves when struggling with denial. Resisting an emot
ion fuels it, which is usually an unfortunate catch-22 for an actor, but in this case it’s exactly what you need. Let the intensity build until you can barely hold back, then let the tears flow.
* * *
“I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.”
Frank Capra1
* * *
Incidentally, this is also the key to playing “drunk.” Drunks are usually trying to keep it together. Relax all the muscles in your face and body and resist looking and speaking like a drunk.
A second, more mechanical way of triggering2 the flow of tears is a method actors have used for years. Warning: in order to avoid being sued by someone who will undoubtedly figure out a way to hurt themselves with Vaporub®, I must advise you not to try this at home. Disclaimers aside, the method I’m about to describe has been used successfully by myself and thousands of screen actors for generations.
Dabbing the tiniest dot of Vicks® Vaporub® just below the tear ducts—not in the eye, mind you, but just below—brings on many of the physiological responses to sadness, including tears. Very real tears will flow freely down your face. Menthol is the same ingredient used by makeup artists on-set, blown through a needleless syringe stuffed with cotton to protect against a menthol crystal being shot into your eye. I’ve had a crystal bypass the cotton and land on my eye—an incredibly painful experience that required the services of medics. Safety with Vaporub® is not difficult for most who use the tiniest amount of the substance just below the eye. Beauty supplies for film professionals carry a menthol lipstick that is both portable and easily dabbed in the corners of the eyes.
The menthol method is generally used for recording auditions at home or actual jobs on-set, and is trickier in live audition situations with casting directors. Another warning about menthol: menthol isn’t a switch you can turn off and on. You may not want to apply it in front of the casting director and you may not want to apply it before walking in the room or you’ll look on the verge of mental collapse before a job interview.
Laughter
Another big challenge actors face is pulling off authentic laughter. Celeste Holm tells a story about shooting the 1949 film All About Eve with Bette Davis, for which both actresses were nominated for an Academy Award. Bette Davis was notoriously difficult to work with and had strained relations with the entire cast and crew. Davis and Holm were shooting a scene together near the end of the film where Holm was required to laugh—to burst out laughing and not let up. Holm was pulling it off through multiple takes. At one point Bette Davis turned to her co-star and, disgruntled, she muttered, “You can do that?…I can’t do that.” Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz overheard this and ordered repeat takes of Celeste Holm laughing to rub it in Bette Davis’s face.3
The trick to authentic laughter when moving in for coverage4 is to have someone on-set sit below frame and tickle your feet. As utterly absurd or contrived as this may sound, if you’re even the slightest bit ticklish, this trick will evoke real, authentic laughter, ample peals of joy for your director to cut together in post.
Again, laughter derived from tickling is laughter derived from impulse in the moment, not from mental exertions. You can gum up your brain trying to psych yourself into a laugh, a counterfeit for the real thing, or you can use tricks to leave yourself wide open for impulse, inspiration, and reflexive laughter in every moment.
Saccades, fixation, and nictation: how the camera reads your thoughts
When you scan your surroundings visually, your eyes dance over objects, darting from one point of focus to another. As your eyes appraise an area with these little jumps, your mind is putting together a meaningful mental map of the outside world. Your eyes react to thoughts in much the same way they react to objects in your environment. When trying to string your thoughts together, your eyes saccade, which is the technical term for rapidly shifting from one point of focus to another. When your mind lands on a thought inside your head, your eyes land on an object in the outside world. Even though the object is in your field of view, you are not really seeing this object. That is, you are not paying attention to it. It is as if the object you are looking at when you are deep in thought is a visual surrogate for the thought inside your head. When you are trying to put together a string of several thoughts, your eyes shift between several objects in your environment, landing on them without paying attention to them, saccading and fixating for brief moments. When the ideas finally come together to form a larger, meaningful idea, your eyes are likely to fixate on a single external object for a somewhat longer beat. The muscles around your eyes contract slightly as you stare, deep in thought. This is a version of perceptual blindness called cognitive capture, as you stare at something, not really looking at it but focused instead on the thought inside your head. An increase in saccades and fixation durations indicate someone is immersed in thought.5
In addition to saccades and fixation, as you think you engage in nictation, the technical term for blinking. You only require between two and four blinks a minute to keep your eyes healthily lubricated yet we tend to blink up to twenty times per minute. Evidence suggests that you blink to release your attention on a thought.6 Each time you blink you reset your mind to a default state so you can shift your attention from one thought to another. This is not the same as a nervous twitch where eyelids blink distractingly. Fifteen to twenty blinks per minute looks perfectly natural.
When an actor tries to recall an inner monologue or lines that have been committed to memory by rote, the actor often engages in conspicuously fewer saccades and less nictation. This is a subliminal give-away that you have slipped into autopilot and the lines are not stemming from meaningful, spontaneous thoughts. When looking for a line and not for meaning, mechanical, autopilot performances, or performances that are too ‘clean’ often reveal a sluggish blink rate and fewer saccades during playback.
One way to refresh your performance is to make it ‘dirty.’ I.e., when trying to think of what you want to say, you might flutter your eyes or fiddle with something for a fleeting moment. You may utter small noises; soft sighs, an “ah” or “um.” Dirtying up a scene, or making it coarse means taking the time to search for the words while engaging in subtle, flustered behaviors associated with thinking. These behaviors emerge when we are unable to retrieve certain thoughts or the right word choice instantaneously. The struggle reflexively produces saccades and nictation. It may be helpful to consider these little ripples of activity the run-off produced as the brain makes meaning. Peppering a scene with this kind of behavior is not a protracted act. It happens in the briefest of beats. It takes just a moment to touch on the words you were looking for, but that spec of mental lint breaks up an overly sanitized scene.
Saccades, fixation and nictation are processes that walk audiences up to the entryway of your thoughts, but bar complete access. Audiences can relate on such a profound, instinctual level while remaining separated by a chasm to the mystery steeled inside another’s mind. Saccades, fixation and nictation gives your audience little glimmers of insight into your character’s inner world by revealing the shape of unspoken thoughts while withholding the details, a tease that human nature finds irresistible.
* * *
"Cognitive psychologists now tell us that the brain doesn’t see the world as it is but instead creates a series of mental models through a collection of aha! moments, or moments of discovery.”
Tom Wujec, Information designer7
* * *
To avoid an overly sanitized or stale scene in the first place, do not pre-determine any thoughts, inner monologue or subtext. Moments of discovery by definition cannot be previously known or rehearsed. Audiences cannot read your thoughts, but they can detect when meaning is being brewed behind your eyes and the discovery that follows. By allowing for whatever thoughts come up naturally, you allow meaning, which effortlessly produces saccades, fixation and nictation and innumerable bits and pieces of what it means to be human.
Looking
versus seeing
We spend a lot of time looking at things and not actually seeing them because we are absorbed by the thoughts inside our own heads. It’s common and perfectly natural. The transition from looking to actually seeing will frequently be indicated in screenplays. For example, an actor may be playing a character sitting at his desk at work, lost in thought. A coworker enters the scene. “Oh hi,” his character says to the character who just entered, “I didn’t see you there.” At the same moment, it’s not uncommon for the actor to do a small eyebrow jump, blink, or small double-take with the head or eyes to indicate he is now seeing this new character. This action is often a misinterpretation of subtle physiology. For the most part, actors are unaware they did anything that looks artificial until they see it during playback.
What frequently happens in life is that you’re hanging out inside your head, thinking, your eyes are passively looking around, saccadding from one external object to the next as you jump from one thought to another. Or you fixate on an object and “stare into space.” Then someone enters your field of vision out of the corner of your eye, or perhaps they walk right up to you, and you look at them for a fraction of a second before seeing them. It isn’t a little double-take or small, surprised jolt. It’s a moment while you experience a visual reverse dissolve. Your attention is grabbed and your unfocused gaze sharpens into focus. It is phenomenally subtle and universally picked-up on. It's a mental and corneal adjustment. Practice this by looking directly at someone while getting distracted by a thought. After a few moments, come out of your thought and bring the person in front of you back into focus. Register them visually before speaking to them. On-camera, you must allow the briefest moment for the mental shift and the lenses of your eyes to sharpen form an unfocused gaze to a focused one.
The Science of On-Camera Acting Page 5
