• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 428 0

you for a draft horse pulling a beer wagon, you’re obliged to fight back. A surprising number of directors think they know everything. Not only do they have little insight into or understanding of what it is to be an actor or what the acting process is, but they have no notion of how one develops a characterization. They hand you a script and tell you to report for work on Monday; it’s left to you to create your role. If you’re working with a director who doesn’t have good taste, or who is dangerous because he lacks sound instincts, you have to take over and make sure a scene works right; in effect, you must direct it yourself. If the director has misconceived a part and continues to insist that you play it his way, you have to outmaneuver him by giving such a poor performance that you know he won’t be able to use it—though in the process you may ruin your reputation. In a close-up or a shot taken over the shoulder—anything close—give him nine bad takes, blow your lines, give a weak performance and wear him down. Then, finally, when you know he’s tired and frustrated, you give him the one take in which you do it the way it should be done. By then he’s so pleased and grateful to get the scene out of the way that he’ll print it. You don’t give him a choice. You have to play such games with untalented directors.

If someone decided to produce a play the way people make movies in Hollywood, he’d be laughed off the stage. Before putting a play on Broadway, the actors and director sit around for five to six weeks, talk about motivation, discuss the script and the characters, go through the story, walk around the stage, try different approaches and eventually put the show on its feet. Then they take the play to Schenectady or New Haven, test it before audiences, fine-tune it and after eight weeks return to New York to hold previews. Eventually, after everything has been edited, reedited and refined, there is an opening night. In Hollywood you usually have a meeting to make a deal where the talk is all about money, “points” and “profit participation.” Then you’re given a script, told to come to the set with your part in your pocket, and from then on are mostly on your own. Motion-picture directors rarely give you the vaguest hint of how to realize your character. If it’s any good, most acting in pictures is improvisational because the cast receives such little help from its director. Sometimes when you improvise you advance the story and the drama, but not always. If you’re playing Tennessee Williams, you should stick to the script, but most scripts are not written in stone, so you can change them in a way that makes you feel more comfortable. Every once in a while you run into a script that is not very good, with a director who thinks that it is. Such a situation is to be avoided at all costs from the beginning.

In my experience one of the few directors who prepared a movie sensibly was Elia Kazan, who was not only an actor but had directed stage plays. What if Broadway producers hired an actor for a part, met with him once or twice, then told him to report to work that evening for opening night? It would be considered irresponsible, and no one in the theater would do it, but in motion pictures, those are normal operating procedures.

On the stage you can change the emphasis of a scene, set the tempo and determine from the response of the out-of-town audience the key emotional points in a play. But in the movies the director says, “Cut” and “Print,” and that’s it. In the cutting room they can make chicken feed out of the scene if they want to. The actor has no control unless he has enough experience to know how to play the game, take charge and give only the performance he wants to give.

The moral is, never give a stupid, egotistical, insensitive or inept director an even break.

30

OFTEN WE HEAR SOMEONE coming out of a movie theater say, “My God, what a picture! What a job of acting! I was so moved that I cried my heart out!” while his or her companion says, “I was bored to death.” For the latter there was no emotional