When The Principles of Good Acting REALLY COUNT: Lessons Learned.

Just finished filming my first fairly serious independent short film. It was just one scene, 10 minutes of screen time. It was from a full length feature screenplay. The short will be eventually shown at festivals in order to promote both the director and screenplay, and to find funding for a full-lenght feature. The scene was well written with definite, believable characters and a believable situation, and it was shot with film (24fps), not digital.

General Insights/Principles: Problems and Lessons

I found it difficult work -- at times quite difficult, a mixed bag of successes and failures, and I'd give my overall performance a C,C+/B-: not bad, but not great.

I think I may have been miscast. The director was also the screenwriter, a very talented guy, but given this, I think the first misstep took place at the audition: the audition required a monologue, which went well. However, as the writer, naturally enough, he had very definite ideas about my character, how he should be played, right down to specific lines. These ideas were great -- however, I don't think he anticipated the difficulty I would have giving him exactly what he wanted. I suspect that if the audition consisted of reading sides from the scene, he would have had a much better idea of whether or not I could give him what he wanted, and if I had auditioned with sides, I suspect I would not have gotten the part.

But I did get the part, so what lessons can be learned from the experience?

Lesson 1: When auditioning for a film, make sure I'm reading sides for the role I'll be playing -- I suspect the director/writer has also come to this conclusion.

Second Problem: Increasingly my approach has been to decide as clearly as possible what my character wants, try to emotionally connect with that, and then during performance, I "simply" ('simply' in quotes here because it's anything but -- but it is what I strive for), I "simply" let go, and go on impulse and intuition. My standard for success is that I surprise myself -- I don't plan it out, esp. for film (and most of the advice books strongly recommend this, e.g., The Art of Film Acting, A Guide for Actors and Directors by Jeremiah Comey).

Today, however, the director, for the most part, had a very clear idea of what he wanted to see in terms of character, and he would often give line readings. The problem that I had (stemming back to miscasting) is that the line readings put me right into my head, breaking most of my emotional connection -- it was exactly the same problem I would have if I had a "picture" or "movie" of the character in my head and then tried to "do that" during performance. At least for me, that's the way of ruin. My performance is always forced, head-driven, and flat.

How I experienced the character was different then how the writer experienced him when creating him. I could not bring myself in alignment with what the director wanted. Fortunately, it was not a disagreement about what my character wanted, just about how he was going about getting what he wanted. That necessarily isn't a problem, but it is if the actor's and the director's sensibilities are fundamentally different, i.e., I should have been reading sides for the audition instead of doing a monologue, but that is lesson one, so there I was, with a problem. What to do?

Lesson 2. The Principles of Good Acting are never MORE important than when you find yourself in a position where you are struggling. In short, there wasn't really much I could do -- but I could at least stick to first principles, and that saved me at least some of the time, and today, the first and most important principle was taking in fully, completely, my partner and responding only to that -- forgetting all direction and any pre-conceptions about what I thought the director wanted to see or hear. And a few times, it worked like a charm -- the director seemed happy or at least satisfied.

The steps I tried to apply were these:

1. Before the director called "action," I reminded myself what I was after, tried to feel it, emotionally connect with it.
2. After "action," I put full attention on my partner, taking him in from head to toe, tried to sense what he was feeling and emotionally react to it even before I started speaking.
3. Go with my impulses, "ride them" (because they seem to grow and change if I let them).
4. Give myself time to react -- don't rush.

At times I just failed to do this because I'm inexperienced, and once because I had no partner -- I was talking directly to the camera. In that case I got a lot of line readings from the director, a lot of specific direction, and my performance seemed to steadily deteriorate. Again, in this latter case, I don't think there was much I could do -- the director had a very specific idea of what he wanted to hear, and I just wasn't able to do it.

Third Problem: self-direction. I've done this in stage work, and it's a disaster there too. In one case, I simply had to walk up to a person in the scene, sit down next to her, and then dialogue would start. I made a decision, because it "felt" like something the character would do, to be looking down, checking over over some forms I was carrying, as I approached her, not looking it her at all. Now, the problem was NOT this choice per se or it's consequences, that is, not looking at her until I sat down. Trying it was the right thing to do, but immediately after the first take, the cinematographer said it "felt awkward."

My mistake was sticking to my self direction, and the choice I made turned out to violate, I believe, the above principle of taking in and reacting to my partner. For whatever reason, the scene wasn't working, and I think had I taken her in as I approached her, started to react to her even before she started the first line of dialogue, I strongly suspect the scene would have gone much better. However, at the time, I simply wasn't able to debug it like this, and I probably should have run my self-directed first choice by the director before attempting it. He probably would have said "try it," and it may have helped him debug that scene. Also, I did the same sort of thing for another scene, and again, I got into trouble, again unable, until now, to pinpoint exactly what the problem was.

Lesson 3. Minimize self-directing and when I do self-direct, or if I think I am, let the director in on it. I think I just really wanted to do it, but I was afraid I'd be told no, so I just did it, and then got into trouble without knowing exactly why. Ultimately this is a problem caused by lack of experience, so I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to learn this. Another problem was doing a scene as if MY eye was the camera (really self-directing there) -- that was clearly a mistake, but it was easily corrected on subsequent takes.

Lesson 4. Surprisingly, despite the stress, especially during the scene where I was just talking to the camera and things were starting to fall apart, I was able to maintain concentration and focus, and I was able to maintain a sense of focused relaxation for the rest of the day. I can't say exactly how I did this other than I just refused to succumb to the slings and arrows that were starting to come my way. I was simply determined to stick to first principles and do my best.

(The thing that also really helped was just staying by myself, staying quiet, closing my eyes, and meditating/relaxing between takes).

Conclusions

All in all, a very valuable (albeit painful) experience, but one (after a few hours of serious reflection) I'm glad to have had. The problems, I feel, really came down to not taking every opportunity of reacting to my partner, and second, to basic miscasting. However, I was very, VERY, surprised at how simply doing what I wrote in lesson #2 above counteracted the problems of miscasting. It really saved me, when I was able to do it.

And with all the takes, with any luck at all, my C/B- performance might be upgraded to a B or maybe even an B+, at least with some cuts/scenes. Editing will certainly improve things, at least to some extent, and there should be lot of opportunities for editing: it was a 10 minute scene that took about 20 hours and 40 "shots" to film -- that's 2 hours per minute of screen time. It was a serious, well thought-out, detailed shoot.