On Directing Actors for Film/Video
Posted on March 25, 2009 in Directing | 1 Comment
By IQ forum member: KillerCordova
Before we start, know this, I can only teach what I know, and I know only what I was taught, and a small bit more. I acknowledge that this isn’t complete, but it’s worked well for me, and hopefully it’ll work well with refining your technique a bit more as well.
This is all about refining your technique, you don’t have to use everything (I don’t, I think I’ve probably even forgotten some of what I was taught that I don’t use all that often), it’s all about doing whatever it takes (within reason) to get the result you need.
If you have any other methods you’d like to share, or styles (or if you know more about this and know what this style is called) then please share.
Let’s start with the simple obvious fact that acting for the camera is obviously different than acting on a stage. It’s a much more realistic medium, and thus requires a much more realistic actor and acting style.
The first assumption made under all Method based acting techniques is that no human being can accurately control his or her emotions. Our emotions are dictated by one thing alone, our desires (also called: objectives, intentions, motivations, drives, etc.) and whether or not we succeed in attaining those desires.
Good feelings come from getting what you want, and bad feelings from failing to get what you want.
People in real life have millions of desires and drives, but you can break them down in most scripts to two or three objectives, the scene objective(s) and the super objective(s).
The scene objective is what a character wants in that particular scene, generally from another character within it (Jack Bauer needs the password from the terrorist). The super objective is what the character wants out of their life (Jack Bauer wants to live in a safe country (yes all references in this article will be in relation to 24, sorry to non fans and to Fox for ripping you off, but you just made the ultimate killer male character to replace Chuck Norris)).
Different objectives lead to different flavors of acting, and there may also be a different script super-objective to keep the flow of the story going (I.E. your character has something to do in the scene, in the script overall, and in life in general).
Since your talent now knows why they’re in that particular location with that particular person, he needs a way to get what he wants. So you give them an action, something to do, a verb.
You can tell your talent to “be angry” and they will, but in my opinion, no matter how incredible the actor is, it comes across as overplayed, the better the actor or actress the less so, but that’s not the point.
From what I’ve experienced, it’s always been more realistic to ask actor to do something that will make them angry, or cause them angry emotions, ask them to “abuse” the other actor with their words, ask them to “defend” themselves, or ask them to “snap” or “fly off the handle”, all of which are things to do, not ways to be.
Please note, more realistic acting does not always equal better, see also: Boondock Saints.
Having different actions for different scenes will give you vastly different results. You have a different story if Jack Bauer is “terrorizing” the evil gunman, than if he is “seducing” them, don’t you?
Giving them something to do brings you closer to the most basic part of directing an actor, you need them to be in the moment. Their performance should come from the other people in the scene.
Let me put it this way. Interesting results can occur during the course of a normal scene when you give one actor a secondary goal of sitting down in the only chair in the room, while giving the other the reverse goal of never leaving said chair. Have a skilled actor or actress perform these actions while reciting their lines, and you’ll notice a difference in the way they perform their lines immediately, and so will they.
Once these concepts become familiar to yourself and you start to get what’s going on, there’s one last thing for you to wrap your mind around, and that’s the fairly simple idea of a given circumstance.
This concept is familiar to every storymaker in all history, these are simply the events that surround where a character is, who they are, where they are, what they’re doing, and why they’re doing it.
These are events that an performer must believe about themselves in order to successfully fill the role of the character. Sometimes it’s not so obvious. And sometimes you want it to be less obvious.
How tremendous of a job of acting do you think Mark Hamill would have done if he had never read in the script that Darth Vader was his father, but had only found out about it on set, and in character?
Hopefully there’s something for you to think about in there the next time you take the set.
One Comment
need more information about direction