Brando, Songs My Mother Taught Me

by Marlon Brando

  Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc’d it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to see a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipp’d for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it.

  What follows is excellent advice for every actor:

  Be not too tame, neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve …

  The evolution of English theater came to full flower in Kenneth Branagh’s production of Henry V. He did not injure the language; he showed a reverence for it, and followed Shakespeare’s instructions precisely. It was an extraordinary accomplishment of melding the realities of human behavior with the poetry of language. I can’t imagine Shakespeare being performed with more refinement. In America we are unable to approach such refinements, and of course we have no taste for it. If given the choice between Branagh’s production of Henry V or Arnold Schwarzenegger’s The Terminator, there’s hardly a question of where most television dials would be turned. If the expenditure of money for entertainment in America is any indication of taste, clearly the majority of us are addicted to trash.

  The theatrical experience is a little-understood phenomenon. I’m not sure that I understand it. It seems mysterious to me that people will spend hard-earned cash to go to a building that contains a large darkened room where people sit and look at two-dimensional figures reflected on a screen and invest the entire spectrum of their emotions in what appears to be an approximation of reality. They’ll be moved to tears, laughter, empathy, or experience truly deep fear, sometimes becoming frightened for days, perhaps years, by the memory of what they saw. It is even harder to understand that audiences in Japan can be so deeply moved by the Noh theater, in which actors wear masks and classical clothing, and where movement and voice are restricted and highly stylized. On the other hand, humans are able to see images in clouds, in cracks in the ceiling and in Rorschach tests. They are also able to look at drawings and make up stories suggested to them by their unconscious. These kinds of tests are often used to establish psychological profiles, so what seems apparent in this peculiar ability is that we don’t see what we behold in front of us. As Shakespeare wisely pointed out, we hold a mirror up to our “nature.” We are forever reading emotions into people’s comments or facial expressions—emotions that are not intended. It seems clear that this peculiarity of the human mind determines to a large extent the composition of our psyche. All of us are looking through the lens of our own perspective, and this applies even to such subjects as a particular interpretation of quantum physics.

  These strange characteristics can be witnessed in an actor’s performance. Often actors choose to underplay a moment in the drama. If he shows little or no reaction, the audience will try to imagine what he is feeling. Sometimes actors are superb in their underplaying, but others can’t wait to hit their head on the top of their part. The great Jewish actor Jacob P. Adler, Stella’s father, advised his company of actors, “If you come to the theater and feel a hundred percent, show them eighty percent. If you feel sixty percent, show them forty percent, but if you only feel forty percent, put the understudy onstage.”

  Never hit your head on the top of your part, Stella said. There are some roles in which less is more, and you should underplay them. Jimmy Cagney had both great acting talent and a terrific presence. He had a distinctive look, a very strong, clear personality, and was a self-made actor. He never went to acting school. But unlike most actors of his generation, he tried to take on the subtle aspects of his characters. He believed he was the character and made audiences believe it.

  One of the most difficult lessons an actor has to learn is not to leave the fight in the gym. In other words, you must learn to keep your emotion simmering all day long, but never boiling over. If you give everything you’ve got in the long shot, you will have less in the medium shot and, where you need it most, in the close shots. You must learn to pace yourself so that you don’t dry up when the close shot comes. Even smart performance directors—and God knows there are few of them—misuse the actor unless they are experienced.

  As an example, in my first movie, The Men, I had an emotional scene in which I had to admit to myself that I would never be able to walk again or to make love. It was a scene in which it was proper to cry. I got to the studio at 7:30 A.M. and went to my dressing room loaded with mood music, poetry and anything else that would elicit an emotional response. I played the scene over and over in my mind, rehearsed it quietly and was moved. But by 9:30 A.M., when I had to play the scene, I had nothing left. I had left the fight in the gym. I have remembered that moment ever since.

  Unless you’re fully experienced, some directors can destroy you with their insensitivity. An actor’s motivation often depends on focusing sharply on small details. If a director doesn’t prepare the crew and the other actors, he can destroy the mood of a scene. Directors don’t realize how hard it is to create a fragile emotional impression, and how easy it is to break the spell. The most fatiguing aspect about acting is turning your emotions on and off. It’s not like pushing a light switch and saying, “I’m going to be angry and kick the walls now,” and then becoming yourself again. If you have an intense scene involving sadness or anger, you may have to hover in the same emotional territory for hours, and this can be extremely taxing. Some directors don’t understand this because they were never actors, or else were bad ones.

  An actor can profit greatly from a good director, but often directors who have a sense of inadequacy try to conceal this by being authoritative and issuing commands and ultimatums. With such directors, who mistake 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 di
fferent 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.

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  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 resonance to the particular story or character. The reason for this is that we all bring to the theater varying experiences and attitudes that affect how we respond to a story. The same thing happens to people who hear a political speech and have diametrically opposite reactions about it.

  Not long ago I saw Runaway Train, a film, directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, about the flight of two escaped prisoners, with wonderful performances by Jon Voight, Eric Roberts, Rebecca DeMornay and Kyle T. Heffner. The picture was only moderately successful at the box office, but I was overwhelmed by it, largely because of what I brought to the characters. As mentioned previously, throughout my life I have always had a strong need to feel free, so in the escaped convict (played by Jon Voight), who stood atop the runaway train in temperatures twenty degrees below zero determined never to return to prison, even knowing that he was likely to die, I saw myself and experienced his feelings. The emotional reverberation made the picture an extraordinary experience for me. Other people, who don’t want that freedom, would see it differently; for them the natural desirable state is to submit to authority.

  I recall watching the Nazi propaganda films made by Hitler’s filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, in which thousands of people gathered in a stadium, and as the Führer arrived they raised their hands in the Nazi salute, transfixed and mesmerized by the experience. In such moments as this the German people invented Hitler, just as Americans invented some of their myths about FDR when they listened to his Fireside Chats, wanting to believe that he had a solution to their problems in the depth of the Depression.

  The Germans in the stadium at Nuremberg didn’t know that Hitler was an unstable, maniacal personality, and that the people around him were thugs, liars and murderers. They were creating myths about him in the theater of their minds. They cheered, marched and saluted on automatic pilot, no longer masters of themselves because they imbued Hitler with their dreams of wanting to be led and to feel proud of Germany again. There is theater in everything we see or do during the day. As Hitler demonstrated, one of the basic characteristics of the human psyche is that it is easily swayed by suggestion. Our susceptibility to it is phenomenal, and it is the job of the actor to manipulate this suggestibility.

  As in On the Waterfront (or, for me, Runaway Train), the most effective performances are those in which audiences identify with the characters and the situations they face, then become the characters in their own minds. If the story is well written and the actor doesn’t get in the way, it’s a natural process.

  Ultimately, I suppose that what makes people willing to part with their hard-earned cash and enter a theater is that it allows them to savor a variety of human experiences without having to pay the normal price for them. Maybe it’s equivalent to the emotion people feel when they jump off a bridge with a bungee cord tied to their ankles: they fall two hundred feet and experience the sensation of being at the edge of death, then bounce back safely, just as we do when we walk out of a theater unscathed after undergoing a harrowing experience.

  It is no accident that plays are performed in the dark, for this allows audiences to exclude others and be alone with the characters; in the dark other people cease to exist. There is something peculiar about the process, which started long before Greek drama. It probably began when men first left their caves to hunt, and the women, children and old men left behind danced and acted out stories to counteract their boredom.

  Acting, not prostitution, is the oldest profession in the world. Even apes act. If you want to invite trouble from one, lock your eyes on his and stare. It’s enough of an assault to make the animal rise, pound his chest and feign a charge; he is acting, hoping that his gestures will make you avert your eyes.

  Storytelling is a basic part of every human culture—people have always had a need to participate emotionally in stories—and so the actor has probably played an important part in every society. But he should never forget that it is the audience that really does the work and is a pivotal part of the process: every theatrical event, from those taking place in Stone Age caves to Punch-and-Judy shows and Broadway plays, can produce an emotional participation from the audience, who become the actors in the drama.

  A lot of actors are credited with great performances that really weren’t extraordinary because the audience simply was moved by a well-written story and the situation facing a character. As I’ve already said, Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront is a good example of this. I was moved by The Elephant Man, in which John Hurt portrayed a man in Victorian England who was afflicted by a horrible, disfiguring disease and was heckled and ridiculed by strangers. But as the story evolved, his humanity was revealed and he became every member of the audience who ever maintained dignity in the face of hardship or abuse. When I saw the picture, I cried because I was touched. John Hurt is a very good actor, and has proved it in several parts, including Caligula in the television production of I, Claudius, in which he was brilliant. But his role in The Elephant Man was one of those actor-proof parts and he just couldn’t miss.

  Still, the reverse is often true: sometimes actors are given a nearly impossible challenge because a story is poorly written or not realistic, and when they do a good job, they don’t get the credit they deserve. I’ve seen many great performances go unrecognized because audiences don’t realize how difficult they were.

  Of course, different actors apply different techniques to attain their goals. Laurence Olivier is an example. After the sun set on the British Empire, England began to lose touch with Shakespeare and the great traditions of the British theater that were the legacy of the greatest writer the world has ever known. But almost single-handedly Olivier revived the classical British theater and helped to stabilize English culture. His con
tributions were unequaled, though of course he had the help of the wonderful repertory actors at the Old Vic. While I believe that Larry did his best acting toward the end of his life, when I think of him as an actor, I perceive him mostly as an architect. He designed his parts beautifully, but they were like sketches engraved with an etching tool on a sheet of copper. He said every line the same way every time. He hated the thought of improvising and said, “I’m an ‘outside-in’ actor, not an ‘inside-out actor.’ ” Everything he did had to be structured in advance, and he always stuck to the blueprint. He was uncomfortable with me and other actors influenced by Stella Adler and the Russian school of acting, and probably felt a much deeper kinship with performers whose roots were more traditional. This kind of acting can be effective on the stage because audiences are far away, but it becomes absurd in movies, in which audiences can see actors’ expressions magnified hundreds of times in close-ups.