An Improvised Life

by Alan Arkin

  When I directed the film version of Little Murders, I was fortunate enough to work with Gordon Willis, one of our greatest cinematographers. In discussing how we were going to put the film together, when something didn’t feel right Gordon would say, “No, that’s a piece out of the ball.” I finally asked him what he meant by that. He said, “When a sequence is working right it should roll in any direction, straight on like a bowling ball with no dents in it.” I knew what he meant. We both wanted seamlessness. When I go to a film and come out talking about a performance, or a lighting effect, or the music, or a fancy shot, the movie doesn’t work. It works when I don’t see any of that. When I’m caught up in the event. When I’m moved. When I’m affected by the entirety. My life has been changed by films I’ve seen, and I don’t want a trip to the theater to be two mindless hours out of my life.

  For example, I remember seeing a wonderful performance of Spencer Tracy’s that gave me a perspective on the nature of guilt. The film was State of the Union. Tracy played an industrialist who had a lot of firebrand and revolutionary political ideas. The character had no trouble expressing them eloquently and passionately, and was ultimately asked to run for president. He did so, and as the film went on, his winning the election started looking more and more possible. Inevitably, his advisers, thinking he could win, asked him to tone down the incendiary aspects of his platform in order to get more votes. Tracy followed their advice, and one of the last scenes in the film is his reading of his final radio address to his wife, played by Katharine Hepburn. He reads the speech to Hepburn, and asks her what she thinks of it. “Do you want me to tell you the truth?” she says. “Yes,” Tracy answers. “It’s terrible,” says Hepburn. “You’ve sold yourself down the river.” She goes on to tell him that in order to win the election he’s turned into the same kind of political hack he’s denounced his whole life. Tracy listens to her quietly and then has to immediately go on the air and read the speech. He goes up to the mike, rips up the speech, and tells the American people what has happened to him, what he has allowed himself to become—that he’d sold out for a cheap success. The words are contrite and self-disparaging, the kind of speech we see on TV all the time now, where we witness an endless parade of celebrities using the media as the new confession box. Tracy did a version of that, but in his confession his tone was anger at himself. He was enraged at what he had allowed himself to become. There was no obsequiousness, no fawning, no cringing, no asking for forgiveness; he was angry at himself. And in the anger was his power, and I found myself saying, “He’s never going to do it again. He’s over with that behavior.” Yes, he admitted his fault, but there was none of that servile submission to guilt that says “This is what I’m like. I’ll probably do this again.” It was a great life lesson.

  Another film that changed me was My Dinner with Andre . I remember coming out of the theater embarrassed at what I’d allowed myself to think were the rules of “film making.” “It’s a visual medium,” we are told, over and over again. “The camera tells the story.” And then there’s My Dinner with Andre. We sit in the theater and watch two people at a table in a restaurant talking to each other for two hours. Just talking and listening to each other. And it is riveting. I can barely conceive of the creators and their meetings with producers, trying to sell the film.

  I had occasion to spend a day with Arnold Palmer a few years ago. I’ve never had much feeling for golf, never thought about it much, but after spending a few hours with him I started wondering what it must be like for a professional golfer to be in the middle of an important tournament. I realized that of all the competitive sports, golf might possibly be the hardest under pressure. There’s no leeway. If you’re a sixteenth of an inch off with your stroke, the ball can be a hundred feet off at the end of the fairway. I wondered about this, and asked him if he ever felt anxious during tournaments, if he felt pressure. “Sure,” he admitted. “What do you do when you feel that?” I asked. “I go back to basics,” he said easily. Of course. It’s what he would have to have said. Keep your eye on the ball. Breathe. One of the greatest golfers in history, and he’s not ashamed to go back to the beginning. To start all over again each time he goes out to play. Once again, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

  Jean Renoir was one of the greatest film directors of all time. His scripts, mostly written by him, were also brilliant. And, on top of that, he was a fine actor. His films make you want to jump onto the screen and join in the fun. There is an effortless ease to all of them, which hides his extraordinary mastery of the medium, and a brilliance with the camera that can be fully appreciated only if you turn off the sound and watch one of his films without the distraction of the story and the performances.

  Renoir’s first rehearsals consisted of gathering the cast together and reading the script several times with no intent to “act,” reading as if it were a laundry list, or the phone book. Intuitively, Renoir understood and had adapted the lesson of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. This method prevented his actors from making quick and obvious choices about their characters; it prevented them from falling into clichés.

  I remember using this method once in a film where an old friend and I were playing the leads. We sat for two days reading the script, devoid of any commitment, of any expression, injecting none of our own ideas or personalities into the material, simply seeing, feeling what the author and his characters were telling us. For the first couple of hours, alone with my friend, I felt tremendous anxiety. Fear, even. Most of me wanted to jump into a safe old place, even though there was absolutely nothing at stake. At any moment I could have done that, but I stayed with the method even though it was new, naked, and unsettling. I think the performance that resulted is one of the best things I ever did.

  Our tendency when reading a script for the first time is to tell ourselves we know how to do it. So we dredge up the old formulas and clichés that have gotten us to whatever position we’ve earned in the industry, making sure that we don’t make fools of ourselves or, even worse, get fired, and we breathe a sigh of relief when the first readings are done.

  Over and over again, throughout the years, I’ve seen examples within my craft and, for that matter, in all of life that showed me the necessity of looking through the new eyes of a beginner. The more craft I developed, the more that need grew. In my film work I reached a point where, on occasion, just before beginning a scene, I would force myself to think about other things. Then, on “action,” I would throw myself into an event that I had rehearsed for weeks, but in the instant of doing it became brand new, often providing a wonderful surprise. There are actors by the thousands who work on their part and then do it exactly as they prepared it. Sometimes these actors have prodigious gifts. Sometimes they are capable of deeply moving an audience with these gifts. But I wonder, finally, what they end up learning about themselves, what gifts they end up giving themselves. For me, every activity I engage in has to contain the possibility of internal growth; otherwise it ends up as either “making a living” or “passing the time”—two ways of going through life that feel to me like a living death. I want to know with every passing moment that I am alive, that I am conscious, that with every breath I take there will be some possibility of growth, of surprise, and of complete spontaneity.

  intermission

  Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud, two of the greatest actors of the English theater, worked together a lot. On one of these occasions Geilgud was directing, with Richardson playing the lead role. As rehearsals went on, Geilgud noticed that Richardson was behaving a bit strangely. Richardson was spending a lot of time pacing around, frowning, and talking to himself. Gielgud watched him go through this for a while, then asked him what the problem was. Richardson said, “I don’t know what it is. I’m having trouble with the opening scene. With my first entrance. I feel as if the entire part hinges on the way I come through the door for the first time. If I can find my first entrance I think I’ll have the whole thing. In fact, I’m quite sure I’ll have th
e whole thing. But I can’t find it. Haven’t got a clue.” Gielgud consoled him, confident that Richardson would find what he needed; he always did.

  But as rehearsals went on Richardson got more and more frustrated. More and more preoccupied. His entire concentration seemed to be directed at the problematic first entrance. He tried endless ways of coming through the door. He came in fast, he came in slow, he entered in high spirits, he entered in low spirits, he tried throwing his hat across the room aiming for the hat rack, he tried backing in, he tried creeping in, skipping in, walking in backward and then turning around very quickly; he tried doing a summersault. Nothing worked. “I can’t find it,” he kept saying. “The first entrance is the whole play for me. The whole character lives in that first entrance.”

  Gielgud continued to try to make him feel better. Every day at lunch Richardson would leave the table and head for the nearest door to practice his entrance. He opened imaginary doors in the middle of conversations. He watched other people open doors. He dreamed he was opening doors. Weeks went by. The whole cast began to wonder what was happening to their star. Finally, during the last days before the opening, during one of the tech rehearsals, with the two ingénues onstage billing and cooing at each other quietly under the lights and Gielgud in the back of the theater running light cues, Richardson came barreling onstage, makeup half on, hair disheveled, Kleenex hanging out of his collar.

  “John!” he shouted into the lights. “John! Are you out there?” “I’m here, Ralph,” Gielgud called back hopefully, “What is it?”

  “I’ve found it,” Richardson said triumphantly. “I’ve found my entrance. I know how I’m going to do it.” “What is it, Ralph?” Gielgud called. “What have you found?” “I’m just going to come in,” Richardson said triumphantly. “I’m just going to walk right in.” “That sounds marvelous,” said Gielgud. “That will be perfect.” And that was the end of that.

  PART two

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Sometime during the ’90s I got a call from Susan Scorbate, the dean of Bennington College. We chatted for a while and then she came to the point of her call. She wanted to know if I would give the commencement address for the graduation class that June.

  I was shocked. “I don’t think it’s really appropriate for me to give a commencement address,” I said. “Why not?” she asked me. “I got kicked out of Bennington,” I told her. “So did I,” she answered.

  Her comfortable confession put us on common ground, and we talked for a while, the two miscreants. I ended up not wanting to give the commencement address; the idea of writing a speech was appalling to me. But I did feel that I wanted to do something for the college in return for the scholarship they’d given me and which, except for a couple of performances, I had for the most part squandered. She asked if I wanted to teach an acting course, and that didn’t appeal to me either, for reasons I didn’t understand until years later. I thought for several weeks about what I might want to do instead, and came up with the idea of doing an improvisational workshop. Susan liked the idea and we formulated a ten-day program with thirty-five students, from freshmen to seniors.

  It was an imbalanced, cumbersome group with greatly varied levels of proficiency, but what transpired was so exciting and so filled with wonderful scenes that six days into the workshop I thought we had enough material to do a show for the rest of the college. Bennington is a small school and everyone lives on campus, so it was easy to arrange. After another four rehearsal days we put on a two-hour show for the student body using all-original material that the group had created in a little over a week. It was an exciting and revelatory evening.

  In the group there were two sweet, bright girls who were not terribly inventive. They got pushed to the side in scene after scene, and when it came time to put on the show they had very little to do. At the end of our last rehearsal, just before the dinner break, an hour and a half before the show was to go on, they came to me and said, “Before we break for dinner can we show you a scene?” “It’s too late,” I answered. “The show’s been set, and there isn’t any time to revise it.” “We don’t want it to be put in the show,” they said. “We just want to do it for the group.”

  How could I say no? I called back the group and we gathered in the audience while the two girls got onstage. They started their scene. It became clear after a couple of minutes that they were playing themselves, and that the scene was about the two of them leaving a rehearsal. As they pretended to put on coats and hats they talked about how much fun they were having in spite of the fact that their work wasn’t very good. They mimed leaving the theater and going out in the cold to their car, a Volkswagen, which was now covered with snow. They mimed shoveling the snow off their car, still talking about the workshop, laughing and joking, imitating other people in the group and wishing they had been more inventive. Then they got into the car and it wouldn’t start. They laughed at that, and one of them said, “Wouldn’t this be a funny scene?” “What do you mean?” the other replied. “Just this,” said the first. “The two of us leaving rehearsal, not coming up with anything interesting to do, and then not being able to start the car. Why didn’t we think of this when we were in rehearsal? This could have been a good scene.” They laughed again and talked about how they would do the scene if the workshop was still going on; then the car started and they mimed driving off to their dorm. The scene was so charming, so real, so filled with love and humor and wonderful Pirandello layers and ironies that it broke all of our hearts, and there was no choice but to include it in the show. Not only include it, but it was so relevant to the spirit of the week that it became the centerpiece for the entire evening.

  The workshop at Bennington inspired me enough to want to do more of them. I remembered that a few years earlier I had been approached by The Omega Institute in upstate New York, an organization that offers a huge variety of courses in all kinds of self-exploration. They had asked me if I wanted to do some kind of program there. At the time I was honored by the request, but didn’t feel as if I had anything much to offer. Now I thought perhaps I did.

  The Bennington experience hadn’t felt like an acting workshop. There was something else at play there. It tapped into something broader and deeper. The students were uncovering issues of their own. They were sifting through real problems and touching on real answers. I have over the years been asked to teach acting classes, which I’ve never wanted to do. There was something about the idea that bored me and turned me off. Doing the improvisation workshop had a different feel. In the week and a half I spent working with the kids at Bennington I’d seen much of the group get out of themselves and fly, do things they didn’t know how to do, go to new places and effortlessly get into the zone. If I taught acting classes I could imagine doing it for fifty years and at the end have helped a handful of people learn to fly. But in just ten days at Bennington there were a dozen kids who were aloft, who had discovered that improv could get them into a core part of their “selves.” It seemed to be about acting, directing, writing, and self-discovery, all at once, and its implications beyond craft, and its immediate applications, were inescapable.

  The Omega people were interested in doing a couple of workshops and we set up two weekend sessions for that summer. It was the beginning of a whole series of workshops that I did there and elsewhere, most of which happened by word of mouth since I had no desire to turn it into a business. No websites, no business cards, no mailing lists. I wanted it to stay fun, and without the pressure of making it “successful.” The best part of it for me was that I seemed to be clear of any personal need for it to work, or even for the participants to be happy or fulfilled or to want to recommend it to other people. I didn’t care about any of that. I just wanted to see the participants get out of their own way and be truly present onstage. If they did, great; if they didn’t, it was their business. I think this attitude was felt by the groups, even though it was never verbalized, and my sense is that this detachment contributed to their be
ing able to cut loose and take chances, and helped create an atmosphere of ease and experimentation and fun.

  In setting up the programs I decided that I didn’t want to turn the workshops into a series of party games. A lot of improv techniques are, to my way of thinking, overly intellectual, or go in the direction of precious or clever oneupmanship games. I wanted the exercises to be immediate and practical. As the course developed, I found that in general the exercises I assembled were not wildly exciting. I didn’t want to be Santa Claus, allowing the groups to fall into the trap of waiting for endless gifts and surprises from the teacher. That’s the actor’s disease. We’re all waiting for the perfect part. For the perfect agent. The perfect play. The perfect scene-partner. Then “I can finally do some good work.” I wanted the group to feel that what they brought to the work was going to make the exercises exciting. In addition, I didn’t want to audition people for these groups, something that I could have easily gotten away with, but which felt wrong. I could have asked for résumés, I could have asked for essays that gave me a sense of what the applicants thought of themselves, or told me of their needs. I could have auditioned, but in the end I was convinced it wouldn’t help me know in any important way who I would be working with.