Lots of actors study dance or work out to keep themselves ready for any physical challenge. There are also those who know the challenge will never come because of their own physical limitations. But whether you're athletic or not, you should have a heightened sensibility about movement as it relates to character. In this realm, quite small physical manifestations, like nervous hand movements, can be just as effective as a physically demanding pratfall. You don't need to go to a gym to acquire this talent. All you need is sharp-eyed observation of other human beings.
Characters
When becoming a character, you have to steal. Steal whatever you see. You can even steal from other actors' characterizations; but if you do, only steal from the best."
The moment you pick up a script, you start to make certain deductions about the character you are going to play. It's like picking up clues. The writer gives you some hints and, if you are lucky, you will also have insights based on your experience of life. You may also use your observations of other people who perhaps resemble your character in some way. When I played Frank, the alcoholic university lecturer in Educating Rita, I based him on two people I know because while I knew what it was like to be drunk, alcoholism was another thing; and I had no concept of how a university lecturer behaves. (I'd never been to a university.)
So I based Frank-the-lecturer partly on a writer friend of mine named Robert Bolt, who was a great teacher. I knew how he functioned with people-I'd seen him talking and explaining, I knew his manner. And for Frank-the-alcoholic I imagined myself to be another friend of mine named Peter Langan, my partner in a restaurant and someone who behaved like an alcoholic of truly historic proportions. I amalgamated the two people to make Frank. The day that Peter Langan saw the film, he said, "That was based on me, wasn't it?" I said, "Yes."
EDUCATING RITA
Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Columbia, 1983.
Pictured with Julie Walters.
When becoming a character, you have to steal. Steal whatever you see. You can even steal from other actors' characterizations; but if you do, only steal from the best. If you see Vivien Leigh do something, or Marlon Brando or Robert de Niro or Meryl Streep do something that fits your character, steal it. Because what you're seeing them do, they stole.
The best movie actors become their characters to such an extent that the product isn't viewed by an audience as a performance. It's a strange situation, but in film a person is a person, not an actor; and yet you need an actor to play the person. About twenty years ago, when I was doing The Ipcress File, I heard the director, Sid Furie, say, "I need a butcher in this part." Someone suggested that he get a real butcher who knew how to cut up meat authentically. Furie answered: "If I've got a good actor, I've got a real butcher. If I've got a real butcher, the minute I put him in front of the camera he's stiff and I've got a bad actor."
You've got to base your character on reality, not on some actor-ish memory of what reality is because, finally, the actor is in charge of the effect he wants. Woody Allen can play a tragic scene about a brain tumor and make the audience laugh. Another actor can fall on a banana skin and make the audience cry. But the audience mustn't see "an actor," they mustn't see the wheels turning. They must see a real person standing there, somebody just like them.
I remember once I played a drunk in repertory and the director stopped me and said, "You're not playing a drunk! You're playing an actor playing a drunk. An actor playing a drunk walks crooked and talks slurry; a real drunk tries to walk straight and speak properly ... drunks are fighting to stay in control." That was very good advice. And remember that as a drunk, your thought processes and your tongue, for once, are not connected; time lapses before a drunk can get it together. Let yourself struggle. Drunks don't react fast. When I played Frank in Educating Rita, I tried to control my head (with which a drunk keeps hitting his chest) because I didn't want Rita to see me drunk. I sat in a way that made me seem a foot shorter because I let my muscles go. Drunks are somehow small and rather pitiful. That Frank is a drunk is tragic, even though he appears at times to be funny.
GENRE
Our lives are not comedies or tragedies or dramas. They are a fascinating mixture, an alchemy, really, of all three. You make a mistake if you pigeonhole a script in any one category because you then seriously limit your character. In a comedy film, "trying to be funny" is certain death. First you have to be a real man or woman. Then you slide on the banana skin, and then it will be funny. If you are a comedian sliding on a funny banana peel, nobody will laugh because you're not real. The history of the cinema is littered with great comics who failed on the screen largely because they weren't actors; they coud not be real up there. Jack Benny's funny routines never failed in the theatre, but initially, when he did his schtick on the screen, he died. The reason? He was being a funny comedian instead of being a real person to whom something funny happened. If you want to borrow from theatre experience in a film comedy, the best way is in the timing of laughs. In film comedies, theatre actors are especially helped by stage know-hove because they have a sense memory of a live audience's laughter. I time the laughs according to how the film crew laughed the first time they heard the scene in rehearsal.
THE SWARM
Directed by Irwin Allen. AIP/Warner Brothers, 1978.
Pictured with Katharine Ross.
In film, a character is a real person. You have to refrain from turning that real person into a type. Some early film directors like John Ford could get away with characters that became archetypes (the chuckwagon cook who is a drunk, for example); but to do that in the cinema today would risk an audience's disbelief. When you look for qualities to use in building your character, avoid the obvious approach whenever possible. One critic compared Educating Rita to My Fair Lady because in both cases the girl is changed when her mind and tongue are liberated by a teacher. In My Fair Lady, Eliza falls in love with Professor Higgins. It would have been easy to be seduced by the cliche of Rita and Frank falling for each other in Educating Rita; but I found none of that in our script. I felt very strongly that although Frank does fall in love with Rita, it's never spoken about and is totally unrequited. If the audience of Educating Rita had wanted to search for a prototype, the model might have been the Emil Jannings character in The Blue Angel, the sad figure who gets nowhere with the girl. It shouldn't occur to an audience (except maybe to an audience of critics) to look anywhere else for an explanation of a character other than in the film being viewed.
When you are stealing details to build characters on, steal only what was real in the first place, not some dusty stereotype. Since I knew that the tannings character in The Blue Angel had a realistic ingredient for Frank, I stole some of that. I gained 35 pounds and grew a beard because there never should have been the possibility of Rita's being sexually attracted to this fat old drunk. But I suspect nobody noticed my Blue Angel steal because Frank wasn't the same as that character any more than he was the same as Professor Higgins. Frank was unique.
LOVE SCENES
Speaking of sexual attraction, love scenes often present special technical problems for actors. There's a lot to cope with there, in addition to characterization. Every one wonders what it can be like to make love to a total stranger in front of a camera. Well, it might seem like a good idea to get together and break the ice before the actual shooting, but I think that way lies disaster. You're liable to start the intimacy the night before. Then halfway through the picture, you've split up, aren't talking to each other, and miles of film romance lie before you.
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
Directed by John Huston. Allied Artists, 1975.
I find the way to deal with love scenes is to be extremely professional about the whole thing: this is a job, this is what the two of us happen to have been asked to do-lie in bed naked-and it doesn't matter that we have never met before. Actually, you're rarely naked, but you do get into some intimate positions and, of course, you do kiss properly. My solution to the potential awkwar
dness is to joke about it a lot so that the actress I'm with is never under the impression that I'm getting off on it. The moment the director says "Cut!" I make a joke to let the woman know that there was no real passion involved. Such scenes could be embarrassing, but I've done them so often now that there's no sensuality in the process. And then there's the problem for the actress; she has to get herself into a frame of mind where she'd able to let a strange man stroke her bum. But it's all just part of the job, and none of us can afford to be coy about it. But what makes me laugh is that the only time a director ever demonstrates things to you is in the love scenes! Suddenly he feels the need to show you exactly how to hold the actress.
There is one practical consideration that makes life more pleasant for everyone under these circumstances: I always carry mouth spray. I have a quick squirt just before a love scene; the actress says, "What's that?" I say, "Have a taste" and spray her, too. It gets us both over that potential problem.
But despite all manner of professionalism, it can still be somewhat embarrassing to shoot love scenes on a crowded location. It requires fierce concentration to screen out hecklers. In Alfie, I had to run out into Notting Hill Gate-an area that is not populated with sensitive drama lovers-and shout, "Darling! Come back! I love you!" The guys on the street started heckling me. The director told me not to worry about the sound because he would post-synch it later. So I struggled with "Come back, come back, I love you," while all this razzing was going on around us. You just have to block it out. The moment you feel foolish, you look foolish. Concentrate, block it out, and relax. Of course, that's not always easy. When I did Deathtrap, there was a scene in which I had to kiss Christopher Reeve. He's bigger than I am and, quite honestly, I'd never kissed a man in my life, other than my Dad. Cranking myself up for the task was murderously hard. To an extent, joking still helped: I said to Chris, "If you open your mouth, I'll kill you." I'm afraid Chris and I overcame this problem not with technique or any emotion, but with a bottle of brandy between us.
THE ROMANTIC ENGLISHWOMAN
Directed by Joseph Losey. Independent, 1975.
Pictured with Nathalie Delon.
ROLE MODELS, RESEARCH AND YOU
When you flesh out a character to make him real, your tools are the aspects of yourself that apply, and your role models. People always think the character Alfie was close to my own personality, but while I understood Alfie, I wasn't like him. I based him on a guy named Jim Slater, my best friend when I was young. I could never get any girls, and Jim got them all. I Ie would have been perfect in the part, except that he was always too tired.
I also used Jim as the person to whom I was talking when I had to speak directly to the camera. Normally when you look directly into the lens, the effect will be very phoney because the filmmaker is breaking the illusion of eavesdropping on reality. But in Alfie, my character spoke to the audience through the camera, a bit like the technique of "asides" in the theatre when a character detaches himself from the action and addresses the audience directly. In fact, when I first spoke directly to the camera, I treated it like a large audience. The director, Gilbert Lewis, said, "Cut! Come closer to the camera. Do it as if you were talking to just one person, so that every member of the audience feels as if you're singling him out personally." Then I played the moment as though I were talking to Jim. We liked each other, and Jim was really interested in what I had to say. Ile would have especially appreciated remarks like, "She's in beautiful condition," when Alfie was running his hands over a woman's bum, because Jim used to say things like that. That confidence in Jim's appreciation is what won me the collusion of the cinema audience, even when they didn't really approve of Alfie's goings-on.
Courtesy of Paramours Pictures. 01965 Sheldrake Films Ltd. All rights reserved.
ALFIE
Directed by Lewis Gilbert. Paramount, 1966.
On location.
Sometimes you have to play a character with whom you have absolutely nothing in common. In The Romantic Englishwoman, I was cast completely against type, as the sort of man I would despise if I met him in real life. Ile was totally unable to take effective action. Now I'm not completely an action man, but at worst I'm a catalyst; this character I was playing just let his life go wrong all around him without doing anything about it. He was a rich novelist who lived in the plush stockbroker belt, mixed with pseudo-intellectuals, and did absolutely nothing to stop his wife from going off on a romantic adventure. The character was completely non-chemical; everything about the part was against my nature.
But once you have reached that kind of conclusion about a character, you have to put it out of your mind. In real life, each person is always in sympathy with his own motives; and I had to find the reasons for this man's behavior. I ended by thoroughly enjoying the part because I submerged my own personality entirely and invented everything: if I would have gone north, I made this character go south; if some piece of behavior was alien to me, I figured it was probably right for him.
In historical pictures, research can sometimes be a valuable guide in finding what's real for a character. Often we have stereotyped views of how people behaved in other periods and places, and research often disproves a stereotype and makes life more interesting for the actor. For example, in Zulu I was cast as a wishy-washy upper-crust Victorian officer. Now, I wasn't in a very strong position to make radical suggestions about interpretation. I had got the part by the skin of my teeth. Originally I'd gone to audition for the part of a Cockney private, but they'd already cast that role. I Iowever, since I was tall and fair, I apparently looked like a posh Englishman, and the director, Cy Endfield, asked if I could do an upper-class accent. I switched quickly to Etonian and said, "Why, Mr. Endfield, I've been doing it for years." Ile had me do a screen test, during which I showed my absolute terror. He came up to me at a party the following night, after ignoring me most of the evening, and said, "That was the worst damn screen test I ever saw in my life." I thought, okay, so I haven't got it. "But," he continued, "you've got the part because we're leaving on Monday and we can't find anybody else."
Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker (who was the producer and also the star) both saw my character, Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead, as a chinless wonder who treated war as though it were a game on the playing fields of Eton. Stanley wanted the character played like a weedy Hooray I lenry what-ho type, as a contrast to the character he was playing. But I had found a history book in a secondhand bookshop in Charing Cross Road with a photograph of the real Lieutenant Bromhead. He was 5"6' tall, had a black beard, and in no way corresponded to this vacillating upper-class twit they were envisaging. I showed the picture to Baker, saying, "Listen, Stan, I know your character has to overpower my character in the end because that's the story. But wouldn't it be better to overpower a man who is strong and believes in himself, rather than the kind of fellow who says `Hullo, chaps, and all that'? The kind of fellow everyone knows immediately Stanley Baker could make mincemeat of? There's no clash of personality unless my character has some strength."
BLAME IT ON RIO
Directed by Stanley Donen. 20th Century-Fox, 1983.
Picaaed with Michelk johncon.
Baker and Endfield thought it over and agreed with me. So I was allowed to play Lieutenant Bromhead as something quite different than the way he was written. And that part was my first big break. If nothing else, we put the record straight about the stereotyped view of Victorian officers as upper-class caricatures.
The Man Who Would Be King, which was adapted from a story written in 1888 by Rudyard Kipling, was another film in which background knowledge proved indispensable. The director, John Huston, had been trying to get this film off the ground for years. In fact, it was a bit daunting to learn that he had originally wanted to cast Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart in the parts that Sean Connery and I played. I was cast as Peachy and Sean played Danny: we were a couple of rogues, formerly sergeants in the army of Queen Victoria, now gunrunners in India planning to set ourselves
up as kings in a remote Himalayan stronghold.
We all spent days talking about the script before we even shot a foot because Huston wanted us to achieve a Victorian view of society. For example, Peachy had to throw an Indian off of a moving train, for no real reason. From a contemporary perspective, that seems inexplicable and barbaric. But from the standpoint of Victorian values, this high-handed attitude toward the natives was the norm. Furthermore, Peachy and Danny had experienced their own humiliations at home as members of the working class at a time when class divisions in England were as tough as apartheid is now in South Africa. So when I tossed that Indian off the train, I had to bear in mind that Peachy might well have been tossed off a train by a member of the English aristocracy.
Everyone kept telling Scan and me that we were making another Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. We weren't. It's no good getting into the imitation game; all you get is a pale copy. But Sean and I did come to the conclusion pretty quickly that we had to be a double act, and a generous double act. We had to give each other complete collaboration for the sake of the picture. We had a choice: we could edge each other out and get individual close-ups, or we could bring each other into close-up for the most interesting lines and improve the film as a whole. This was the best relationship I've ever had with another actor; we gave to each other all the time. It made it much easier to become those characters.
Acting in Film Page 6