The next evening when I came to the theater, I didn’t go over my lines. I spent the time before performance reading material for the next day’s coaching, a novel—anything but the script. When I got the call for places, I walked to the stage. I had no idea what I was going to do. I only knew what I wasn’t going to do. I wasn’t going to stay where I was.
I entered and looked around. I didn’t walk to the spot I normally did. I went calmly to another part of the stage and delivered my line. The line came out with abandon, and it got a big laugh—which it was supposed to get.
Frannie came rushing over to me, delivering her line as she ran. She barely got to me when I casually strolled across the stage to the other side, saying my line. Another big laugh. Now that I didn’t care where I went on stage, I was no longer worried about my lines. I felt free.
Frannie flew across to me. She was furious with me on stage. Even though this was right for her character and this wonderful story about an impossible relationship, I thought her anger might be personal, that she might feel I was messing up her performance. But I’ll tell you this: we were really cooking. And although we were improvising each moment, we stuck to the lines. We found a freedom and reality between us that was both fresh and edgy. She was with me every step of the way.
When the lights went down, I exited just behind her in total darkness, as I always did. We were barely off stage when I felt hands on my face. I braced myself. I thought Frannie was going to belt me one.
Instead, she planted a big kiss on my lips. Then she hugged me and said, “Where have you been, Harold?”
What had happened? My fear had sneaked up on me in performance. Instead of attacking it, I looked for safety. I stopped exploring. I froze up, went flat. It was no longer me on that stage—no longer my Griswold for Frannie.
I stress the importance of continuing the exploration in performance not to subvert directors’ work but precisely because the shared work of the actor and director is so important, and it has to be alive in the performance. No director wants a replica of what he’s worked on. He wants the performance alive and full of the same kind of energy and stimulation that was in play when actor and director came up with their first successful choices in rehearsal. That’s what live theater is about. Actors need directors. But directors also need actors at their best in performance.
Performance doesn’t always require such drastic choices to keep us at our best. But sometimes we have to actively shatter our fears, our obligations, our preconceptions to free ourselves for our best work. We must put ourselves in danger, on the edge, to make instinct surface. If all we know is what we will say but not how we will say it, instinct will be free to take us there in a newly creative way. Once we are cooking again, many of the choices we had made before may recur. We may not need to keep changing things so boldly.
No specific choice is more important than the true presence of the actor on stage at that moment. The actor, alive on stage, with his humanity—his feelings, his thoughts, his imagination—intact, is the greatest gift he can give the audience.
So the actor must be patient. He must not preempt the thoughts and feelings that come to him on stage in the moment. If he gives himself time in that frightening moment, something may come to him that is better than what he had—maybe something surprising. And he must have the courage to go with whatever truly matters to him at the moment, whether it’s something he already knows or something new. It may seem scary to do this in performance, but the actor owes the audience the best he’s got, whether he has discovered it in rehearsal or that very night. The audience has given up their precious time. They have paid to see us. They trust we will give them our best. We must not only trust the work we’ve done in preparation. We must trust ourselves and our connection with the text to take us in performance to the best choice we have to offer.
For me, that is what acting on stage is all about.
Acting in Long Runs
Acting in a long run on Broadway, in regional theater, or on tour can bring many challenges. After a couple of months of eight performances a week, the actor can go on autopilot—beginning to think he knows where the laugh is, where the pauses are, where to move, how each line goes. This doesn’t make for good acting or a thrilling experience for the audience. Boredom sets in, making each performance a chore.
Glenn Close recalls that when she and Jeremy Irons were about four months into The Real Thing they were so bored that one night after the first act they met in Jeremy’s dressing room and he said, “Okay, let’s go out in the second act and surprise each other. Let’s go to different areas of the stage. Let’s do anything to jerk ourselves out of this rut.”
“By that time the set was like home,” she remembers. They were so familiar with it, it was easy to try new things, and trying new things got the adrenaline pumping again and “jolted us out of the doldrums.” They kept exploring and trying to surprise each other, and they kept some of the new choices they made. “We would always meet after the first act and say, ‘That worked. Why don’t we try that tomorrow?’ Or, ‘That didn’t. Why?’ That’s the joy of having a great piece of material in the long run.”
Kevin Kline called me one night after a performance of Pirates of Penzance on Broadway. He had been in the show for several months following two months at the Delacourt in Central Park. It was a huge hit and he had been nominated for a Tony Award. He wanted me to come back and see the show, particularly his performance.
“What’s the problem, no laughs?” I asked.
“No, they’re laughing,” he said. “It’s just that the audience doesn’t have that immediate response they had in the park and when we first opened on Broadway. Tell me what you see. We’re selling out and the Tony voters are returning for a second look.”
I went the next night. Sure enough, Kevin was good—fun to watch, getting a lot of laughs—but he was ahead of himself. He knew where the laughs were. So he was there before the audience was, and then on to the next moment before the audience could truly respond to what he had just done so brilliantly.
I suggested that Kevin forget about the big laugh moments and concentrate only on the moment he was in on stage—even if it meant changing how he played each moment. He could make little changes or big ones as long as they forced his concentration onto that moment alone. When the big laugh moments came up they would be fresh. But he must not rush them. “The audience needs to be with you,” I told him. “For instance, when Frederic tells you that he is leaving and he is indentured until noon this day, you look straight up at the sun and say, ‘But it is not yet twelve o’clock?’ Instead of just looking up and then saying the line, do a double-take or even a triple-take, and then say the line. After all, the Pirate King is dense. He may not be sure why he looked up. He may have forgotten it was to check the time.” We talked through a number of such moments.
The next night Kevin called from his dressing room at intermission to tell me that he’d done six takes on the sun before he finally said the line. The audience was roaring, and they were with him all the way through the act. His performance was back on track because he was free to explore it anew.
Long runs give the actor the possibility of going into the role in greater depth—if the actor is willing to surprise himself and stay on the edge. The playing field only gets bigger and bigger, with greater opportunities and variations.
In acting, the trip is what’s interesting, not the destination.
Acting is the trip!
5
ACTING IN FILM AND TELEVISION
“You taught me how to prime myself, like a gun—put together, cleaned, cocked, loaded, and ready to go. I did not know how to do that for myself. I didn’t even know how to begin. I didn’t even know the mechanism was supposed to be a gun … because you’ve got to be ready to fire.”
—Bridget Fonda
Unlike theater, film and television usually have no prolonged rehearsal period. Instead, the whole filming period from which the actor’s
performance on screen will be drawn is one giant rehearsal.
On stage, the actor’s performance on that night is the character in total. No editing is possible—it’s all you. The actor in film does not have the opportunity to complete the character as he does on stage. In the end, the director will put the character together in the editing room.
Therefore, the director has the actors play each scene again and again in front of the camera. Each “take” is just another exploration. If what the actor has done seems good to the director, he calls, “Cut. Print.” This means that piece of film will be sent to the laboratory to be developed so that the director and editor can see the scene in “dailies” as a possibility for editing into the final cut of the movie. If it’s not good for the director, he calls, “Cut. Let’s do it again.” If the actor blows his lines or screws up an action, it doesn’t really matter. It is best to continue the take. It’s not necessary for the whole take to be perfect, because a whole take is rarely used in the final cut. If a piece of a take is good, that piece will be used.
There are rare exceptions. Woody Allen, for example, likes to use only a master-shot for each scene. He doesn’t have “coverage,” in which there are many shots at different angles and distances. In this kind of filming, the director will rehearse a great deal and take a long time to complete the master shot. It will take as long to shoot this one shot as it takes to shoot the many shots for a scene in traditional American filmmaking. The whole take has to be perfect, because there are no possibilities of editing within the scene. It’s like acting in a play.
But most of the time, filming is, as Glenn Close describes it, “like one big rehearsal without the performance at the end of it.” Knowing this can be extremely liberating for the actor. As Glenn says, “You can loosen up. You can breathe. You can try things. There’s such a huge flexibility in film. That, to me, is what’s fun about movies.”
During the filming of Sophie’s Choice, Alan Pakula told Kevin Kline, “Think of it as rehearsing, and trust the moment in the rehearsal. When it really happens, that’s the take I’m going to use.” If you think of film this way, then the process of creating a character for film becomes clear. The actor cannot control how the character will ultimately be perceived. But between “action” and “cut,” it’s all the actor. So you must be free in each take, and with each take you must be trying out different ways to play the scene. You must offer many possibilities “within the parameters of the character,” as Glenn puts it, “so that the director will have a choice—a valid choice.”
PREPARING THE ROLE BEFORE FILMING BEGINS
When Bridget Fonda is cast in a film, she comes to me to “pre-rehearse,” as she calls it. “I work with you to rescue the rehearsal period,” she says.
Directors want and expect a professional actor to bring a great deal to the table. He has to be available to the director, but as Jim Gandolfini says, “You should have your own idea. You should try to surprise the guy a little bit.” Most directors hope that the actor will surprise them with ideas about the character. And if the actor has done the preparation to put himself into a state of open exploration with the character, he will be available to whatever the director has to offer. He will come to filming with possibilities to offer, and with a confidence in his work that gives him the strength to do his best.
“I kind of want to have my cake and eat it too,” Bridget says, about opening herself to both her own exploration of the character and the director’s insights. “It’s, How can I satisfy the truth of this and yet be able to go anywhere with the director? If you’re lucky enough to be with someone who is a genius, you want to get that gold they have to offer. And yet you can’t compromise yourself, because it has to stay free. It can’t be contrived. And that is the biggest trick.” Instead of trying to anticipate what the director wants, the actor prepares by “completely investigating” the character, discovering as many possibilities as he can before filming begins without making any decisions. He can explore alone or with a coach. The steps are the same and easy to replicate on your own.
Take the Script off the Page
First, I take the actor through the script from beginning to end, having him verbalize his lines by taking them off the page. We read back and forth, letting the lines take us wherever they go. As Bridget says, “The lines are your lifeline.” Then we go over the scene, pulling it apart, plumbing the nuances of each moment, making sure the actor is in tune with himself, the scene, and the lines. We do each scene many different ways. We take our time.
On your own, you must work out loud, verbalizing your lines, the other characters’ lines, and even your thoughts, as I described in chapter 3. Don’t skim—really immerse yourself in every line, letting your mind wander around what’s happening with the character. Take each scene off the page in five different ways, as I suggested earlier—for example, in a rage, for laughs, for intimate internal values, for sensuality, for pure logic. Don’t set anything; just try out ideas.
Work Through the Script in Sequence
It is even more important in film than in theater to work your way through the script in sequence, because films are shot out of sequence. Working in sequence helps you to discover the character by osmosis, not analysis. As you go from beginning to end, verbalizing not only the lines but your reactions to them, the character simply appears, as does the meaning of the story as a whole. “It’s kind of like when you do a play,” James Gandolfini says, “and you rehearse scenes three, four, and five, and six, seven, and eight, but you don’t really know the character until you do a run-through of the whole thing. And then you go, Oh! And something happens—the guy starts to come to life and you get the whole thing.”
As the actor and I read back and forth, coming to know each moment in a specific way, the actor becomes aware of the intimate changes that are happening within each scene to the character. Even if the actor has read the script to himself from start to finish, it doesn’t really come to life until he begins to speak the lines out loud. As James Gandolfini says, “I’ll know I can do a role, but it doesn’t take shape sometimes until I talk it out.”
Sometimes it’s a particular line that brings the character into focus. “We kind of close the net,” Bridget says. “It starts out in a general way and then gets down to the lines—to the crux of the moment. There’s this one line that’s going to be the key, that’s going to say it all about the character. When that falls into your lap, you don’t want to miss it—not know what it was. You don’t want to choke on it. You want to be able to do something great with it. That’s when we work on this line, this line, this line. It’s so abstract and yet it’s the whole idea of this story.”
But whether it’s a single line that brings the character to life or a number of moments in the story, the actor has to know the script cold, to feel it in his bones, so that he’s free to be in an improvisational state when he’s filming. If he’s thinking about where he was in the previous scene, or where he’s supposed to end up in the next scene, the camera will catch him Acting. And the camera is unforgiving about Acting. To be believed on film, you must be living in the moment, going with the impulse as it hits you.
In the end, the actor needs to work on the script in sequence so that it is so much a part of him he doesn’t have to think about the story at all while filming. Then his only concern is what’s playing on him at the moment of shooting. The script will move the story along anyway, but the moments will be filled creatively. This will make the story more surprising and the character less predictable to the audience, because they too will be lost in each moment and will have to put each moment together with the story as it develops. Remember, when the audience is involved and has to work, it becomes active and interested rather than passive and bored.
Research What You Don’t Know
As with stage acting, research has its place. As I go through the script with an actor, we pinpoint aspects of the script that call for investigation. Working on your own, pay atte
ntion to what you don’t know and do research on that.
For example, John Leguizamo and I were working recently on a new film, Infamous. He was to play Lex Vargas, a Puerto Rican boxer who becomes middleweight champion. John is a marvelous actor, but he wasn’t a boxer, so he had to start training as a boxer. But as we worked our way through the script, we also spent a lot of time discussing how boxers think and what makes a champion.
I told John about an experience I had coaching the great fight trainer Teddy Atlas for a role in a boxing film. Teddy, an early trainer of Mike Tyson, also trained the heavyweight champion Michael Moorer. Teddy told me his idea about personal character as it relates to genuine champions in the ring. He talked about the “negatives,” like bullies, and the “positives”—those who know themselves, won’t allow loss, and are true champions. Just listening to and watching Teddy talk can tell an actor a lot about boxers—the tics, the rhythms, the permanent bruises.
I suggested John get in touch with Teddy as a source of information that would be invaluable for the character of Lex. We also talked about styles of boxing relating to ethnicity, which could affect his performance.
There are times when the research you do on a character will contradict aspects of the script. This doesn’t invalidate the process. In fact, everything an actor does finds its way into his work and has a subliminal impact that makes the character more interesting.
When Jennifer Connelly was preparing the role of Alicia Larde in the film A Beautiful Mind, she researched the character of Sylvia Nasar, on whom the role was based. Although she couldn’t use many of the real-life details because the script differed from them, her research informed our discussions and gave the character a deeper layer that resonated with the audience.
How to Stop Acting Page 13