Once you get familiar with this exercise, you can use it to kick-start your emotions for a particular scene. Go through the exercise for twenty minutes each evening in the period leading up to shooting. On the day of the shoot, begin the exercise right before going on set, but stop just when the emotion starts to push through. Then forget about it. You want to take yourself up to the moment of release, as if you were priming a pump, then leave the surprise to happen in front of the camera. When you are on camera, don’t do anything special—just play the scene. You will probably find the emotion popping up on you in different places. Let it happen. Don’t try to control it. You have primed yourself, so it will happen on its own. However, if the emotion isn’t there on the take, do the exercise in front of the camera during the take. That is, start the shaking. Let your mind wander. Imagine the cold. Let the feeling surface from behind your ears into your sinuses. Let it out almost as if you are going to fake it—but don’t fake it. Fill it with yourself and it will be there.
This is not a trick. The thoughts and feelings are yours. Disorienting your breathing is just another way to attack your fear of not having a “real” feeling by allowing your feelings to arise. But you can’t get there just because you’re supposed to, because you’ve been told to cry or get angry. You have to have done the work to understand the scene and to explore it in a personal way. You must believe and want your reaction; it must matter to you.
Let me close this chapter with an experience I had coaching on set.
Aaliyah had come to study acting with me when she was nineteen years old and already a rhythm-and-blues recording star with two platinum albums to her credit. Even though she had never acted before, I could see she had a natural talent, ferocious drive, and discipline. I also knew she would be cast in films quickly. So we worked together three or more times a week on scenes and monologues from Chekhov and Shakespeare, along with Sam Shepard and other contemporary playwrights. She was by nature shy and gentle, so I worked on getting her to express rage and other big feelings.
As I had expected, within six months Aaliyah was cast to play the leading role opposite Jet Li in Romeo Must Die. Joel Silver, the producer, and Andrzej Bartkoviak, the director, asked me to come on set in Vancouver to coach both Aaliyah and Jet.
We had a couple of weeks before filming began. I worked with each actor privately every day for a few hours, going through the whole script in sequence, as well as rehearsing with the director and other cast members.
The character Aaliyah was playing was feisty, fun, loving, smart, witty, serious, and angry. In the script, she was called on to play two scenes that would have challenged any actress. In one scene, she sees her dead brother being taken to the morgue in a body bag after he has been thrown out of the window of a high-rise and accuses her father of being responsible for his death. In the other scene, she tells Jet’s character a story about her brother and herself as children and then reveals to him that her brother has been killed. The second scene was going to be shot quite early in the filming. So while working Aaliyah through the script as a whole, I also had her preparing emotionally for that scene.
Aaliyah was close to her family and had a lot of emotion about them to call on. She had a brother whom she adored, so we discussed her fears for him. Then we spent time on The Breathing Thing, getting down into the emotion. At first it was difficult for her to let go completely. She would always get to a truthful and touching place, but at first she couldn’t pop the feeling. I was not surprised. After all, she was a young actress in her first film. Her days were filled with costume fittings, make-up tests, camera tests, rehearsals, and rewrites. Everything was moving fast, except for the few hours we had together each day when she could really work on the role.
Soon the scene with Jet was nearly upon us. Three days before, we started focusing more intensively on that scene in addition to the material she was shooting each day. The night before the shoot for that scene, we went over it again. Aaliyah was worried because she still didn’t feel entirely free emotionally.
I knew we were in for a long day, but I had confidence in Aaliyah’s talent. My chief concern was that, given the pressure, she might push her emotions. Or she might go for the emotion too early, using it up before the time the close-up came.
Early the next morning, we met on the set, a small room. I didn’t work the scene with her at first, assuring her that we had plenty of time. First there would be a rehearsal to set the camera and lighting, then the initial shots—a master and a two-shot favoring Jet. I told Aaliyah we didn’t need to have it all for those. After the rehearsal, we went to a quiet place to prepare the scene for the shots being set up.
The story Aaliyah’s character tells Jet’s is about a prank she and her brother played on their mother when they were children. She pretended her brother had collapsed and ran to their mother for help. When the mother came, he jumped up and surprised her. The prank scared their mother so much that she burst into tears and scolded both of them. At that point in the story, Aaliyah’s character breaks down, revealing to Jet the truth: “They killed him. They killed my beautiful brother.”
I had Aaliyah do The Breathing Thing: take a breath, hold it, let the breath start to shake her body, feel the cold, let her mind wander into loss, see her brother, keep shaking, hold the breath until she couldn’t, then expel the air and start again. After a few minutes, I stopped her. “Good,” I said. “But I didn’t get there,” she said desperately. “Right,” I answered, “not yet. We have a long way to go.”
Aaliyah went out and played the scene through the master shot. They did a bunch of takes, and she was good in all of them. After the master shot, the crew changed the lighting for the medium shots favoring Jet. This took a couple of hours. During that time, I kept her with me and apart from the crew so she wouldn’t fritter away her energy. We talked about a lot of things.
The medium shots went well too. Jet and Aaliyah were still just getting to know each other, but he seemed touched by her acting. There were three cameras on them. One was a medium shot on Aaliyah. The whole set was growing very tense, as it often does when someone has a highly emotional scene to play. Sometimes it can make the pressure on the actor intolerable.
We had another two-hour wait during the set-up for the closeups. Aaliyah and I spent the time together talking. I told her about some violent experiences of mine that caused rage in me; she talked of her grandmother’s illness, her fears for her father, her brother; I talked about my mother at my father’s funeral. We talked through many different experiences. I must have cried ten times. But Aaliyah was too afraid to cry yet. I took her into The Breathing Thing but again stopped her before she was finished.
We were called to the set. I talked with Jet, whom I had also been coaching throughout the day. They did a rehearsal for camera and lighting. One camera was a medium shot on Aaliyah, another was a close-up on her, and a third a close-up on Jet. I asked the director to shoot the rehearsal in case it was the best take. He did. It was a good take but not quite as good as I thought it would get.
Everything was set for Aaliyah’s close-up. I checked with the director to be sure. With such a big scene and such a young actress, we didn’t want to risk losing the take for technical reasons if she was there emotionally.
I went behind the couch Aaliyah was sitting on and leaned over so that no one could hear what I said.
“Take a breath.”
She did.
“Hold it,” I said. “Go down into yourself, see your beautiful brother, let it shake out of you.”
She did.
Then I said, “Just tell the story simply, like a little girl. But when you get to the line, ‘They killed him. They killed my beautiful brother,’ yell it! I want you to yell it so loud you scare the crap out of jet.”
“What?” she said, panicking. “You never told me to do that before.”
“I know,” I said. “Just do it. Scream at him. Scare yourself. Scream it!”
I left. She w
as shaking, but I knew she could handle it. She was strong and prepared.
“Action” was called. Aaliyah started the scene. She told the story. She was obviously upset, but she kept going. She was simple and beautiful, as if distracted by some terrible truth. Then all of a sudden, surprising herself and all of us watching, she yelled at Jet fiercely, “They killed my brother!” Her rage burst and her tears came flying out. “My beautiful brother.” She finished the lines in tears, just like a little girl—she was so lost, so young, so heartbroken.
The director called, “Cut. Print.” We all rushed to Aaliyah. She asked, “Was it all right?”
“Yeah, it was all right,” I said. “It was more than all right.”
Jet’s take was great too because he had allowed himself simply to respond to Aaliyah’s acting.
The director and producer were thrilled and relieved. “We got it,” Andrzej said. “Let’s go home.”
I was so proud of this remarkable young actress. And I use this story as an example because I knew Aaliyah was at the point a lot of talented young actors are at when they are faced with a big emotional moment. She was prepared. She had the feelings in her, and she was in touch with them and with the scene. But her fear that she wouldn’t get to an emotional peak could easily have gotten in the way. She needed one last piece of the puzzle to go the distance: she needed to surprise herself in order to put herself on the edge. She needed to be unsure of what to do and confused enough not to give a damn where she went.
I gave Aaliyah the surprise, but you can learn to give it to yourself. You must do the best preparation you can, and then trust yourself enough to go someplace you don’t know in front of the camera. Go to the unknown and discover it at the moment. Your instinct will take you to the best you have to offer.
Aaliyah did only one other film, for which I helped her prepare, although I could not be on set with her. She died in a plane crash before we got an opportunity to tape a conversation about our work together. I miss working on the great plays with her, and on the many film roles she would have inhabited so intimately.
6
PLAYING THE GREAT ROLES
“It’s what Hamlet was saying to the Players, ‘Don’t over-do it, but
don’t under-do it either.’ I suppose a more refined definition of
acting is hitting it just right. It’s just perfect, but it’s not perfection.
It’s knowing when to leave it alone, to finesse it, throw it away.
Or when to make a meal of it. It’s instinctive.”
—Kevin Kline
We usually think of the great roles—Hamlet, Lear, Viola, Ophelia, Othello, Desdemona—as the point an actor’s career builds toward, the ultimate test of his talent and skill. And they are. But the big, multidimensional roles also offer the most important lessons in conceiving and developing character for actors at all stages of their training and growth. They force us to give up trying to control the character and let the character play us. They expose our acting tricks, the gimmicks we do with our voices, bodies, and emotions—including those for which we have been praised in the past. They expose especially the tricks we do with dialogue—substituting facile line readings for simple truths, and dramatizing our emotions rather than letting them surface instinctively.
The great roles require our all, and then some. Playing Hamlet, for instance, you can’t just play your idea of Hamlet. You have to bring all your experiences in life—all your rage, love, passion, and sensitivity, as well as all your intelligence, knowledge, and powers of concentration. And even that may not be enough. We must become bigger people to become big enough for such a role. And that is the paramount challenge and joy of acting.
BUILDING EMOTIONAL RANGE
The great roles build emotional range. This is why I work on the classical repertoire with beginning actors, and why, in 1987, I created the Classical Workshop at the New York Shakespeare Festival. The idea of the Workshop was to introduce actors to Shakespeare and other classic plays as well as to take actors with classical experience through roles they had not yet played. Aidan Quinn would come in to explore Marc Antony in Julius Caesar, or Peter Coyote to explore Cassius, or Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates to try Romeo and Juliet.
I developed one- and two-week workshops in which actors started with sonnets to become comfortable with verse, moved on to soliloquies of characters they might play someday, and then tackled complicated scenes with other actors. Actors would spend four hours each day in small groups, immersing themselves in Shakespeare’s language and exploring his characters. It was quite an experience to watch Sally Field attacking the role of Hermione in The Winter’s Tale; Diane Wiest approaching Lady Macbeth as a loving wife rather than the harridan she is so often portrayed as; Goldie Hawn finding the simplicity and truth in a sonnet; Joel Grey, as a charming, scary Richard III, seducing a weeping young woman whose husband he has killed; Cicely Tyson as Gertrude describing the death of Ophelia in Hamlet; Kris Kristofferson plumbing the depths of Macbeth’s soliloquy “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.” The richness of exploring Shakespeare took all these actors—even the most experienced of them—to new places, giving them new insights into the human condition as well as their own acting. They responded to the work as if they had come upon an acting oasis where they could replenish themselves on Shakespeare’s profound language.
When I worked with Glenn Close on Cleopatra, the text illuminated a sensuality in her that I had not seen before. She was funny, coy, petulant, irritating, angry, spoiled, sexy, loving, and profoundly in touch with great loss. The brilliance of Shakespeare’s dialogue allowed Glenn to explore this complex character in depth even in the short time we had in the Workshop. Although she has not yet performed this role on stage or screen, audiences have seen the qualities she discovered in many of the roles she has since played in films—the Marquise de Merteuil in Dangerous Liaisons, the erotically predatory young editor with whom Michael Douglas gets involved in Fatal Attraction, her Gertrude in Franco Zeffirelli’s film of Hamlet, Sunny von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune.
You will find it valuable to work on great characters on your own, even if you don’t get a chance to play them in performance. They will make you a more powerful actor and put you more deeply in touch with your feelings, even uncovering hidden aspects of your personality. They will open you to the best and worst within you, and that will help you to grow as both an actor and a human being.
To play Hamlet, you must be not only the beautiful, intelligent, clever prince, but also the grotesque, crafty, vulgar madman. Ophelia says of Hamlet:
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy.
And indeed he is violent and hateful to his mother. He is touched by the old Player at one moment, full of self-loathing the next. He is a consummate fencer who kills Polonius and Laertes with regret, but he is also the vicious murderer who kills Claudius without remorse.
Nor is he without humor. Hamlet can be and is funny, although his humor is often dark. He is witty as well as crafty and cruel with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he knows are betraying him to Claudius, and he makes a number of jokes at the expense of Polonius, as when he answers the foolish question, “What do you read, my lord?” with a literal, “Words, words, words.” When Kevin Kline played Hamlet, he played this scene sitting quite strangely, as if on a chair with one leg crossed over the other and a book on his lap—but there was no chair. He answered, while continuing to read, “Words, words …” There was a pause as Kevin continued reading, then he turned the page and said, “Words.” The change in rhythm made the audience laugh. It also highlighted the humor and brilliance of this famous line.
To play a man of as many parts as Hamlet, an actor must give himself up to the text and let it take him wherever it goes.
The Role of Imagination
The gre
at roles will help you to explore who you are, but you will not find there enough to fill the role. If you try to limit these characters to what you already know and feel, you will be too small to inhabit them. If you are to do justice to them, you must fly up to them—rather than dragging them down to you—by expanding your range of knowledge and strengthening your imagination. Your imagination must become as real and important to you as your memories and feelings. So you must be willing to study things you do not yet know, and you must study them in such depth that what you study becomes you. What you take into yourself about human behavior, politics, sociology, the history of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and so on, will allow you to reach places in yourself you didn’t know existed before. No line, no image, no thought can be left general. You must understand and feel each one in a specific and personal way. Your work on the text and character will not be complete until this is so.
This process takes time, concentration, and creativity. When you read about an earlier era in a novel or a history book, you must let your imagination take over. See yourself there, in that period. It’s not enough, when acting, to wear the costume—you must be able to imagine yourself in the moment on stage in a way that is real to you. So you must immerse yourself not only in the play but also in history as a real, living study. Read about the politics, art, music, dance, and customs of the period. Look at its art in museums and listen to its music in concerts and on recordings.
Against Interpretation
It is fashionable now to have an “idea” of how to play these great characters—an interpretation: Hamlet as an intellectual and therefore unable to make a decision or act impulsively; Hamlet in Oedipal terms, preoccupied with his fixation on his mother and therefore unable to avenge his father’s murder. But a one-note interpretation of a character is the opposite of the kind of imaginative, wide-ranging search for knowledge I have been describing. Any single idea you have will illuminate an aspect of the character at best. It will be too small, too limiting, for the character as a whole.
How to Stop Acting Page 16