The Great Acting Blog: "There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind"

This week, I journeyed to Cork City, to attend a screening of HE  (the new feature film by Rouzbeh Rashidi, and where I play the lead role), which was wonderfully hosted by The Guesthouse. Rouzbeh and I participated in a Q & A session after the screening, and I very much enjoyed answering the few questions about acting which came my way, especially in light of the unusual, highly collborative methods Rouzbeh and I employ. I found it enriching to engage with the audience in this direct way, and it was pleasing to see that the film was very well recieved.

 Also while in Cork, production was set in motion for There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind, the fourth feature film collaboration between myself and Rouzbeh - it's a fragmented, experimental, horror film, with a melancholic inflection, and will be shot over the next year in various countries. The film also features Maximillian Le Cain in a leading role. Visually, the film will again be driven by Rouzbeh's high visual artistry, and I will again create scenes in response to brief notes given to me by the director. There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind marks a slight change of approach for us however, in the sense that long monologues have been prominent in our previous films, whereas in this new film, dialogue will be extremely limited, although a voiceover will be added upon completion of filming. So the scenes we shot in Cork then, were largely physical, which is to say I was expressing myself through movement and actions, which is a form of acting I particularly love, because I love to find ways of expressing the internal life of the character through physical movements and the handling of objects: using these tools to show states of being like; distraction, pre-occuption, or an important thought suddenly entering my mind. There was one scene in particular, where my character is waiting to play an important game of chess, and the key challenge was moving between being mildly aggitated and nervous, to trying to alleviate this state by finding ways of distracting myself, to sudden bursts of intense clarity of thought, where my character has come up with some moves to defeat his opponent. Agitation and nervousness can be done physically through the body, using a certain amount of physical tension and intensity of concentration. In order to alleviate this state, I scanned books on the shelf, but with no particular object in mind other than distraction. And finally, in order to show an important thought coming into my mind, I grabbed my pen and scribbled notes into my notebook. It's important to stress that each of these beats was given to me by Rouzbeh just before we were to shoot the scene, and my job was to express the meaning of the scene using these beats - and the meaning of the scene is: waiting for important events. We continued in this fashion for several more scenes, employing the notions of distraction  and agitation and thought, sometimes using different objects to express the moment (a Super 8 camera in one scene, for example), but the notebook was always present. Whether we are creating dialogue, or physical actions, the idea which unifies our approach in all the scenes (here, and in the other films where I have worked with Rouzbeh) is; improvising in response to the immediate situation, and so create "moments of cinema".

Work on There Is No Escape From The Terrors Of The Mind continues early next year.