The Great Acting Blog: "Improvising"

Check out this quick teaser I put together. We've still some work to do on the sound, but the film will be completed in the next week or so.

I had planned to shoot Noirish Project in two chunks: the first last week, and the second later in the year.  Unfortunately, I had to postpone shooting the first chunk last week because of the snow, obviously this wouldn't have matched with anything we would have shot in the second chunk when in all likelihood there wouldn't have been snow. However, seeing as everything was set up anyway, I thought it would be a waste to not do anything, and so decided to go out and make a short, using the landscape as a snowy backdrop. I wanted the short to still be connected to Noirish Project in some way, and hit upon the idea of the short film being a sort of "backstory" for the feature, where we would learn a little bit more about the characters and how the events in the feature came about, calling the short; Prelude To Noirish Project. 

In the feature film, Billy has stolen his families' heirloom, some pearls, which they have owned "since before the War", and he gives the pearls to the only person he knows who has even a vague connection with the world of crime, Jimmy, to sell to a fence. Prelude takes place before Billy has stolen the pearls, and is structured around a telephone call, i.e. - Billy ringing-up Jimmy to see if he'd be interested in the pearls. The telephone call is then intercut with imagery of Jimmy on his way to meet Billy in the park. This structure lends the film a sort of fantasy quality, where we are not sure whether Billy is imagining the events we are seeing or not. I'm starting to think that the telephone is perhaps my favourite dramatic device of all - it's just so economical, and it creates plenty of scope for the acting, it's always fun to watch actors trying to express themselves through a phone. Also, I think telephones are very strange indeed (far stranger than email or text message, which seem far more natural), and therefore they possess a mystery which is intrinsically dramatic. It also opens up structural possibilities, and in Prelude, often I use the telephone conversation as a voice-over: we hear the characters talking, but we see imagery from another time and place.

There wasn't time to write a script, so I just decided on subject matter and the overall structure of the film, and we improvised the specific dialogue. We had, however, during the preceding weeks, been rehearsing the scripted scenes  we had already scheduled to shoot, and had arrived at performance level. This work had a strong impact on the improvisation, especially in terms of style and rhythm of dialogue. The actual script has repetitive, punchy dialogue, and we found that to be true of the improvisation aswell, as if the rhythms of the script had lodged themselves in our minds. I also found it easy to access my character's (Jimmy) sardonic intent toward the other character (Billy). The net result is that Prelude feels very much a part of the full Noirish Project feature film, it seems part of the universe of the full film, which is a very pleasant result.

I am currently in the process of re-scheduling the scenes we were unable to do, probably for mid- February. Snowfall has been rumoured, but we'll have to wait and see.