The Great Acting Blog: "Poetic Acting In Noirish Project"

As many of you probably already know, filming began on Noirish Project recently, and, generally, it went very smoothly. We all had worked together before, and we all wanted to work on this material, which created, despite the early start on a cold February morning, a very happy, productive camp. It was also my first opportunity to try out my notion of “poetic acting” (which I outlined here). In a nut shell, poetic acting requires austerity on the part of the actor, aswell as simplicity and discipline, rather than forcing things, he simply allows moments and expressions to “pop out” of his performance, as a by-product of his attempt to do his action. Poetic acting also requires pared-back camera work, and minimal editing,  as this clears the way for those organic moments and expressions to become significant – such subtleties would be lost without this minimalism. The object of poetic acting is to offer the viewer the chance to interpret the behaviour of the characters they see upon the screen, using those momentary expressions created by the actor as signs.  This invites the viewer to engage more intensely with the scene, and witness hidden truths, witness that which is not manifest in the script. This does require  the viewer to pay acute attention to what he is watching, and clearly the minimalist filmmaking helps by offering the minimum of distraction.

The script is very gentle and slight, which requires the acting to be likewise, and again, this is in order to  give precedence to small moments. Ironically however, I find this gentle form of acting enormously challenging, it’s more natural for me to play high drama or (sometimes) high comedy. If I don’t feel as though I’m hurling my very soul at a brick wall as forcefully as I can, then I don’t think I’m doing any work. However, when I reviewed the scenes we had done, the little moments, which are so important to the film, were certainly present, and shockingly so at times. This has certainly re-enforced my belief in the aesthetic we are employing, and hopefully, we will see it strengthen and produce even more vivid results as the production progresses.

 

Next up, Billy and Jimmy get lost in the woods, which should be a lot of fun to do. We will be taking a slightly different approach this time, as the scenes are only sketched out in the script, and we will, on the day, improvise specific tragi-comic events, and then, the week after, we will be back to fully scripted scenes.