The Great Acting Blog: "Non-Actors, Employee-Actors, & Artist-Actors"

“with professional actors they have an imaginary in between you and them. In other words they have some model in their minds about how to act, or how someone did it before, or some techniques, visual or physical, they can use....it's as if you are writing a book and you are two” - Albert Serra

 

Serra is a filmmaker who primarily works with non-actors. He says he doesn't like professional actors, and the above quote gives us a clue as to why. What Serra is really doing here, is criticising actors in general for a lack of creativity, or more precisely, a lack of in-the-moment creativity: actors work-out in advance exactly how they are going to do the scene, down to each gesture, each facial movement, each inflection, and simply implement this preparation regardless of what is actually happening in the scene as it unfolds (and regardless of what the other actors in the scene are doing). This approach makes it that much harder for the director to work with the actor, because the actor has already set their performance in stone. The model of acting Serra talks about, is the model of the employee-actor, whose goal is simply to rubber stamp a performance of complacent, base professionalism, and where every effort is made to explain the character rather than create organically, because the greatest terror is that anything the actor does may be even slightlymisunderstood, every I dotted and every T crossed to absolute death, and any semblance of art is eliminated mercilessly. Of course, all this leads to the bland, meaningless, presentation-without-mistakes type of performance which so dominates contemporary acting, and which so irks filmmakers like Serra.

 

There is the non-actor and there is the employee-actor, but there is also a third kind of actor: the artist-actor. This actor arrives at the scene with nothing, and creates something out of that nothing. For sure there is preparation – memorising lines, understanding what is happening in the scene, practice – but artist-actors don't merely re-produce this preparation and call it “performance”, they use preparation as a tool for liberating their creativity, the preparation is a means and not an end. The artist-actor responds to what is actually happening in the scene, and respondsregardless of their preparation. They come to the work ready to discover. And the work that is produced with this approach is intense, various, intriguing, and true. Also, by creating in-the-moment, we are closer to the actors source personality, as oppose to the layers and layers of guff piled on in the name of technique, and being close to the source leads to a more vivid performance. Artist-actors don't bring things to the scene, they simply try to understand what the scene is, and fit themselves into it. The employee-actor almost ignores the scene entirely, and sees the whole project as an excuse to showcase themselves (“my character wouldn't do that”), and in a sense, this is what Serra is referring to when he says; “it's as if you are writing a book and you are two”: the actor is, without invite, bringing things in from outside the original conception of the project, which effectively creates a rival to the original conception, trying to turn it into something else, hence two authors. The artist-actor is flexible enough, sensitive enough, and good enough, to respond to whichever way the director may want to work the scene. The artist-actor does not want to co-author but serve the form. For actor-artists, aesthetic truth is the goal, and organic creation is the way to attain it. These artist-actors struggle enormously in a world where little more is expected of the actor than having the right colour hair.

 

The mistake Serra makes (and others do too) is to speak of actors in general – he is effectively saying all actors are the same, and take the same approach. Clearly this is not true. It is a shame that a filmmaker of Serra's calibre sees it this way. More broadly speaking though, it is utterly crucial that we recognise and endorse artist-actors, otherwise they will disappear in that gap between employee-actors and non-actors, and the art of acting will disappear with them.

The Great Acting Blog: "Non-Actors, Employee-Actors, & Artist-Actors"

 

“with professional actors they have an imaginary in between you and them. In other words they have some model in their minds about how to act, or how someone did it before, or some techniques, visual or physical, they can use....it's as if you are writing a book and you are two” - Albert Serra

 

Serra is a filmmaker who primarily works with non-actors. He says he doesn't like professional actors, and the above quote gives us a clue as to why. What Serra is really doing here, is criticising actors in general for a lack of creativity, or more precisely, a lack of in-the-moment creativity: actors work-out in advance exactly how they are going to do the scene, down to each gesture, each facial movement, each inflection, and simply implement this preparation regardless of what is actually happening in the scene as it unfolds (and regardless of what the other actors in the scene are doing). This approach makes it that much harder for the director to work with the actor, because the actor has already set their performance in stone. The model of acting Serra talks about, is the model of the employee-actor, whose goal is simply to rubber stamp a performance of complacent, base professionalism, and where every effort is made to explain the character rather than create organically, because the greatest terror is that anything the actor does may be even slightly misunderstood, every I dotted and every T crossed to absolute death, and any semblance of art is eliminated mercilessly. Of course, all this leads to the bland, meaningless, presentation-without-mistakes type of performance which so dominates contemporary acting, and which so irks filmmakers like Serra.

 

There is the non-actor and there is the employee-actor, but there is also a third kind of actor: the artist-actor. This actor arrives at the scene with nothing, and creates something out of that nothing. For sure there is preparation – memorising lines, understanding what is happening in the scene, practice – but artist-actors don't merely re-produce this preparation and call it “performance”, they use preparation as a tool for liberating their creativity, the preparation is a means and not an end. The artist-actor responds to what is actually happening in the scene, and responds regardless of their preparation. They come to the work ready to discover. And the work that is produced with this approach is intense, various, intriguing, and true. Also, by creating in-the-moment, we are closer to the actors source personality, as oppose to the layers and layers of guff piled on in the name of technique, and being close to the source leads to a more vivid performance. Artist-actors don't bring things to the scene, they simply try to understand what the scene is, and fit themselves into it. The employee-actor almost ignores the scene entirely, and sees the whole project as an excuse to showcase themselves (“my character wouldn't do that”), and in a sense, this is what Serra is referring to when he says; “it's as if you are writing a book and you are two”: the actor is, without invite, bringing things in from outside the original conception of the project, which effectively creates a rival to the original conception, trying to turn it into something else, hence two authors. The artist-actor is flexible enough, sensitive enough, and good enough, to respond to whichever way the director may want to work the scene. The artist-actor does not want to co-author but serve the form. For actor-artists, aesthetic truth is the goal, and organic creation is the way to attain it. These artist-actors struggle enormously in a world where little more is expected of the actor than having the right colour hair.

 

The mistake Serra makes (and others do too) is to speak of actors in general – he is effectively saying all actors are the same, and take the same approach. Clearly this is not true. It is a shame that a filmmaker of Serra's calibre sees it this way. More broadly speaking though, it is utterly crucial that we recognise and endorse artist-actors, otherwise they will disappear in that gap between employee-actors and non-actors, and the art of acting will disappear with them.

Noirish Project - Feature Film Announcement

A possible location for the film

Noirish Project is the working title for a film noir feature film, which begins shooting next month. We will start off with a scripted premise, or a scripted Act One, and discover the rest of the film while we're making it, so that the journey of the characters becomes the journey of the filmmakers.

 

The film itself is about the nature of perception, how we interpret the signs which confront us, and how that interpretation changes as our desires change. At the heart of the film is an ambiguity of action, which I have coded as a film noir:

Naive, small-town boy Billy, has stolen the family jewels, and handed them over to small-time scheister, Jimmy, who in turn takes them to the local Fence to sell them for cash. When the jewels turn out to be fake, Jimmy barely escapes with his life, and returns to Billy without the jewels or the cash. Billy thinks Jimmy is screwing him over, and gets Jimmy to take him to the Fence to get the jewels back. However, when they discover the Fence has gone missing, they realise their journey has only just begun ….

 

The character Billy is totally dependent on Jimmy, because Jimmy is his only connection to the Fence, and therefore, must interpret everything Jimmy says or does in relation to his goal of getting the jewels back, and this interpretation is viewed through the prism of whatever context the character happens to find himself in.

 

The film will be dense with intricate, repetitive, formalised dialogue, which will serve to describe events, meaning that much of the action will take place “off-screen”,  so in the minds eye of the beholder. We'll be using static shots, of long duration, to let the intricate dialogue unfold in real-time. The general universe of the film, will again be low-grade, hopeless and listless, with scenes of intense expository dialogue intercut with scenes of inertia, and loss of focus on the central thrust of action. We will be shooting in black and white, on the streets of London, and structurally the film will encompass a road movie element, which will take us outside the city, and to various parts of the UK.

Once again, I will be producing aswell as acting in the film, a multitasking challenge which I have explored previously on this blog. This dual role can distract from performing the scene, and this distraction can lead to a loss of commitment, which in turn may result in a loss of energy. We're only talking about 1 or 2 percentage points, but still.... Anyway, in terms of the general performance style, we will be flipping between bravura, and something more disciplined, but always simple, forceful, and true. Overall, we will be paring back the performances to include only the essentials, which will lead to minimal, direct style.

This is very much the starting point for Noirish Project, and I'm sure it will expand and contract, simplify and complicate as work on it evolves, and may even change radically over time. Either way, I look forward to documentating the project here, over the coming months.

RELATED

Some Thoughts On Self-Producing

The Performance In Your Head Doesn't Count

Jean-Pierre Melville On His Films

“I don’t want to situate my heroes in time; I don’t want the action of a film to be recognizable as something that happens in 1968. That’s why in Le samouraï, for example, the women aren’t wearing miniskirts, while the men are wearing hats—something, unfortunately, that no one does anymore. I’m not interested in realism. All my films hinge on the fantastic. I’m not a documentarian; a film is first and foremost a dream, and it’s absurd to copy life in an attempt to produce an exact re-creation of it. Transposition is more or less a reflex with me: I move from realism to fantasy without the spectator ever noticing.”

 

 

Via Strangewood

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Noirish Project - Feature Film Announcement"

Noirish Project is the working title for a film noir feature film, which begins shooting next month. We will start off with a scripted premise, or a scripted Act One, and discover the rest of the film while we're making it, so that the journey of the characters becomes the journey of the filmmakers.

The film itself is about the nature of perception, how we interpret the signs which confront us, and how that interpretation changes as our desires change. At the heart of the film is an ambiguity of action, which I have coded as a film noir:

Naive, small-town boy Billy, has stolen the family jewels, and handed them over to small-time scheister, Jimmy, who in turn takes them to the local Fence to sell them for cash. When the jewels turn out to be fake, Jimmy barely escapes with his life, and returns to Billy empty-handed. Billy thinks Jimmy is screwing him over, and gets Jimmy to take him to the Fence to get the jewels back. However, when they discover the Fence has gone missing, they realise their journey has only just begun ….

The character Billy is totally dependent on Jimmy, because Jimmy is his only connection to the Fence, and therefore, must interpret everything Jimmy says or does in relation to his goal of getting the jewels back, and this interpretation is viewed through the prism of whatever context the character happens to find himself in.

The film will be dense with intricate, repetitive, formalised dialogue, which will serve to describe events, meaning that much of the action will take place “off-screen”,  so in the minds eye of the beholder. We'll be using static shots, of long duration, to let the intricate dialogue unfold in real-time. The general universe of the film, will again be low-grade, hopeless and listless, with scenes of intense expository dialogue intercut with scenes of inertia, and loss of focus on the central thrust of action. We will be shooting in black and white, on the streets of London, and structurally the film will encompass a road movie element, which will take us outside the city, and to various parts of the UK.

Once again, I will be producing aswell as acting in the film, a multitasking challenge which I have explored previously on this blog. This dual role can distract from performing the scene, and this distraction can lead to a loss of commitment, which in turn may result in a loss of energy. We're only talking about 1 or 2 percentage points, but still.... Anyway, in terms of the general performance style, we will be flipping between bravura, and something more disciplined, but always simple, forceful, and true. Overall, we will be paring back the performances to include only the essentials, which will lead to minimal, direct style.

This is very much the starting point for Noirish Project, and I'm sure it will expand and contract, simplify and complicate as work on it evolves, and may even change radically over time. Either way, I look forward to documentating the project here, over the coming months.

RELATED

Some Thoughts On Self-Producing

The Performance In Your Head Doesn't Count

The Great Acting Blog: "A New Body For A Lost Soul"

 

“Homo Sapiens Project is an ongoing series of personal video works by Rouzbeh Rashidi.... The films produced range from cryptic, often darkly surreal film diaries to impressionistic portraits of places and people, from found footage séances to semi-documentary monologues. Formally, they encompass everything from highly composed and distantly framed meditations to frenetically flickering plunges into the textural substance of moving images. They are also frequently often suffused with an eerie sense of mystery reminiscent of Horror and Classic Sci-Fi cinema. “

 

The Call had been my one-play from 2008, which I wrote and produced myself aswell as performed. The plays is about Mickey, a near-psychotic entrepeneur who rings up a rival in order to boast about his recent successes, but finds himself locked into an ever more extreme battle of one-upmanship, over girls, cars and money. It's structured around a telephone call in such a way that the audience only hears Mickey's side of the conversation, and had proved to be a very challenging piece of work, and constituted an important artistic breakthrough for me. However, my only record of the performance had been a scratchy DVD of one of the rehearsals, which had been lost until I stumbled upon it year or so ago, copying it to my hardrive, and there it languished for months.

I decided recently to send the recording to Rashidi, because I knew he liked to re-work old footage for Homo Sapiens Project. And I was not disapointed. Using digital post-production techniques, Rashidi transformed the material into a stunning new film: HSP 131 (ie – the 131^st film in Homo Sapiens Project so far). The file I sent him was a 100MB MPEG, which he then converted and blew-up into a 40 GIG Apple Pro-Res 422 (HQ), it is a half hour multiple exposure of one continuous take. Rashidi eloborates on the aesthetic aspects of HSP 131: -

“The nature of HSP usually are rooted in horror and science fiction cinema with heavily presecence of eerie mood and mysteriousness. In this particular episode elements such as visual multi-layer activities, positive/negative imagery, sepia-tone, dark/drone ambient soundscape, and use of very light flickering effect are together in order to serve the enigmatic experience,and expose the situation of the uncanny character of the film”.

And further, on the new life given to my performance of The Call in HSP 131: -

“If we assume that the performance of James Devereaux is the heart and soul of the film, then it needed a brain/bodyi n order for it to come back to cinematic life...when the performance is good, the soul is there. The image and sound can be heavily changed and altered later on, thanks to digital cinema. Like we did in HSP 131”.

I think this is an important and fundamental point, which I am still coming to terms with. I thought that my work in The Call was essentially “dead” - the performances on stage can only live on in the memory of the audience, and the recording of the rehearsal was never really going to see the light of day, but Rashidi has given the performance a new life, or, to put it another way, a new body for a lost soul. I've written before on this blog, that it is the actor's job to be truthful, while the filmmaker supplies the fantasy (the actor is Alice in the filmmaker's Wonderland, as it were). Digital technology in the right hands then, possesses the power to take the same, truthful performance, and create a new, fantastical context for it.

Aki Kaurismaki's on the acting technique of Matti Pellonpaa ....

"The late Matti Pellonpää used exactly the same method as an actor. I gave him the script and he read it at once. Then he didn’t touch it for three months until just prior to the shooting, mainly to learn the dialogue. He used his subconscious to develop the character and to do all the work, like a lazy man would. His subconscious did all the work that a lesser actor would’ve burdened himself with."

Via Film Comment

Aki Kaurismaki on not using storyboards....

"After all, I don’t have any storyboards. The first shot leads to another, and so on. Only when the previous shot is finished I start to plan the next. And I don’t believe storyboards would help. You can lose something because you can’t react to what the scene itself produces. Shots mechanically prepared in advance turn against themselves. The film ends up feeling too well made."

 

Originally published in an interview for Film Comment

Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Robby Muller Interviewed On Down By Law"

 

 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Will It Stop Raining In Summer"

Possile location for Will It Stop Raining In Summer

 

 

Will It Stop Raining In Summer will be our next short film. It's a love triangle thriller, about Roger, who is having an affair with Beryl, but every-time they meet-up, Beryl's husband, Maurice, shows up co-incidentally, apparently oblivious to his wife's illicit trysts. The film came about when a jumble of images popped into my mind and I tried to make sense of them. The film owes something to those suburban British films from the '50s and '60s which would be on telly on those days when you were home sick from school. This is not an homage or even a reference however, I couldn't tell you the names of these films, I can't remember their plots or who was in them, it's more a feeling that the images of these films absorbed themselves into my sub-conscious and now they have filtered back through my imagination to create something new. I could also hear the feint sound of another echo in Will It Stop Raining In Summer, and that is of benign middle class sitcoms, which were prevalent in the 1980s (I unknowingly lifted the name of Beryl from No Place Like Home, a sitcom which starred William Gaunt). I have no specific affection for such sitcoms or any real interest in the sitcom as a form, but again, they created images which have been locked in my sub-conscious for years, but which are now rattling their chains. So, Will It Stop Raining In Summer is my imagination's regurgitation of these films and shows, giving them a new darkly ironic form.

 

And what of the acting then? Again, I will play opposite John Giles, and we are currently working on finding an actress to play Beryl. The script is full of characterization (ie - how the character does something, rather than what he does), for example; the character of Maurice, is a cuckold written in the style of a cuckold, bluff and amiable, and this, coupled with the context of the scenes, means that the actor never needs to show us that his character is a cuckold (which is how most modern acting is done: “hi, I'm a serial killer”), the script has already done that work, so the actor need only concentrate on doing the actions called forth in the scene. We will again be aiming for performances which are direct, simple, forceful, and truthful. Filming will begin over the next month, and I will post regularly about the film on here and on the Drifting Clouds Cinema blog. Finally, for me, I will once again be directing and acting in the film, and I will strive once again to perfect the process of switching between those two roles – I'm still too reliant on will power, but want to get it down to a science, and I will of course share my findings on this blog, in the form of a repeatable and transferable technique.

A thought on Phone Box Gun

Phone Box Gun is neither comic nor dramatic: one viewer may find a certain moment in the film to be funny, another may find the same moment to be sad, and another still may find no interest in it at all. All responses are valid. What I am doing is creating a very obvious line of action (or plot) - in the case of this film we have a protagonist who commits robbery in order to get cash - and follow that line to it's logical end. The film exist as a culmination of filmmaking choices in service of that line of action.

The Great Acting Blog: "Stills From Phone Box Gun"

 

See the full gallery on Posterous

The Great Acting Blog: "Flipping Between Mindsets"

Before I head back to Ireland to complete filming on Rouzbeh Rashidi's HE (which is going to be an utterly sublime feature, by the way), I intend to squeeze in a quickie short film, called Phone Box Gun. It'll be a Kaurismakian film noir, about a jewellery heist, where I'll finally get the chance to wave a Beretta about and wear a false beard, and further, just because I enjoy making life difficult, I'll also be directing the film aswell as acting in it.

Whenever I've tried my hand at filmmaking in the past, I've gone into it with too aggressive a mindset, which I think is inappropriate. An aggressive mindset is very good for acting (or, indeed, writing) because acting requires short bursts of heightened intensity, which are generated in the moment of performance. Filmmaking, I believe, requires a slow burn kind of energy – a filmmaker needs to be able to function consistently well over the period of time of the shoot, making many decisions, being alive to mishaps. The filmmaker is required to manage other people, which means he needs to ensure he is available for them, and create conditions whereby they can work happily.The filmmaker is at the centre of everything, all eyes are on him. The actor need only concern himself with himself, and the singular act of his performance, and all of his attention is dedicated to that, he need not multi-task – and that's just the way most actors like it,  because most actors are minimalists, it's the philosopher aspect of their work, favouring clarity and simplicity (this becomes very evident when actors move behind the camera), however, this is not a pre-requisite for the job, but certainly a common trait I have witnessed. It's also worth noting that a relaxed body and mind is crucial to the actor's work, and so another reason why they don't want to be pre-occupied with anything else. The poor filmmaker is often under stress, as he skits around, trying to keep all the plates spinning. The life of the actor sounds positively leisurely in comparison to that of the filmmaker, which of course it is, apart from that battle with the awesome which takes place during the performance (I've met more than one director who started out as an actor, but switched because they could not cope with the pressure of the performance). Acting requires a laser-like in-the-moment precision, and to deliver that requires immense discipline, mental strength, and self-control, all difficult, improved only over a long period of practice. Directors need a certain kind of generosity, a magnanimity, because they are handling different personalities, with differing talents – a director needs, to a certain extent, a big tent, whereas actors needs only a sleeping bag. 

To be a filmmaker requires a certain kind of humility: he is responsible for everything, yet much of the production is out of his control. Setting up the shot may take time, it may not go according to plan, but the key is to accept this state of affairs, not grind against it, which will only lead to fatigue and a diminishment in the quality of the work. It's also being aware that everybody else is doing their best, and it is upto the filmmaker to be able to articulate what he wants in a way that is useful and practical to the person he is speaking too. Much of this then, is a preparation issue, being ready to explain yourself, being ready to communicate – if the filmmaker cannot articulate himself properly, he should refrain altogether, and let cast and crew go about their work. I think this is the  aspect I need to work on most. I find managing people to be tedious, which is why I prefer to work with independent types, who think for themselves and take their work seriously, just getting on with it. Also, so much of acting is about energy conservation, and articulating what you want is energy draining. Therefore, directing and acting in the same production, requires compartmentalisation,  flipping between the two mindsets as and when. The point is, committing totally to the scene when acting in it, then, when the scene is over, stepping out of it, and looking at it with a director's eye. 

On Phone Box Gun, I intend to be more relaxed about how the production will unfold, and flip flop more consciously between the mindsets of actor and director, as oppose to jumbling it all together, and pushing it through by force of will. Hopefully, this adjustment to my previous approach, will lead to greater productivity, and ultimately serve the film better.