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 in which 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.

The Great Acting Blog: "Mindboggling - Tony Curtis in The Boston Strangler"

Tony Curtis plays Albert DeSalvo, who is picked up by the cops on a breaking and entering charge, but when the judge rules Albert is not of his right mind, he is institutionalised where psychiatrists diagnose him with a multiple personality disorder. Chief Detective John S Bottomly (played by Henry Fonda) discovers him there, and all the signs are that Albert is infact the perpetrator of the 13 murders Bottomly has so far failed to solve. Bottomly wants to interrogate Albert,  to prove conclusively that he is the murderer, and put him behind bars. Trouble is, Albert's disorder means that he has literally two totally separate people enclosed within his one body – the vulnerable, simple,honest, blue collar family man, and the cold, serial killer, with each taking it in turns to use the body. Albert the family man has no knowledge or  rememberance of the murders, and further, his survival depends on his absolute certainty of his innocence. If he is interrogated, the doctors say, and Albert the family man is forced to acknowledge Albert the strangler, then this may “just push him over the edge”, and keep him institutionalised for the rest of his life, probably catatonic. Bottomly decides that this would be the next best thing to putting Albert behind bars, and sets up a series of interviews with him, to get to the truth.

During the interviews, Curtis begins to explain what he was doing on the day of each of the murders, and here the film employs flashback, to show us what Curtis is telling us. Curtis' false memories are innocent, however, they are gradually invaded by the true memories of the murders; on one occasion he hears a disembodied scream while his memory tells him he's at work, on another, he thinks he was building a dolls house for his daughter but this is intercut with a strangled corpse. So these flashbacks become a mish-mash of what Curtis thinks he remembers happening, and what actually happened (ie – the murders). Scene by scene, Fonda pushes harder with his questioning, and Curtis digs deeper within himself to arrive at the truth.

Of course, there are the plastic elements which aid Curtis' perfromance; the false nose, the brown contact lenses, the distinctive, working-class, Boston accent (more recently employed in Scorsese's Departed). Then the directorial conceit of using flashback does a lot of the heavy lifting for Curtis – he need only show us intense concentration, and the visuals will do the rest. However, Curtis' performance really becomes very special in the final scene, when he at last comes face to face with who he really is. The memories of past murder begin to flood Curtis' mind, dominating  the false, innocent memories. However, the film, at this point, eshcews the use of flashback, and the whole thing is expressed through Curtis' performance. At the first flash of realisation, Curtis whimpers and leaps out of his chair, moving to the wall and leaning his whole body against it, as if to prevent himself from falling into an abyss. Then, he walks  while still leaning against the wall, and feeling his way across it with his hands, as though blindfolded. There is a moment when Curtis makes one last attempt to deny the truth; he clenches his hands to his head, as though trying to refuse the memories entry to his mind, repressing them. However, all this effort is to no avail, as Curtis is finally consumed by his muderous past, and begins to relive it, re-enacting each murder, the victims are invisible this time of course.

The miracle of Curtis' perfromance here, is that by using his body, he reveals the inside of his mind.