The Great Acting Blog: "Robert De Niro Notes"

 

De Niro offers practical advice here, which means alot coming from an actor of his stature, and especially him I suppose, because so much theoretical voodoo has grown up around his work, in order to explain away his performances - the truth is, acting requires skill and technique and a little bit of aptitude. For me, the central theme of De Niro's view, is that it's about getting the work done and getting on with doing it, aswell as respecting the scene at hand.  

 

 

• De Niro says acting is not about neuroses and playing on your neuroses, it's about doing the character - "the tasks of the character".
• He says don't go about it as though the character was you and how you would do it - it's about the character.
• Be faithful to the text/script. 
• Says it's about script analysis, seeing something for what it is, breaking the play down - not fictionalising but taking whatever you get from the analysis, and making your choices based on what you pick up from the analysis - "the talent is in the choices" - Stella Adler.
• "Earn the right to play the character" -  make it your own and feel comfortable in doing it by researching the character, try to be close to the character, so if you have to improv or ad lib, you have an idea about what the character would do in that situation.
• Acting is about having an action, like "to sell something."
• He says you've got to get up and do it - the sooner you get to knowing you've got to get up and do it, the sooner you'll do it.
• He says he had a problem when he was a young actor : he was afraid to make a move "I have to feel it, and I have to do this".- but says you've got to sometimes jump in - "if i jumped in I arrive at that place" (where he is playing the scene) - whereas before he thought he had to do all sorts of weird preparation before he could arrive at that point.
• Says, don't pamper yourself, you've got to get out there and do it, and if you make a mistake, you do it again.
• Never comment on the character, never put the character down.
• While working on Mean Streets with Scorsese, they improvised scenes, but it was set and structured by the time they did it in front of camera.
• For Godfather 2, he studied and studied Brando's performance to find the boundaries.
• Says he doesn't like to expend a lot of energy on the set: does the scene then goes back home and rests.
• Says the last thing he wants to do is worry about the scene, because then his action becomes "to worry!"
• Says Scorsese has great respect for actors, which is important to get the best out of them.
• Listening is essential in acting - says actors have problems just listening, trusting themselves, but if there's nothing to do don't do anything.
• Says the notion that if actors look at the dailies it creates a problem, is a myth. Doesn't subscribe to it.
• Says he and Scorsese understand each other, that's why they're able to work with each other so many times and have a good time.. Says they have the same sensibility, says you have to be very honest with each other, about how you feel about things.
• Says he always wanted to direct, that's why he made Bronx Tale.
• Says do authentic work, regardless of how you think people may react. That'll distinguish you from other people.

The Great Acting Blog: "Robert De Niro Notes"

 

De Niro offers practical advice here, which means alot coming from an actor of his stature, and especially him I suppose, because so much theoretical voodoo has grown up around his work, in order to explain away his performances - the truth is, acting requires skill and technique and a little bit of aptitude. For me, the central theme of De Niro's view, is that it's about getting the work done and getting on with doing it, aswell as respecting the scene at hand.  

 

• De Niro says acting is not about neuroses and playing on your neuroses, it's about doing the character - "the tasks of the character".
• He says don't go about it as though the character was you and how you would do it - it's about the character.
• Be faithful to the text/script. 
• Says it's about script analysis, seeing something for what it is, breaking the play down - not fictionalising but taking whatever you get from the analysis, and making your choices based on what you pick up from the analysis - "the talent is in the choices" - Stella Adler.
• "Earn the right to play the character" -  make it your own and feel comfortable in doing it by researching the character, try to be close to the character, so if you have to improv or ad lib, you have an idea about what the character would do in that situation.
• Acting is about having an action, like "to sell something."
• He says you've got to get up and do it - the sooner you get to knowing you've got to get up and do it, the sooner you'll do it.
• He says he had a problem when he was a young actor : he was afraid to make a move "I have to feel it, and I have to do this".- but says you've got to sometimes jump in - "if i jumped in I arrive at that place" (where he is playing the scene) - whereas before he thought he had to do all sorts of weird preparation before he could arrive at that point.
• Says, don't pamper yourself, you've got to get out there and do it, and if you make a mistake, you do it again.
• Never comment on the character, never put the character down.
• While working on Mean Streets with Scorsese, they improvised scenes, but it was set and structured by the time they did it in front of camera.
• For Godfather 2, he studied and studied Brando's performance to find the boundaries.
• Says he doesn't like to expend a lot of energy on the set: does the scene then goes back home and rests.
• Says the last thing he wants to do is worry about the scene, because then his action becomes "to worry!"
• Says Scorsese has great respect for actors, which is important to get the best out of them.
• Listening is essential in acting - says actors have problems just listening, trusting themselves, but if there's nothing to do don't do anything.
• Says the notion that if actors look at the dailies it creates a problem, is a myth. Doesn't subscribe to it.
• Says he and Scorsese understand each other, that's why they're able to work with each other so many times and have a good time.. Says they have the same sensibility, says you have to be very honest with each other, about how you feel about things.
• Says he always wanted to direct, that's why he made Bronx Tale.
• Says do authentic work, regardless of how you think people may react. That'll distinguish you from other people.

The Great Acting Blog: "Strive To Be Great"

A forthcoming Daniel Day-Lewis performance is always turned into a huge event by the media - we were told his turn in PT Anderson's There Will Be Blood was the performance to define cinematic acting for all time. Then there is the psychophantic reporting about the lengths Day-Lewis went in order to “research the character”, and that he “stays in character” between takes. All of this stuff of course, has helped to create a mythology around Day-Lewis, a mystique, a narrative, and which has become self-perpetuating. When Day-Lewis quit the run of Hamlet early, claiming that the death of his own father weighed too greatly on his performances (others juicily claimed he actually saw the ghost of his father on stage), this only added to his legend. Whereas most actors would have been branded incompetent and unreliable for quitting, for Day-Lewis this was seen as an example of just how far he is willing to go to give a truthful performance. His failure is held up as his commitment to his art (quitting is a sign of commitment in our topsy-turvy modern world). On another occasion, Day-Lewis disappeared to make shoes in Italy somewhere, and again this was cited as evidence of his commitment; he'd spent so long in the blazing furnace of creation, he just needed to get away from it all, and make shoes. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect about all this however, is the fact that Day-Lewis has been able to maintain the intensity of the attention on his work for so long - the only comparable actor I can think of is Robert De Niro during the 70s and early 80s, a far better actor than Day-Lewis, but focus on his work has faded as his career has worn on.*

 

Whatever you may think of Day-Lewis, the sheer ambition of his acting choices is an example, and should be an inspiration. Few other actors these days strive to give something extra, something remarkable, in the way that Day-Lewis does. The great explorations of acting, the will to deliver a performance of force, the longing to express, the love of art, the desire to thrill, seems to be broadly lacking in contemporary acting. Any actor who strives to be an artist is sneered at, brand names on the CV are all that count, few take the technical and aesthetic aspects of acting seriously. That's generally why acting and actors are less exciting than they were, less fun, and in turn, less loved.

Actors now see the audience as an appendage to their career, rather than the object of it. This has been evidenced in recent years by the spate of incidents in theatres where actors have broken out of character and told the audience to shut-up whenever their mobile phone has rung or when they eat crisps. I can't help but feel that in the old days, actors like Donald Wolfitt or Anew Macmaster would have rendered such distractions irrelevant and quelled any noise by the sheer greatness of their performances. Infact, Harold Pinter tells the story about when he was a young actor touring Shakespeare in MacMaster's company, they were doing Othello in some Irish village, and the 2000 strong audience were drunk and bawdy to the extent that the actors on stage couldn't hear eachother speak, that is, until MacMaster entered, and who, by the end of the play, held the audience in rapt silence – you could hear a pin drop – but he didn't ask or tell them to be quiet, he stunned them with his brilliance. That's what we should be aiming for in our work.

 

 

 

* Day-Lewis has a much lower output than De Niro, making only 6 films in the last 15 years, while De Niro has made 44 in the same timeframe. This may go some way to explain why the intensity of attention on Day-Lewis' work has endured.

The Great Acting Blog: "Make Choices You Enjoy - John Malkovich In Colour Me Kubrick"

Malkovich is one of those American actors who is regarded as a real actor, which is to say, he actually can act, he's an artist, he's in it because he wants to be a great actor, or make a great contribution, he's certainly an actor who gives something a little bit extra, he's always provocative, always intense. He's also one of those actors for whom we feel that the calibre of material offered to him is rarely commensurate to his talent – Malkovich has never had a great run of performances in the way his compatriots from the generation preceding his did, namely Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. But then perhaps Malkovich has never quite been the Hollywood star in the same way either. Infact, off the top of my head, it's difficult to really name any of his Hollywood films. However, his output in Europe seems to be more distinctive, where he has worked with Raoul Ruiz, Manoel de Olveira, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani. Malkovich though, is an actor of such strength, that he can take fairly mediocre material, and render it compelling. And Colour Me Kubrick is an example of this.

The film itself is a light, fluffy affair, loose in parts, piquant in others, and had the actor at the centre of the film been of anything less than Malkovich's standard, then Colour Me Kubrick would have been a very ordinary film indeed. But there Malkovich is, delivering perhaps one of the great underrated screen performances of recent years (this is certainly an example of an actor's work receiving less than due attention because it was done in an unfeted film – an actor cannot enjoy success unless the production he is working on, is successful as a whole – there's moral in there somewhere). Colour Me Kubrick is based on the true story of Alan Conway, who went around passing himself off as filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. It wasn't that Conway looked anything like Kubrick, he didn't, but he was able to get away with it because Kubrick's reclusiveness meant that few people were certain of what he looked like. And Malkovich goes to town as Conway, playing him as a cheap, camp, bedsitland, alcoholic – imagine one of those middle aged men wearing a brown mac and tatty old baseball cap with a cheap bottle of vodka in his pocket, and you've got him . Scene by scene, he wins the confidence of wannabe showbiz types by appealing to their vanity; he promises a young rock group work on his new film, and so they buy him drinks (“rich people don't carry cash”), and on another occasion, he beds a young costumer designer after promising to hook him up with his Hollywood connections, and on another, he agrees to invest in a swanky restaurant in order to save it from bankruptcy, offering to get his Hollywood legal team to “look over the figures”. Perhaps Conway's most audacious con, was of a light entertainer, who, in real life had been Joe Longthorne but was coded as Lee Pratt in the film. After attending a party at Pratt's house, Conway tells him he will help him crack Vegas, and the con starts in a scene where Malkovich delivers a great piece of bravura acting – waving his arms about, and speaking in a sort of unmodulated bellow: he informs Pratt that he will speak to “Moe Green in Vegas”, and, “Sheckie in New York”, and get the ball rolling. It is a sensational acting choice, hilarious, and disquietingly true, the film is worth watching if only for this scene. The net result however, is that he takes up residence in a luxury hotel, all at Pratt's expense of course.

The film is choc full of these wonderful little moments created by Malkovich. Playing a character who is himself acting, offers rich performance possibilities. It's true that Malkovich, now in his late 50s, is a master craftsman. He is innately compelling, with his intensity, intelligence, dry humour and unusual persona. His work is always precise, always simple, never adding unnecessary detail, but always striving to express the scene, and he makes it seem effortless in Colour Me Kubrick, as all great actors do. Essentially however, at the heart of this performance, is the fact that Malkovich is making acting choices he enjoys, choices which interest him, which touch off his imagination, and which ultimately energise him and fuel him through the scenes. The alternative to making enjoyable choices, is making choices we do not enjoy, and this typically happens when we act to please the director – whether that's to give the director what we think he wants in order to make him like us, or whether it's to shore up an insecure director by doing it his way (insecure directors typically talk too much, and want to control how the actor does the scene) – the irony is, most actors make choices in order to please others, which is why so much contemporary acting is joyless and stingy. Malkovich doesn't fall into that trap – and as a result, we the audience, are delighted by a performance which is properly energised, vivid, various, and, well, fun.

 

Make choices you enjoy.

 

To quote the great David Mamet; “You not only have a right to choose actions which are fun, you have a responsibility – that's your job as an actor”.

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness - Part 1""

 

As I arrived in Cork,  the ever prolific and hardworking Rouzbeh Rashidi informed me that in addition to HE, we were to shoot some scenes for another feature film he was putting together (in collaboration with Maximilian Le Cain), and he did so in a tone of voice which suggested that shooting two feature films simultaneously was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, the obvious thing to do infact.

He said he wanted to explore on camera some of the ideas I have been developing on this blog over the months, aswell as create fictional, improvised scenes, then finally explore my attitude to cinema generally, in scenes which would be both fiction and documentary. However, as the scenes progressed and as we accrued material, it was decided that the footage would form a feature film of it's own: “Boredom Of The Disgust And Monotony Of The Tediousness”.

5 OF THE BEST

Firstly, Rashidi asked me to write down my five favourite actors and actresses, on a piece of paper, and then discuss what I liked about them, or why I thought they were great. Normally an easy task – I always love a good list, and walking down street lost in my thoughts, I could probably reel off one name after another, but when someone asks you to name names, suddenly the mind goes blank. However, after some thought, I did manage to come up with five actors – (in no particular order) Charles Laughton, Marlon Brando, Michel Piccoli, Jack Nicholson and Jean Gabin (on my reserve list were Alain Delon and Robert De Niro). For actresses, I decided on: Tilda Swinton, Emmanuelle Beart, Irene Jacob and Delphine Seyrig, and ran out of time before thinking of my fifth (which would have been Monica Vitti). I then offered my reasons for including each. Obviously a lot was said about the excellence of each actor's technique, but, in the end, what we respond to in each actor is their personality, each of them is intrinsically compelling – and I'm not talking about them playing compelling characters, it's something in them, call it energy, call it spirit, there's just something about them that is alight....Of course, as I write this blog, I can think of many, many others I could add to the list (Dirk Bogarde anyone?).

GURU

The next set up had me expounding my theories on acting more broadly (never needing to be asked twice to do so of course) – many of which may be viewed as “controversial”, such as the fact that there is no difference between stage and camera acting, but that a lot of people make a lot of money by inventing a difference: then charging good money to explain what the difference is, then charge again to "teach" the actor how to "adapt" accordingly. The wider point, of course, is that a whole industry has sprouted up around the idealism and the ambition of young people who go into acting – and this industry is made up of “business people” who create a problem for the actor and then offer themselves as the solution (in the same way cigarettes create an aggravation for nicotine in the smoker, which can only be soothed by smoking). A classic example, is the “career guru”, who charges actors £50 an hour to assess the marketing effectiveness of their materials (ie - headshots, CVs, covering letters etc). During this hour, the actor is subjected to a comprehensive criticism of all that he has been doing to “get work”, and at the end, the guru gives him list of things to change (whether it is an improvement is moot of course). What else is the guru to do? Imagine that the desperate actor entered the guru's den, hoping to find out “where he's going wrong”, but, after only 10 minutes, the guru simply turned round and said; “congratulations! I've checked your stuff, and everything seems in order – keep doing what you're doing and success will soon be yours”,  then ushered the actor out the door? Wouldn't the actor feel cheated out of his money? Isn't he paying for the guru to criticise him?....With the £50 spent on the guru, the actor could have gone onto Amazon and bought a Flip HD camera and started making his own films.....I didn't put it this way in Boredom Of The Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness, but my point is the actor should remind himself that all he wants to do is offer a presentation to an audience (and hopefully delight them in the process) – this way of thinking will keep him fitted for the task - all else should be kept in perspective. If our work becomes simply a marketing mechanism, it will not be long before the lies breed an all consuming self-loathing, and then what?

The next part of the Boredom Of Disgust & Monotony Of The Tediousness blogs, which look at the fictional improvised scenes we created.

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The Great Acting Blog: "From Fake Independence To A True Artistic Culture"

Being independent has nothing whatever to do with money, or lack thereof. It has got nothing to do with the means of production. Independence is about how you think. We're currently seeing the proliferation of filmmakers who describe themselves as “independent” because they operate with very little money and outside any organized structure like Hollywood. However, the true objective of many of these “independents” is to win the affection of a large corporation, or perhaps become one themselves, and the starting point for this effort is to produce a script which is merely a bad rip- off of the latest commercial success. What's independent about that? Nothing.

Of course, the vast majority of these phonies fail in their attempt to become big shots. And so, they do the next best thing, and mimic, what they perceive to be, the behaviour of a Hollywood player in order to make it look like they are one. But the difference between the actual Hollywood player and the fake, is that the Hollywood player possesses real world accomplishments (regardless of the griminess of the pole climbed) whereas the fake's accomplishments exist only in his head. By copying Hollywood, the fake strives to convince himself (as much as to convince others), that he too is part of the club, but of course, his membership is a fantasy, and, perhaps then, this is the closest he will ever get to the land of make believe. These losers read somewhere that Hitchcock treated actors like cattle (oh really?) and so decide to do likewise thinking this alone will get us to recognize and bow before their genius, and that they too are capable of making a movie like Shadow Of A Doubt or Strangers On A Train. Of course, the real reason the phony treats actors like cattle is because they are absolutely terrified of actors, and of acting, and rather than allay that terror by learning to understand the craft of the actor better (because that's a real pain in the ass right?), they decide to convert their fear into contempt, and invoke Hitchcock (or whatever Hollywood prize cow they choose for whatever situation presented) in order to justify their pig ignorance. It is very difficult to spot these fakes before you've wasted time on them, but the only sure fire tell-tale sign I've found, is that their script stinks to high heaven and they don't care, or worse, they don't realize.

It takes enormous courage and strength (built up over time) for a filmmaker or a playwright or an actor to go his or her own way, to stand alone and express their own view of the world, to define and employ their own aesthetic, to produce their own films, to start their own theatres. Perhaps it is more difficult now than it's ever been, for we are a people brainwashed by the screaming indoctrination of the fame and fortune principle, and anyone who tries to produce work outside of this principle, which is to say an actual artist who dedicates his life to his work and longs to produce something remarkable,or, put another way: an actual independent, is seen as illegitemate and unserious.

Many times the artist produces work which doesn't look like anything that's gone before, and we find it difficult to accept because it is too unsettling, too startlingly original, or it reveals an ugly truth about us humans for the first time. Harold Pinter's debut play in the West End, The Birthday Party, lasted just a week, playing to empty houses, before closing. Orson Welles was largely ignored during his lifetime and many of his films denigrated, buried, and/or taken away from him and re-edited by hacks, his works only became celebrated masterpieces after he died. Often, for a true artist, the typical channels in our culture for producing work are closed off, those channels being too conservative or they have an agenda other than aesthetic (usually commercial or political). Robert De Niro, an actor with a towering body of work, was embarassingly bad in auditions and got work originally through his friendship with Brian De Palma, and Samuel Beckett self-published his early novels, a mere 200 or so people read “Murphy” in the first 4 years of it's existence, and yet now, in the 21^st century, Beckett is held aloft as one of our most important writers. Suddenly, I think of the great John Cassavetes, an actor who struck out on his own, and produced some of the most remarkable and influential films in the history of cinema, some of which he spent literally years making, and Cassavetes often re-mortgaged his house and lived on credit in order to fund them. Point is, if he had asked someone's permission to make his difficult films, they may never have come into existence because he was not employing any formula in their construction, but giving expression to his own vision, and, further, his scripts would most likely have dumbfounded the corporate accountant or the government official.

Actors: I urge you not to become jobsworths. If you come across a true visionary, an artist, chances are his or her work will not look like the picture drawn for you by your drama school tutor or by some accredited “handbook”. Watch as many films as you can, explore the arthouse even if it's not your usual thing, read as many scripts as you can, because that's how you'll learn to tell the difference between a good film and a bad film, between a good script and a bad script, between the phony who gets a kick out of manipulating actors, and the real filmmaker who only wants to do good work. And perhaps then, by teaching ourselves the critical tools and therefore the ability to recognize a real artist when we see one, we actors can validate and support their work through the employment of our skills. And, in so doing, we can actively help to create a true artistic culture, one in which we can participate with pride, one that energises us, and inspires us to greater heights, one which loves the audience and strives to serve it by offering works of beauty, works of grace, and works of truth.