Creating the Space
There is a scene in the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall that begins with Sam the Indian arguing with the Hired Hand about a broken wagon wheel. It’s a slice of daily life on the ranch, mundane and familiar. Suddenly, Sam stops listening to the Hired Hand and looks out into the distance—he sees something. The Hand looks at Sam, who points into the distance. The Hand looks and sees what Sam is looking at: a man is riding toward the house. He yells out to the Colonel. The Colonel is sitting outside of the house, reading with Sam’s daughter, Isabel Two. He looks into the distance, searching the horizon. Sam’s wife is beating a rug. She stops and looks into the distance. The Colonel sees the man riding on a horse toward them; it is Tristan, his son, returning from the war. Susannah, the woman he left behind, is standing in the doorway, looking into the distance. Tristan is drawing nearer. The Colonel, his father, stands up and takes two steps forward. Sam walks forward, Sam’s wife walks forward, and Tristan, sunlit from behind, is coming closer and closer to them.
Susannah stays in the doorway, biting her nails, looking intensely toward the man riding the horse. Alfred, Tristan’s older brother, comes down the stairs in the house, behind Susannah. He has just confessed his love to Susannah in a previous scene; he already feels that she is now his. It’s fate. He doesn’t know it yet, but his fate is about to change. Alfred is still in his own little world. ‘‘I’m going to town,” he says. Then, he notices that she’s looking at something, transfixed. She hasn’t heard him at all. He stands next to her in the doorway and follows her gaze. He sees his brother, Tristan, riding toward the house, backlit by sunlight, a hero coming home. Alfred looks at Susannah, who returns his gaze, says nothing, turns away, and goes into the house. She is already with Tristan. Alfred stares at nothing; it sinks in. He gets it. She loves Tristan. She will never love him. He looks back into the distance with a different look in his eye. This wonderful scene of a homecoming easily sets up the story to come and makes clear everyone’s relationship to the returning Tristan.
The timing and direction of this sequence is primarily the work of the director and the DP (director of photography). They have created the architecture of the shots to construct a story and a believable rhythm and time frame within which that story takes place. All of the actors appear to be in the same place within the real time frame of a few minutes. All of the actors appear to be watching the same man, coming from the same place and approaching them at the same pace. In reality, when this sequence was being shot, each group of actors was standing somewhere alone in front of a camera crew and was being told when to look, where to look, when to get up, how many steps to take, when to stop, etc. The actors did not see a man riding in on a horse. They were probably looking at a red flag that was put on a light stand, because that is where the sight line would be if they were looking into the distance at the point where Tristan was riding toward the house. The actors follow the direction and fill in the human emotion to make the scene believable.
In Legends of the Fall, the performers were probably all shot around the same set of a ranch in Montana, although they didn’t have to be, and the sequence was probably all shot within the same day, although it didn’t have to be. It could have been shot on different days in different locations. The shots of Tristan riding toward the house, the ones that everyone is reacting to, were definitely shot on a different day, or at least in a different location. All of the other actors in the scene are either in their trailers keeping warm, or they even could be at home in Los Angeles while a second team is taking all of the different exterior shots of Tristan riding in on a horse. There are a lot of them in this movie, and they were all probably shot at the same time if their seasons were the same. With all of this deconstruction of time and place, actors have to do something to ground themselves to a place and make it look real.
PLACE AS A SENSE MEMORY
Actors create everything out of their own imagination anyway. Everything an actor does is enhanced by his or her imagination, which fills out the moment, hopefully, to its fullest extent. When working with place in filmmaking, whether in a studio or on a real location, actors have to enhance the situation with their imagination. As always, there are many approaches to solving the problems presented by place. One of the ways of finding the best methods for you to solve the problems of working with place on a film set is to work on Place as a sense memory. This will help you develop the discipline of creating a 360-degree space around yourself and at the same time develop the emotional control to be connected to the place and given circumstances of the script that you are supposed to be in.
CREATING AN IMAGINARY PLACE
To create an imaginary place, we use the same procedure as creating any of the other sense memories: We begin with the Mental Relaxation exercises and warm up the physical body through movement. In order to create an imaginary place, you have to employ all of your senses and be able to create the space around your entire body. This will not usually come all at once. Sometimes, only a portion of a place will come to you, and for certain circumstances, that will be sufficient.
We have already gone through a “lite” version of creating a place in chapter 2, when I introduced the senses and how they might be used in sense memory. The place we used then was your bedroom. What was missing from that excursion was putting the room further in the past and spending more time with the creation of a 360-degree space.
As with all sense memories, choosing the right ones to work on is very important. I have an exercise that I do with my students to introduce the use of place as a sense memory. When I teach, I normally lead the students through this exercise after they are warmed up. If you are reading this book on your own and want to do this exercise, it’s quite possible, as well. You will have to make sure that when you decide to do the exercise, you are reading it in an atmosphere of concentrated, undisturbed work. Give yourself at least two hours to start with the Mental Relaxation and then go into the exercise. Read a few steps and then do them. Then read the next step and do it, and so on and so forth.
The Vacation Exercise
I call this exercise the Vacation exercise, because it begins with your favorite vacation spot from at least seven years ago. The further back you go, the better. When I say favorite vacation, I mean the first memory that comes up in response to the question: What is your favorite vacation spot from at least seven years ago? Whatever memory comes up first, it is the right one and will serve the purpose of the exercise. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you had a good time, or that it is indeed your favorite vacation—it might have even been a terrible experience—but if it is the first memory that comes up, it’s the right one.
1. Lie down on the floor, close your eyes, and allow your mind to wander. Don’t be afraid if you feel like you are going to fall asleep. Let yourself go into a sort of dream/awake state. Think of the memory of your favorite vacation spot and allow it to play as a movie in your mind.
2. Start to build the memory through your senses. What were the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of this experience and place? Ask specific questions and wait for the answers.
3. When you have reached some fullness of memory, pay more attention to the actual place that you are in and let go of any scenarios and other people that have entered into the place. Slowly open your eyes and begin to use your senses to create the space around you. Normally, we would start with sight. If you were lying on the ground in your imaginary place, what would you see if you opened your eyes? Look around you as you try and see the place immediately around you.
4. What would you be lying on in your imaginary place? Sand, grass, a porch? Are you outside?
5. What time of year is it? Ask as many questions as you can think of. Don’t worry if you don’t get answers. Remember, in many respects there are no answers, just the development of a better question.
6. When you have established some sense of imaginary reality, slowly start to move in the space. Don’t get up immediately; always let your movements be led by sensory exploration. For instance, if you are lying in sand, pose the questions: If I am lying in the sand in my memory, what does the sand feel like beneath my body? If I move my hand through the sand, how does it feel between my fingers? What sounds do I hear as I move my body? And so on.
7. As you move through the place exploring your senses, you create the place. Remember, the place is in your imagination. If you stop creating it with your senses, it disappears for the audience. It must exist outside of your self, and that will only happen if you keep exploring it through your senses.
8. Move to a sitting position, and then a standing position if you like. Let your movement be guided by asking sensory questions. Do not get involved in mime-like activities or interacting with imaginary people, etc. You are strictly creating a place around you from your memory through your senses. Direct the concentration clearly from one thing to the next, systematically.
9. Don’t forget to employ all of the relaxation and breathing techniques of the previous chapters to enhance your exploration of the moment.
Once you have created a place around you and you are in the middle of it, you can allow the memories of the place to filter back in. You can employ the Inner Monologue to start to interact with the space. If people figure greatly into your memory, you can speak about them in your Inner Monologue, but you should try to keep from being distracted from creating the place around you. If you allow figures from the past to take over your place sense memory, you may find that it will sabotage and diffuse your concentration. Remember, the primary task is creating the place.
The Street Where You Lived
We are going to leave the vacation spot now and go to the street where you lived at the time of the vacation. This is not a travel story—one moment you’re in the vacation spot, the next you’re standing outside the house or apartment building where you lived. Again, the first place that comes up is the right place, even if it isn’t correct in terms of the time and space of your life.
1. Notice all aspects of the street where you lived. What time of year is it? Is it consistent with your vacation, or is it a different season and time altogether? Be very careful that you don’t direct your memory as if you were making up a story. Let the memory reveal itself to you and lead you down its own path. If you try and make a nice, neat story out of everything, that is to say, make everything coherent and logical, it will be completely useless as an acting tool. You are not creating a little movie in your mind for others to see or to read; you are plowing the fields of your imagination to employ its fruits in someone else’s movie. You will use your imagination to flesh out someone else’s story.
2. Create the street through your senses as fully as possible. You may want to spend some time on this. Usually, there are many, many memories connected to the places where we live or have lived.
Note about Recalling Memories:
If you find that there aren’t any memories or you find yourself becoming bored or tired, it usually means that you are blocked by a major memory that you would prefer not to revisit. To help you overcome this and move forward in the exercise, visualize a chest full of treasures that has one horrible little thing in it and think of that as your memory bank. Because you don’t want to look at or have others see this little horrible thing, you never open the chest. You live in poverty, in rags, because your treasure chest has one thing that cannot not be revealed. Strangely enough, if the horrible thing is revealed, everyone else thinks that it’s cute, or they have one just like it and they are happy to see another one. Or perhaps they find it fascinating because it is so horrible and therefore would like to be your friend, so they could learn more about it. In fact, rather than becoming isolated, you gain comrades by exposing your horrible little things.
I am not talking about describing in detail secrets about your past. I am talking about accessing emotions and parts of yourself that will fuel the details of a fictional character. Very often, you have no idea what might constitute your own personal battalion of horrible little things. You only know that you are frozen in some area. Working on Place will often expose these areas of frozen assets. Once they are exposed, what you want to do about them is up to you, depending on the severity of their power over you. If you see that you have a pattern of avoiding certain things or “spacing out” when you encounter certain memories, try the next step.
3. To break this pattern, you should concentrate on a very small corner of your place and attempt to create it through your senses as realistically as possible. Take, for instance, the corner of a stone stoop and the feeling of the cement as your run your finger over the stone. What parts of your body come in contact with the stone if you are sitting there? How many different types of little stones can you see within the cement, or is it smooth? And so on. Stay within a small, very specific portion of the place. Work very small and very exact. Sometimes, this “tricks” the imagination into releasing a much broader bank of memories and objects.
Creating a Room
We are going to change the location again. Go into the house or apartment connected to the street. If it is an apartment building, you may wind up in the hall or stairwell first. That’s okay; they’re part of your home experience just as much as your apartment. Creating a room is one of the most common usages of the place sense memory.
1. Sit or lie down and close your eyes. Walk into the house or apartment and look around. As always, use all five senses and follow the path of the strongest impulses. As you move through the house, come to one room and stay there. Now, start to explore that room. Open your eyes and begin with what you see. Ask very specific questions. What is the color of the walls? What is on the floor? What is the furniture in this room? What are the objects? When you see something that interests you, reach out your hand and touch it.
2. When you pick up an object, be careful that you are able to stay in the room while you are exploring the object, as well. In other words, don’t drop the room to investigate an imaginary object. This is difficult to do, but try. It requires discipline and systematic direction of the concentration to keep checking that the room is still there. All of this work should be done in a relaxed manner, allowing the breath to fill out the moments and the Inner Monologue to express the thoughts and feelings of those moments.
3. When you find one segment of the room that is very strong for you and ignites your imagination, stay there and investigate it more thoroughly. Take time with the small details of patterns on a pillow or the intricacies of a needlepoint that hangs on the wall.
4. Stay in this segment of the room and create the rest of the room from there. Think of your imagination as concentric circles. You are in the center, at the bull’s-eye, and the space around you emanates from you. Your imagination is directed by your concentration, and you project it ever farther away from yourself. It’s easiest to start small and then work your way to larger and larger spaces. Direct the concentration from the circles closest to you to the circles farthest away and back to the closest again.
BEING THE CHARACTER IN THE ROOM
At this point, it’s interesting to bring a character into the play of your imaginary field. This could be any character that you are working on at the moment, but the best one to choose if you are just starting out in this work is the same one from chapter 3 and the Monologue exercise.
The character is introduced as if it were just dropped in by parachute. There should be no adjustment of who you are, what you’re doing, or your thought patterns. The character is just another loaded parcel of information that you introduce into what is already happening. One nanosecond, you’re standing in the living room of the house you grew up in, and the next nanosecond, you’re the character in a living room. The only thing you adjust is the life history. Instead of yours, you have your character’s. Therefore, you also have your character’s words. The place, however, looks the same.
Give yourself some time to just look around the room again as your character. Revisit sensory moments that were strong for you in the room and see how they have changed now that you’ve decided that you’re the character. Any changes should be very subtle ones. There shouldn’t be any evidence of acting at all. Avoid making judgments and decisions about how your character reacts or acts. Just be in the space as the character and continue the sensorial creation of the imaginary space. When you have adjusted to the way that this feels, begin to say the words of the monologue as if they were your own thoughts. Give the creation of the sensory world the priority of importance over the words. Don’t allow the words, and your effort to remember them, to destroy the imaginary place that you have created. Keep the place going while you say the text and create a moment-to-moment reality. If you forget the text (and if you are doing the exercise correctly, you probably will), stop speaking and investigate the sensory moment more fully before you try to continue with the text. If you cannot remember all of the text, just repeat the parts that you do remember, over and over again. Don’t worry about what you have forgotten; you can always check to see what it was later.
Usually, we forget words when we don’t know what they mean in relation to that acting moment. You always have to give yourself a break when you’re learning a new exercise. The very fact that you are exploring new territory overtaxes your instrument; therefore, you forget how to do things that you normally do very easily. When you slow down and keep the sensory going in lieu of the text, you slowly build the words into your imaginary reality. You learn how to incorporate another level into your acting. You expand the ability of your concentration to incorporate ever larger spaces filled with more and more complex objects. Eventually, you are able to put all of your inner work together with the words, the given circumstances of the script, and any direction that you might receive.
When you start to build the character, you always go back and read the script. You read the part and let the part lead you to new discoveries about your sense memory, and you let the sense memory lead you to new discoveries about the part. It‘s very important to keep working to eventually meld you and the character together. You may even forget what the particulars of the sense memories were. You only remember their keys, and you use them when you need them, when you are at sea with the part or need to inject new life into it. It’s always helpful to keep a Journal (see page 33) for a part of all your sense memory work and its connective patterns. It can be used for the part that you are working on now, but also for ones that you might build in the future. An actor working in this medium is best armed with his or her own road map to hold the performance together, because so much of film acting is disjointed. It’s always best to have your own blueprints upon which you can build your characters.
PLACE AS AN INNER EMOTIONAL STATE
Sometimes, we experience things in life that stay with us for a long time. These things will revisit our consciousness when we least expect it. Great loss requires periods of mourning, just as traumatic events require a period of adjustment and recuperation. The characters that we play also have these events in their lives. Very often, a script will have scenes that are shot in locations of great beauty about a character who is suffering deeply. We, as audience members, are familiar with these scenes. The lovers breaking up on a bridge in Paris, a child alone and hungry on the streets of New York City, a soldier standing over the bloody battlefield with an exquisite sunset in the background—the extraordinary moments of cinema filled with the contrast of human suffering and physical beauty.
There is such a scene in Legends of the Fall, shortly after Tristan’s homecoming from the war, where he kneels before his brother’s grave and cries in agony and remorse over his loss and inability to have saved his brother’s life. The location of this grave is a green field overhanging a gorge, with huge mountains looming in the distance. It is a scene of exceptional natural beauty, but Tristan, played by Brad Pitt, is trapped within an internal place of extreme force, the battlefield where his brother lost his life. The exceptional beauty of Tristan’s surroundings may comfort him in the following moments, but not until he has thoroughly revisited the battlefield and mourned for his brother’s life at his grave. Here, the actor brings his internal place to the physical surface, interacts with it emotionally, and creates a place around him. We are drawn into his experience through his emotional outpouring, which is so deep-rooted in his experience in a place we cannot see that we use our own imaginations to feel what he feels, and we empathize. He is deeply involved in the innermost concentric circles, very close to the bull’s-eye, where we join him by being deeply involved with our own innermost circles. We use our imagination and experience to empathize. In this way, when an actor is the most personally connected to an inner place, he may be most universally understood, because he is being so profoundly human, and that is something everyone can understand.
THE FOURTH WALL
Creating an inner place of such emotional power is a different usage of place than the creation of a communal fourth wall, as all of the actors did in the first scene I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Those actors all created the illusion of seeing the same scene before them that we were seeing on the picture screen. The fourth wall is the missing wall of the traditional proscenium arch of the theater, through which the audience views the play. Though there have been amazing technological advances since the days of actors standing on gaslit stages in heavy makeup, projecting their voices and using large gestures to indicate what is going on, one thing for the most part has not changed—we are still looking at the actors through a frame. Although there have been theater productions that have been site-specific or in the round in the attempt to break away from the proscenium arch, for the most part, we are still inside the box. We are still looking into a frame, and the rules that apply to that rectangle still apply to film. As actors, we are still looking out into the imaginary fourth wall. The difference is that in film, the fourth wall is no longer fixed; it could be moving around us all the time. Wherever the camera stands photographing, so stands the fourth wall or the audience. For the actor on a film set, the fourth wall is wherever the director says it is. Sometimes, it is the camera, sometimes it is not. You just create the space around you as you are told. The interesting thing about this is that you never know what it’s going to be until you’re on the set. You are just expected to be able to create it as they ask for it.
There are two kinds of places that actors concern themselves with on a film set. One is the actual setting of the scene as depicted in the script, and the other is the personal, private place that actors draw from to help them act. The camera can photograph your thoughts and emotions, so the inner place must be as highly developed as the place that you create physically around yourself. To help you to learn to create these two places at the same time, use the following exercise. It is devised to be done with a partner, although it can be done alone as well, but then one wouldn’t do the text. If you are working alone, you would only create the place.
Zoo Story Exercise—Place
This exercise works your ability to create two types of places at the same time. It should be done with a partner. We’ll use the first four pages of Edward Albee’s one-act play, The Zoo Story. These pages are about the place, Central Park in New York City, and moving around within that space.
It doesn’t matter if you are the right type to play either of the parts of Peter or Jerry. It doesn’t even matter if you are the right age or sex. The purpose of the exercise is to create the space around you with your partner, as is required by the text and the given circumstances of the play, while at the same time creating your own personal place that grounds you to a sensorial reality that you can work from to build character. Although this is a play for the stage, it’s a good script to use for building the place sense memory and the fourth wall at the same time.
1. Read the one act play The Zoo Story by Edward Albee and choose a partner to work with.
2. Choose the part for which you are temperamentally more suited. Age, sex, and type don’t matter for the purposes of this exercise. I do it with a classroom full of twenty-year-olds of both sexes, pairing them off indiscriminately.
3. Concentrate on the first four pages of the script or thereabouts. I end with the lines:
Jerry: And you have children.
Peter: Yes; two.
4. Read the script aloud together and discuss the scene. Answer the following questions together:
• Where are you? Where does the scene take place?
• What’s the weather?
• What time of year is it?
• Are there other people around?
• What are the sounds?
• What are the smells?
• When you look around yourselves in 360 degrees, what do you see?
5. Read the script aloud again and work on testing out the space you’ve created together. See how it holds up under the demands of the script.
6. Now, take some time for each of you to remember an outdoor place from your past that you know well.
7. Put the two imaginary places together, the one you have created with your partner and the one you see from your memory. For instance, if you have agreed that Fifth Avenue is to your left at 9:00 o’clock, then take note of what is in the place from your memory in that spot and see that when referring to Fifth Avenue. Of course, this will cause, or should cause, some sort of behavior in you, and that behavior would be put on the character. Take your time.
8. Memorize the lines, and do the scene with the main priority given to creating the place. The scene already demands a strong sense of place, so this shouldn’t be too difficult.
9. Stop yourself from performing too broadly or running away with the script. Don’t give up your personal private space!
Actors in the same scene must be in the same place in order to create the illusion of that place. Each actor comes from a personal private space that he continually creates with his imagination through the five senses. How an actor achieves this private space is unique to each actor. Usually after years of experience, the actor knows his own instrument to such a degree that he will know what works for him. Some actors “see” the place, for some a sound or a certain smell will do it. Some can use a combination of many sensory objects.
When the actor is working (the camera’s rolling), he must be actively creating the imaginary objects; otherwise, these disappear. This is not achieved by indicating or remembering what one did before, but by constantly, actively asking questions and searching for the answers with another question. The above exercise is simple enough for you to give yourself the time to create the surroundings while adhering to the given circumstance of the script and the text. I think you will be surprised to see how much of the character can be discovered by concentrating on the active creation of a place through the senses.
ON SELF-INDULGENCE
When you are working with the private elements of your acting technique as we have been doing in these last few chapters, it’s very important to steer away from being self-indulgent and self-involved. Although you’re using many private aspects of yourself, the work isn’t really about you, it’s about the script. Many of the exercises are just that, a means to an end. That end is the character within the screenplay. At every step along the way, always refer back to the script. When you are working, everything you do must fly on the wings of the script; to do otherwise is not artistry. As you work, you develop an intuitive use of self that translates into the universal human experience.
If you are teaching a group, then it is your responsibility as a teacher to make sure that your students’ work doesn’t become too self-indulgent and that they don’t start spinning tricks just to please you and their fellow students. When I do an exercise like the Zoo Story/Place exercise, I have everyone working at the same time to discourage the tendency to want to perform and entertain. I watch the groups rehearsing and listen to what they are doing. I’ll ask questions and guide them to get their imaginations working more fully. I’ll even have everyone stay in the spaces that they have been rehearsing in, and we’ll go around the class, each pair taking their turn doing the work that they have prepared, while the other groups watch from their various points around the room. This seems to enhance the 360-degree feeling to the pairs and prepares the actors for a film set, where they might very well be surrounded by the crew and the other members of the cast. The classroom is a perfect atmosphere for creating public privacy, since we’re all in it together, just like on a film set. As the groups gain more and more confidence in their imaginary reality and the spheres of public privacy surrounding them, I separate the group into audience and performer and have each group go up and present the work that they have done on the scene. For the purpose of creating imaginary reality, I never mind if all they can accomplish is a few minutes of creating the space together and a few lines of the text. I am happier with that than if they sail through the scene and haven’t created anything uniquely private at all.
Of course, the arena of a classroom and the arena of the real world are two completely different ball games. As a teacher or as a student, there is no better way to test and further develop what you have learned than by entering into the real world of filmmaking. The next section of this book will attempt to help you cope as an actor, as you begin to make your way into that labyrinth of exciting and variable possibilities.