What's at Stake If I Don't Get What I Want?
"An actor is looking for conflict. Conflict is what creates drama."
—Bette Davis
Toward the end of the 2010 film The King's Speech, Colin Firth, who plays King George VI of England, is scheduled to give a radio speech to raise the morale of the British people. It's the beginning of World War Two and the situation is dire; the Germans are bombing London from the air. George's elder brother, David, has just abdicated the throne he only very recently inherited in order that he can marry a non-royal woman, and now George must make this speech. And he absolutely cannot fail because, if he fails, then the people won't accept him as their king. This is his chance to instill confidence, calm, and resolve in them to join together as a nation and stand up against the Nazis. It is also his opportunity to prove to himself that he is not "damaged goods" and is capable of leading.
The trouble is that George has a serious stutter. It is difficult for him to speak clearly, without stammering, and not to feel humiliated. He never trained to be king; nor did he develop an image of himself as being worthy of becoming king. His father berated him for having a defect and viewed his stutter as weakness of character. A private individual, giving a public address is perhaps the thing George fears most in his life, yet it is now the very thing he must do to fulfill his duty to his country and family. History demands it of him. Furthermore, as the first king in the modern era, he is being confronted with a new technology that broadens the scale of his possible embarrassment. He can't merely look noble sitting on a horse. He's got to use the broadcasting equipment and be heard by millions of his subjects simultaneously. Failure is not an option.
The personal and professional stakes are enormous. The pressure would be great under these circumstances even without a speech impediment to contend with, but due to the nature of George's physiological challenge—and the intimate story told around his efforts to compensate for it—the dramatic tension in the film is heightened. It hits an inspirational note when it comes to the scene where he gives the speech and triumphs. And because we know the dark events of the years that are right ahead of him, we love him for doing his duty. We are proud of him for doing his best. We love his humanity. And he comes truly to seem to embody a king by rising to the occasion that his life demands of him. But we also relate to his situation. We can see he's like everyone else. We would be like him if we had lived the same life as him, so his story is universal.
The script of this film is so successful at building urgency into the interactions between the characters it portrays that at the Academy Awards, Firth won the award for Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role. The King's Speech won Best Motion Picture of the Year. Tom Hooper won Best Achievement in Direction. And David Seidler, who originally saw the possibilities inherent in the meshing of the public and private sides of George VI's life, won Best Writing of a Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. If you haven't seen it yet, watch it now to study how urgency factors into every scene. Read a copy of the shooting script (Newmarket Press, 2011).
It should soon become evident that in well-structured screenplays the clues you're learning to detect, intuit, or deduce are put together deliberately to raise the stakes for every character. Practice looking for this element in every film or TV show you watch.
If Colin Firth had played King George as if it was no big deal to give a speech, there would be no urgency for him to overcome his stutter. Urgency means your character is facing time pressure. Your objective must be reached by a certain time or date.
If war hadn't been declared or his brother hadn't abdicated his throne (or if that weren't a challenge to his sense of self), public speaking would have low stakes associated with it; the character would suffer no consequences, and the film would be dull indeed. High-stakes behavior comes from knowing and fighting to avoid certain consequences.
Having just determined your character's through-line in your sides—something you want and need the other person to understand about you—it's time to ask: Why is this so important to me? What's at stake if I don't get what I want? What will my life be like if I don't get it? The answer is your chance to increase the emotional energy in the scene.
Why Are You at a Crossroads?
As a rule of thumb, it's best to be simple when preparing scenes for an audition. What you know has got to be known down to your bones, so you should generally settle on straightforward answers that are easy to remember. Work with recognizable themes. Choose stakes that are human universals, which you can understand from your own life. For example, "If I don't get this, I'll never love again..." or "I'll lose everything."
On a fundamental level, a scene is always about either love or power. Which is it for your scene? Be curious. Aloud, ask yourself: "Is this about love or power? What universal human dilemma is this scene about for me?" An example of an appropriate response to these questions might be: "The scene is about love—love lost—and it's about betrayal. After giving my husband the best years of my life, he has betrayed me." The clues you need lie both in the character breakdown and in the text of the scene itself.
As we all painfully learn in our lives at some moment in time, people are what they do, not what they say. So you may find your clues to the stakes and the urgency behind the words, in the descriptions of the character's behavior or of the setting of the scene. For instance, there could be a digital clock ticking down the seconds on a loaded bomb. Your character has to defuse it before it detonates. Or your character might repeatedly be looking at his wristwatch. Your job will be to take those clues you find in the script and add them up to portray recognizable behavior. How does your character show urgency?
Urgency and high-stakes behavior can be serious or humorous. It all depends on the context in which it occurs. Jason Alexander, the actor who played George on Seinfeld, plays urgency and high stakes in non-urgent and ordinary moments, as if they are for real. In one scene George is yelling out of the window of Jerry's apartment at someone down on the street who is taking a parking space he wants. It is hysterical because he cares so deeply about something people normally treat as a mundane experience. Alexander worked against the grain like that on almost every line on Seinfeld. No matter what was said, he reacted to the private interpretation he gave to the other actors' lines.
There are two main ways to act comedy. The first is to act out a tragedy, such as by slipping and falling on a banana peel. People love to laugh at someone else's bad fortune. The second way relies upon your rigidity of purpose: You behave as if one simple goal must be accomplished or else you'll die a hideous, untimely death. Imagine what the picture of death looks like for you—those are your stakes. Alexander is really good at extreme ridiculousness.
In the theatre, applause is the reward you receive for acting. Applause comes as the curtain drops at the end of Act I or at the conclusion of the play. In film, the "applause" you get is an internal reward you give yourself when you hit the specific moments you planned in your scene. If you set up these moments well, you'll find that you can barely wait to do them in the audition. Nailing those planned moments is a sweet reward.
The producers and director who audition you are waiting for you to discover the important moments in the sides they've given you. If you miss the special lines that show you understand your scenes, you simply won't be hired. Discover your crossroads in each scene and it is going to be evident which lines are the main ones you need to "get."
You've heard me say that a scene is a compression of time, space, and reality. Urgency is one reason why. Here's another definition: A scene is the culmination of years of living that have brought you to the point where you are trying to get what you want for a reason. That reason is why you are at a crossroads in this one scene. And your character must do as Yogi Berra advised, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."1
Let's break this definition down based on acting clues.
You know who you are
You know where you are
You know what has happened
You know when the scene is taking place
You know what you want the other person to understand about you
Now you are asking: Why do I want this? In other words, what's at stake?
Use your common sense to find your answer, which will be something on the order of: Because I'll die. Because I'll lose my job. Because I'll never get another chance. Notice how final these answers are. They're not wishy-washy. That's because this is a crossroads, not a traffic circle. You're supposed to go one way or the other, not to spin around and around. You're fighting for survival, love, liberty, dominance, recognition, respect, relief, and all the things that motivate humans to take action when they do.
Stick to the basics. Every scene contains a dilemma that any human being could face. What this is must be crystal clear to you from moment to moment. But your job is not to act out the plot. Plot is a dangerous thing to focus on because a plot is composed of many moments, and you can only play one moment at a time. In every scene, the screenwriter backs your character into a corner from which you must escape. One scene, one corner.
Sometimes it's necessary to fill in the blanks of a poorly written script. When a script sucks, it's very hard to identify a crossroads for your character because the author simply didn't know how to create urgency or set up the stakes to add dramatic tension. Though I can assure you that in good writing these elements will be written into the scene, if you're auditioning for a part from an inadequately structured role—or going after a role with few lines—you have to add urgency and stakes for yourself using your imagination.
Invent an Actor's Secret
One way to add stakes to a scene is to invent an actor's secret. An older woman came to one of my classes with sides in hand for a role in a broad strokes comedy by the same producers who did the movie The Hangover (2009). Her character's name was Madge, and the role had a plain-spoken Thelma Ritter-esque comic quality to it. If you're too young to remember her, Ritter, a character actress of the last century, had a gravelly voice and a Brooklyn accent, and was well-known for stealing scenes in classic films like All about Eve, Rear Window, and Pillow Talk. Between 1951 and 1968, she was nominated for six Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress, and numerous Emmy Awards.
When my student said her character's name was Madge, I immediately thought of the play The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan. Do you know it? That piece is a reflection of the 1930s, the years of the Great Depression. It's all about dreams never fulfilled, but never forgotten. There's a scene in a bar in San Francisco, where the leading character is people-watching. Based on the initials on the suitcase of a woman sitting nearby he comes up with the name Madge Lebowitz. He keeps guessing. I liken this image of a woman sitting alone at a bar to the Edward Hopper paintings of one person alone in a frame of a window in a diner or gas station. While Madge in The Time of Your Life is a woman in her thirties, I wondered if my student's character with the same name also had unfulfilled dreams.
The point is this. Auditions for roles like the one my student brought into class can be a chance for great character studies. Here are the clues we Sherlock Holmesed from the sides and character breakdown. Madge is a grumpy, gray-haired bank teller wearing a "perma scowl." She has three scenes set in a bank. In the first two, she's gossiping and snorting at things she's observing. The third scene takes place at night. In it, she is leveraging or blackmailing her employer, the bank manager. She says a line on the order of, "You owe me," which gave us the basis of a through-line for what she wanted him to understand about her: She wasn't taking no for an answer. It was time for him to pay her back. My student settled on: "I'm going to take you down."
For this particular audition, we decided she would establish an actor's secret to explain what happened in the past. She asked herself "Why does he owe me?" and worked backwards from there. Perhaps she saw the bank manager do something cowardly while the bank was being robbed and she never told anyone about it. And that was after years of tolerating him and waiting for her dreams to be fulfilled, like the people in the Saroyan play. Her dreams were never forgotten. The idea was for the secret to fill in the unknown elements in the lines. It could not conflict with what was there, but it had to have the potential to bring Madge to life.
We ran the scene in front of a camera. The first picture of my student's face showed us everything about her "payback" scene. She wore a look that read clearly on film: "It's my turn." She looked like Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. You know, the classic 1971 police thriller where he's a tough-guy cop in San Francisco who has no qualms about "blowing away" the bad guys with his revolver, after saying, "Make my day."
At the bottom of the scene, after all the dialogue was done she gave a little eyebrow twitch that communicated, "Take that, motherfucker!" I knew that if she trusted the work she'd put into the scene in class she would do an excellent audition.
On a side note, if you ever worry about being a character actor like this woman who was up for the role of a bank teller, just remember that "Twinkies" (super-pretty, young leading actors who look like fashion models) have to be surrounded by reality. Your character can provide it. If you count the number of actors on TV or in films who look like me and you (older, fatter, and balder, or whatever) you'll see we're in high demand.
My student James DuMont was cast in the role of a stock car racetrack owner in the film Fast Girl (2008). He phoned me from the set to help him find a way to approach a scene between his character and the character of young female driver, as he felt the scene wasn't working as well as it should. In the scene, the driver storms into his office and demands to be allowed to race, and his character tells her that because her father died on the second turn in his track a few years earlier he can't let her do it. James's issue was that he didn't have a sufficiently powerful reason to say those words. I suggested using an actor's secret to intensify his feelings. "She's your daughter." He skyrocketed after that.
Having discovered (or invented) urgency and what's at stake for your character in the scene, your Sherlock Holmesing is done and it's time to move on to crafting. While Sherlock Holmesing may be a relatively slow process as you learn it, with practice you'll be able to do it in less than ten minutes. It will become automatic, as will the process of crafting and making decisions about what to do with the knowledge you now possess.
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