On the day of September 11, 2001, I was in my acting studio in Greenwich Village, a neighborhood not far from Ground Zero in Manhattan. The public transportation system had shut down. Thousands of people were migrating by foot northwards on the streets in varying degrees of shock. Many were covered in ashes. Seeing their plight, I hung a sign on the front door of the building that read: "Refuge here." This gave passersby the chance to come in, sit down, have some food and water, and clean up a bit on their way home.
Like many other people on that tragic day, I did whatever I could to help out—there was an outpouring of generosity that makes me proud. Even so, when I think of the firefighters who kept running back into the Twin Towers again and again attempting to rescue the people who were trapped inside those buildings before they collapsed, I am in genuine awe of their heroism. What they did on that day was important, and it was courageous. Their bravery and selfless professionalism in the face of overwhelming danger was a gift they gave the rest of us, and we should always remember to honor their contribution.
As actors, we are artists, meaning that we make a different sort of contribution. Although we are not in danger like firefighters, we also do important and courageous work; something that's much needed in our society. Like emotional firefighters, we run into the "burning building" of our emotions so that others may feel. Most others run away, yet we choose not to. Our job is to run into the "fire" in order to reveal some form of knowledge, or meaning, and to do so in as entertaining a fashion as possible. In my opinion, this willingness to feel is a noble cultural service, because we do it on behalf of the audience.
The only reason to go into the "burning building" (which, in the case covered in this book, is your audition) is to truthfully represent the character that you are being asked to portray. If you take pride in your work as an actor, you'll never shirk this responsibility.
Think about it in the following way: If a film was being made of your own life, wouldn't you want your story to be told truthfully? Of course, you would. That's why you owe every character you portray the respect of delivering truthful life. This is your craft.
From the producers' point of view, you're like someone tossing them a life preserver: The water is rising and it's up to their necks. They are eager, even anxious, for their pilot to get picked up by a network, or they're worrying about money and time. In film and TV, time is money. They need to get a good performance from you, one that is truthful, specific. And they need to see that you have the capability to find the stuff that they put in the script for you, the clues for how to craft your performance. This doesn't mean you have to do the audition scene exactly as they imagined it; you might do it differently than they thought you would, but you have to show you found the clues in the way you craft your performance. If you do not, then the producers think you're not smart enough or good enough to do the part you're auditioning for.
Remember, you do not ever need to justify your work in an audition as long as it is truthful; simply come alive before the eyes of whoever is watching you. Your craft is not to "act," but to represent a human being in human circumstances. No matter what anyone tells you, as Robert Duvall says, "Protect your craft. It's the only thing you have in life other than time."ref_1
Directors don't always know what to do. So if you blindly follow the director's lead without having thought through your role for yourself and made active choices, you could put yourself in a bad position. After all, who has to bear criticism for the portrayal on screen when the director gives you bad advice? You do. You're the one standing in front of the all-seeing camera lens.
Thorough crafting is how you can become director proof. My goal is for you to have pride of ownership in the role you craft, so much so that when you step into an audition room you can confidently state, "This is what I want to do with this role—and I can justify my choices in the script." That makes you a solid actor. All the great actors are solid in what they do.
In the good old days, we used to have to go in person to pick up our scripts. We had to walk up a steep hill—both ways going uphill—through the rain, tornados, and blizzards. Now sides get emailed to you or you download them. They come on your tablet or smart phone or computer. This seriously frees up your time to practice your skills, craft, and rehearse. Use your time wisely. Don't focus on being "right" or "wrong" from the producers' point of view. Be right for yourself, and then you'll be right for the script. Wrong choices are boring choices.
Gina Hecht, who plays the principal in Hung (HBO) and is a student of mine, told me that she now takes over the audition room when she goes in. "I am going to act in every audition because I am so sick of that audition crap." She cuts lines sometimes, but, of course, always tells them what she's going to do before she does it. (I wouldn't recommend this unless you are very clear about why.) She takes charge of her performance. And she gets hired much of the time.
In an audition, the creative team and producers might ultimately want to see a different truth than the one you delivered, and they may ask you to make an adjustment, but they won't dispute or deny having seen truth when they see it. They're not there to tell you how to achieve results, only to select from among the truthful results presented them by different actors.
Emotion Creates Reality
You do not need to do a lengthy process of emotional preparation in order to prepare to perform well in an on-camera audition. Your life has been your preparation. Having thoroughly Sherlock Holmsed the script using your curiosity, intuition, and deductive reasoning, you actually have sufficient knowledge now to make some quick decisions that enable you to generate emotion in your body for the camera to pick up. You can access the emotions you need with the handful of simple techniques that you'll learn here in Part Two, "Crafting Your Butt Off." As you practice these on a regular basis, you'll come to trust them—and your ability.
Fundamentally, the responsibility of a film actor is to humanize the dialogue of the script, the whole time remembering that people are not what they say; they're what they do. Knowledge is the key. The task is to notice, "The writer gave me a word," and wonder, "How can I use that word to bring me to a specific choice that reveals the truth of a human being?" Then, when a choice has been made, the actor's job is to execute it clearly, transparently, so the truth can be seen on camera.
So how do you do that? Through crafting. To bring a role to life and create emotionally generated reality, you must master the art of bridging your body and psyche to your character.
Thus far, we've been talking about a special way to approach scripts that enables you to quickly draw out clues pointing you in the direction of credible choices. Now you'll learn to make bold choices just as quickly and bring your dialogue to life. You'll learn to rehearse.
When crafting an audition, the most important tools to draw upon are your imagination, your muscle memory, improvisation, and your ability to trust your choices and impulses. Being a student of human nature will come in handy, too; so will your degree of self-knowledge. You must be fiercely committed to following through on the screenwriter's intentions as you find them expressed in the script. If you are, the writers and producers you meet will appreciate your persistence. The number one complaint of casting directors is that actors are ill prepared.
Interestingly, a number of writers have sat in on my on-camera classes. When they came up to shake my hand at the end, they usually made comments like, "Thank you for showing actors how to act from my scripts." Some have said that understanding this way for actors to work from scripts has made them better writers. The eyes of one such writer were teary, as she gratefully told me, "Now I know what I need to go back and do in order to revise my new screenplay."
The point is this: You have the power to bring scripts to life. That's a gift.
Enter the Playground of Your Imagination
When it comes to crafting, the imagination is your playground. Just as astronauts use in-flight simulators to train for the things that could happen on their missions in space, you can use your imagination as your pre-audition experience simulator to generate the knowledge underlying the dialogue from testing different choices before you ever set foot in an audition. Caution: Never get stuck on having the scene go one way in an audition. An audition should be a journey of discovery.
Daydreaming is the activity you were sent to the principal's office for doing in class as a kid. I give you permission to start doing it again now. Give yourself daydreaming time with the sides. The business can erode your joy. You need to separate daydreaming time from doing business. You should commit at least half of your time to practicing your craft by hanging out in the playground of your imagination. You are an artist, therefore you need to daydream.
If we look just at the membership rolls of the two on-camera actors unions—the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the Association of Film, Television, and Radio Actors (AFTRA)—we can estimate that for every actor who is working in a paid capacity there may be a hundred more who work only in nonpaying productions. If you got into this business to make big bucks, like George Clooney, Reese Witherspoon, or some other leading man or woman, how long did that motivate you? You've got to get back to the original reason you went into this business: to have fun. Acting is supposed to be fun. I know that the business can eat away at fun. That's why it's called "business."
The late Jerry Orbach, a well-known New York actor who played Detective Lennie Briscoe in the television series Law & Order for twelve years, was once filming on location in a Manhattan apartment building. A tenant engaged Orbach in conversation when he saw him waiting in the lobby for over a half an hour to shoot his next scene. The tenant asked, "Is it as tough as it looks to sit around on the set doing nothing like this?" Orbach responded, "That's why the producers pay me…" adding, "I act for free!"ref_2
Many actors would share this sentiment. They love to act, and the love that they feel when they act shows in their work. Among other qualities, that's why we enjoy watching these actors on film; there is a kind of light and vitality in their eyes that is very attractive and compelling. Actors who have lost that delicious sense of joyousness and play have a real problem on their hands. Not only will their work suffer, but if they don't derive pleasure from every opportunity they're given to perform for the camera, no amount of money will ever feel like enough to compensate for the pain of waiting around for their chance to act—or for the need to audition.
Crafting is where the play enters into the audition process. Take the case of Meryl Streep. I only did one film with her, but I got to watch her crafting and playing. Though our scene ended up on the cutting room floor, it was a turning point for me to work with her for a full day on the film Falling in Love (1984). What I learned from the specificity she brought to her work impressed me. It was just the two of us. We were about four-feet apart seated across a desk from one another all day long, so I watched her. The story was that she was living in Connecticut, a graphic designer of some kind, and her marriage wasn't good. She was coming into New York City to be interviewed by me for a job in an ad agency. The reason the scene wasn't necessary was that it wasn't what the film was about, which was her romance with a man (Robert DeNiro) whom she met on the train.
Before the scene was shot, they brought Meryl prop drawings to use as her own. Her character was going to show my character her work. I watched her flip through the drawings in character and decide which ones her character would have drawn. I don't remember her saying anything about the reason for her choice, but before the camera rolled she'd decided on one drawing to show. It was magical to watch her process. She was definitive. She knew what she wanted.
Watching Meryl improvise around her choices proved to me that once you've done your homework on the script and you know who your character is you have a knowledge that is complete. That's when the self-expression and creativity of an actor enters into the process. Inspiration is not a godlike phenomenon, in my view. Crafting is. That's where technique occurs, the creative act. The play. An actor is on a quest to learn to speak with the voice of a character, to move with the body of a character—and to have that voice, that body be his or her own.
You need to act from a place of joy, self-discovery, and inner knowing for its own sake. So crafting has to be a part of your preparation. There's nothing worse than going into an audition underprepared. Not having found a particular way to play a scene and to behave as a character is excruciating both to actors and to the casting personnel who watch them audition. Crafting is where you put your insights about life in service to solving the problem of interpreting the script. You must be dedicated to this activity if you want to express yourself fully as an artist and as a professional. For as Marlon Brando once said, "To grasp the full significance of life is the actor's duty, to interpret it is his problem, and to express it his dedication."ref_3
Trusting Your Results
The late Jason Robards, a renowned Eugene O'Neill actor, twice performed the role of Hickey in The Iceman Cometh on Broadway, thirty years apart, at its debut in 1956 and then again in 1988. When someone asked how come Hickey was different the second time around, he answered, "Life."ref_4 Robards wasn't trying to recreate his earlier performance as Hickey; he was not trying to find the "right" answers in the script. He was interpreting Hickey through the knowledge he'd developed of life and the world as he lived. I'm here to tell you that your knowledge of life is the ideal foundation for your acting, too.
Some actors, especially those who have not yet achieved success in the industry, feel a lack of confidence in their choices. Since they're not sure how to arrive at strong, specific choices, they frequently change course, retrace their steps, and gnaw endlessly on every decision. Self-doubt leads them to painfully criticize and second-guess everything they do. These actors are overly concerned about making mistakes and failing to gain someone else's approval.
The tools and techniques of crafting from your sides that you'll learn in the next several chapters can free you from unproductive work habits by shifting your focus to the things you actually can take charge of. They'll empower you to trust your choices and just get on with your acting. Perhaps most importantly, they'll help you to gain your own approval. They work.
After my student Renata Henricks won the lead in a pilot for a TV series she confirmed the efficacy of this way of crafting. She said, "The entire time I was auditioning I felt very relaxed about my work. There were much better known actresses than me in the waiting room and I was sure they'd get cast. After three rounds of auditions I still didn't think I could get the role. Then the casting director told me, 'Renata, it was amazing, but what you did just popped out on the camera. It leapt out at us.' I believe this came from not doing anything other than being truthful. When I learned how to craft, I began to trust my instincts more and do less. Now when an audition goes well, it feels as if I'm not doing anything special. I see that the point is to have everything crafted and then throw it away: just to breathe and to live and to do."
Trust can also be an issue for well-known actors. The super-successful Jayne Brook began working with me a few years ago after she had kids. We worked on character development in pieces when she'd already been cast in several episodes of Private Practice. She told me she wasn't having fun auditioning. Pre-children she didn't have to audition often because she'd take the lead parts in series. Now she just wanted to job in and job out and not carry a show, a decision that put her back into the cycle of casting. When Jayne took my audition on camera class, she complained, "It feels funny not to be working harder. You're making me do nothing. I'm afraid I won't do enough." I told her, "Believe me, you don't have to 'act.' Your choices will be there on camera." She was amazed at the natural quality of her work on the video playback.
What are the personality traits of successful actors like Jayne Brook, Renata Henricks, Meryl Streep, and Jason Robards? Obviously successful actors are more than "good looking." After all, there are lots of pretty people in the world. For certain they are driven and self-assured. Of course, they also have talent. They're born with the ability to access their imaginations and never have this ability drummed out of them as so many people in our culture do. Discipline is another of their personality traits: They respect the demands of the rehearsal process. In my experience they do whatever is necessary to find their moments and craft choices before the camera rolls.
Malcolm Gladwell asserts in his book Outliers that mastery of any skill or art form takes 10,000 hours. I tend to agree. Once you've had hours of practice, crafting will be as natural to you as breathing and you'll trust your results. Through discipline, you can become a master.
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