Find Reasons to Feel
"Feelings are like a timid animal—if you approach them, they run away. Let them come to you."
—Michael Howard
How you feel about any object creates its reality on film. If your relationship to each of the people, places, things, and events in the lines of your script is specific, then, during your audition, you'll get a great result: You'll be like a ball in a pinball machine, hitting against flippers and bumpers, and bouncing off of them in different directions. Your scene will come alive as your body is organically filled with emotions. Most importantly, you'll be engaging to watch on camera. This is the power of personalization.
To personalize a script, you simply take the given circumstances the screenwriter has provided to you—facts you discovered while Sherlock Holmesing the script—and give yourself a point of view about them by using an "As If." There are two kinds.
With As Ifs, you can bridge the elements in a particular scene to aspects of your own life. For example, "It's as if this character is my brother George." In this way, you are overlaying your thoughts and feelings about your brother onto the scene (love, envy, and so on), lending it reality. This type of substitution works only if you've got a strong P.O.V. about your brother or whatever As If you employ.
You can also craft imaginary As Ifs that stir you up in the way the script demands. For example, "It's as if this character is George Clooney." (We're assuming, of course, that this would mean something to you personally if it were true.) For you, that meaning might be: "It's as if he's the sexiest (or most suave) man in the world." And then you overlay the meaning on the context of the scene: rejection, seduction, and so on.
No matter what substitution you choose for a person, place, thing, or event, your crafting must involve daydreaming around it in the context of the scene you're doing so that it comes alive for you. Pictures are not real until you attach an emotion to them. Pictures and sensations just drop in or pop up, and emotions arise of their own accord when you find an As If that works. You can trust these. An actor's first impulse is usually dead-on. It is in trying to improve that first impulse where actors often go wrong.
Here's a key thing to remember about the technique of personalization. For As Ifs, or substitutions, to work in your favor, you must begin by knowing what kind of emotion is wanted in the scene (anger, sorrow, elation, remorse, and so on). This is not arbitrary. It's dictated to you by the script. From there, you can work toward generating it.
The rehearsal process is something like this. You find your character's point of view. Let's say your character arrives for a business meeting with a man he views as a "sneaky bastard." The script says that you shake hands. As an actor, you must ask yourself: "How would I shake hands with a 'sneaky bastard?'" Maybe you do it "as if he's Bernie Madoff" and you imagine that's "as if he's got a slimy hand that makes yours wet." The second As If is the personalization of an object: in this case, the sneaky bastard's hand. This is how layers of substitution can factor into the moments in the script.
The personalization comes from knowing what the substitution means to you. You know you despise Bernie Madoff. You know that shaking a wet hand is creepy.
You don't need to worry or fuss too much about how to create layered responses, as you're already a layered person. That's why specific As Ifs work. Your choices will read. As I like to say in my classes: You don't need to act if you know who the bitch is.
When Roma Maffia was in my class in the '90s, she brought in her scenes for the role of Michael Douglas's lawyer in Disclosure. When she found her As If, "It's as if I am an arrow," she found the physical life of her character. It was her first major role in a film and she was able to more than hold her own in scenes with Demi Moore and Douglas.
Personalization can help you shift your state of being—even turning your emotions on a dime—without pushing for a result. As we'll discuss, it's an effective approach to crafting the entire moment-by-moment reality of a longer scene, or just to bring a specific moment to its fullest potential. I can't tell you how often I'm asked, "What do I do with one line?" My reply to this question is to use this tool. It's a great way to deliver a crystal clear performance and full-blown reality in a one- or two-line audition.
The Three Parts of Crafting Relationships That Make You Feel
Owning the moment as an actor means finding a reason for you to believe in, and genuinely associate with how your character is feeling. An event happens (a line is said or an action taken). There is how you feel about. Then it calls forth an image within you. This last part of the relationship to the script happens after you identify the feeling.
The funny thing about it, as you'll soon discover, is that in practice this process is happening in nanoseconds inside your body. Thoughts and emotions prompt each other to arise. Your job is to sort through them and make selections that serve the script.
As you rehearse with your sides in hand, each time you come to a line about, or a description of, a person, an object, a place, or an event, stop and take steps to personalize it. Once you find a reason to care, create an image of what you are seeing. The body will remember this image if you give it to yourself, and then, every time you reach that line in the scene, its meaning will come flooding back to you effortlessly.
After personalizing the first person/place/thing/event, go back and re-read the script from the beginning and keep going until you hit the next thing you need to personalize. Take those same steps again: find a reason to care and compose an image. Then go back to the beginning, start again, and go on down until you hit the third.
If you find and craft twenty relationships in this manner, before you're finished rehearsing the sides you'll have gone through them twenty times and you'll practically be off book by then. You're not required to memorize the sides for an audition, of course, and I advocate holding the script no matter what, but having a high degree of familiarity with the sides is useful when it comes naturally out of the crafting process.
It is far too easy to go to the level of the story instead of crafting. It is too easy to imagine the other character's point of view and become engaged with it. To avoid this acting trap and stay in your own P.O.V. you must use your own images, those that arise in response to your feelings. This is an abstract and impressionistic way of working. But you can trust it. Generate the emotion first. Then let your muscle memory provide you with an image. That emotion gives your image meaning. The anchor of memory is emotion.
Great moments in scenes are often accidental. They happen in a performance as a result of having crafted the history of a relationship to a person, place, thing, or event, and then being surprised at what happens in you when the history comes up as you're performing the dialogue. An emotional response is just there, like a kneejerk reaction. The history you've crafted provokes it.
Relationships to People
The first relationship you need to develop in any scene is your relationship to your scene partner. In an audition setting, this person is the reader. As we discussed in Part One, the reader is primary to you because he or she is present and feeding you lines. Also if you personalize this relationship first it will help you deliver a great first moment. In the last chapter, we discussed how useful clichés are for establishing your life in the first moment. Daydreaming to personalize your relationship with the reader (including any history and expectations you might have of him/her) adds another layer there.
In Chapter 7, we briefly explored the technique of labeling the reader: coming up with a name that's shorthand for how you feel about him or her. This was part of how you discovered what you wanted that person to understand about you. Here we're doing something a little bit different, but you'll find that it fits with the objective you found.
Let's say your line of dialogue is: "I have never seen Harriet looking better." What do you do with that? First, you ask, "What did the screenwriter imply my character feels?" Because you've Sherlock Holmesed the text, you know the answer: turned on.
Next, you generate the feeling of "turned on" in your body. Your body knows this and other feelings from past experience. Your whole life has been preparation for this.
Then, you run some mental film footage of what you are saying: Let's say you see yourself walking towards Harriet at a party. Since you say, "I never saw her looking better," you know you've seen her before. How can you own that line—believe in it? Here's where an improvisation comes in handy. Recall (in your imagination) those earlier times when Harriet looked hot and it turned you on. Back in tenth grade you thought she was hot, so you asked her out and she laughed at you. Here you are ten years later at the party, and you're looking at her, and thinking, Wow, I am going to hit on her again!
Having given yourself these memories through fantasizing about them, you've literally had a life with Harriet. You created an emotional experience, which is a kind of historical knowledge. And guess what? You betcha! The camera sees what you know.
There's a difference between improvisation and visualization that should be pointed out at this juncture. Improvisation is an experience because you say things out loud while you're doing it. Visualization, on the other hand, is a thought. Thought alone is not experience and the body doesn't respond to it as such.
Do you doubt this? It's the difference between looking into the baby blue eyes of your significant other and thinking, "Boy, do I love her," and actually saying it aloud. You can think it and nothing much will happen. Whereas if you say it out loud, your life changes. Your body knows the distinction. With improvisation, you must speak aloud.
Relationships to Objects
If you want to see a perfect example of an actor who has crafted a strong relationship to an object, watch Anthony Hopkins in The Remains of the Day. In this 1993 Merchant-Ivory costume drama, Hopkins plays an elderly butler reminiscing several years later on his service in the household of a wealthy British lord prior to World War Two. Loyal, calm, and efficient, he runs the household in a traditional manner, as if the staff were invisible. He is intimate with no one. When the less reserved housekeeper (played by Emma Thompson) visits him in the privacy of his study, she casually reaches out for the novella that he's been reading and he pulls the book back toward his body. In this one gesture, it becomes evident that there's an emotional line the butler is unwilling to cross.
I've heard that Hopkins isolated himself off set prior to shooting this scene. Whatever particular meaning he assigned to the book was so emotionally devastating to him that it left him sobbing and drained. The director and crew had to hold the shot for twenty minutes while he composed himself to do the take. Then he did not need to do several takes of the scene; they shot it in one. That's how powerful the relationship with an object can be. If you can specifically craft a moment for an audition that's as compelling as this one, you can be sure it will be a moment that impresses the casting director and creative team.
Objects are often symbols of a character's history. In a recent film study class, a student brought in a scene to work on that was taken from the 1994 film Quiz Show. Her role was Toby Stempel, the wife of a contestant who was winning tons of money on Twenty One, a 1950's TV quiz show that was rigged by the producers. In this particular scene (which was played between Johann Carlo and John Turturro in the movie), my student was working across from a reader doing the lines of her husband. The underlying reality of the moment is that Toby, who is a working-class woman, is afraid that her husband will leave her now that he has made so much money. That's the subtext. On the surface, the lines are merely an argument about a suit.
The suit needs to be dry-cleaned.
"Why does this matter to Toby?" I asked. "What is the couple's relationship to this suit? What is the screenwriter implying that Toby feels about her father? And what is the screenwriter implying that she should feel about her husband's treatment of the suit?" In this case, we decided the emotion being called for was disappointment. We determined from the script that her father had bought the suit. (She loves him.) Now her husband wears the suit (a symbol for their marriage), but from her P.O.V. he's not taking proper care of it. As you can imagine, this raised the stakes for the actress playing the scene.
By personalizing the suit by giving herself some memories of her father wearing it, and knowing what he meant to her, she quickly came to life in front of our eyes.
Relationships to Places
In writer Aaron Sorkin's 1992 film A Few Good Men, Jack Nicholson's character, Colonel Nathan R. Jessep, runs the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The location of that base standing in a "hot" zone between America and hostile Russian-backed Cuban forces is of enormous significance to the plot. This is made clear when Jessep says he does his job to protect America so that others don't have to. He makes it clear that his location entitles him to do as he sees fit on the base, including ordering the murder of a marine who wasn't good at his job. He views himself as above the law, indicating that it doesn't apply to men like him; he should be thanked and not questioned.
Not only did Nicholson need to personalize the base for himself, I believe every other actor on the film needed to personalize its meaning. It's essentially a silent character in the film, one whose presence is felt everywhere.
If you get handed a script with a title like A Year in Tuscany or My Life as a House, asking yourself questions about how the location factors into your scenes is a very good idea. Does your scene take place in a church? A casino? A courtroom? A hospital? What your location means to your character in the moment your scene takes place is something to make a specific choice about, and do some daydreaming on, because this can help you establish history. It is human nature to relate to our surroundings.
Places can be symbolic of people. Writers recognize this fact. The meaning of place is used to full advantage in the play All My Sons by Arthur Miller, in which two sons went to war and only the younger one came home. It was shot for television and aired on PBS in 1987 with Aidan Quinn playing the surviving son. He has a powerful scene in the backyard of the family home, in which his character wants to kiss the girl his brother intended to marry. They are standing in front of a tree that was struck by lightning. He's in love with her and wants to ask her to marry him, but he can't do it there because the tree and the backyard remind him of his dead brother. Any actor who plays this role must find a way to imaginatively personalize the tree and the yard.
Furthermore, any place that's mentioned in a script, such as in a line of dialogue like, "Do you remember how it was when we went to Jamaica?" can be personalized. Bridge that place to your own life with an As If and allow yourself to recall an image of it.
Relationships to Events
Let's say you have a line, such as, "What the fuck did you do twenty years ago—put a gun to his head in the desert, then shoot him?" Well, that's a very specific picture you can act. You can generate a feeling about this man being shot in the desert, based on your character's point of view. Simply daydream about the event being described in the line and substituting As Ifs for the man who was shot, for the shooter, and perhaps for what you did in the period following the man's disappearance. Once you have a picture in your mind of the event that gets your emotional motor running, let it remain true for you until the other character in the scene denies it. Then the picture can change.
A screenwriter suggests experiences and an actor translates those suggestions into emotionally generated reality. In acting, there are really only four or five emotions. Not hundreds. Don't get complicated for film and television. There's no time for that. In your general homework you give yourself to improve your acting, spend time daydreaming about the things that produce genuine emotional responses in you. Then, when you need them, they'll be there for you to supply to the sides you're given as appropriate. You can increase your ability to access your emotions. Become like a well-oiled machine.
A Few Notes about Working with Your Imagination
Good actors are students of human nature. As an actor, you should be collecting As Ifs from your own life, and also from the world around you. Make up stories about the people you see on the subway or on a bus. Practice describing what you see using As Ifs and studying the body language that goes along with it. For example: It's as if the man across from you has lost everything he owned. It's as if the woman across from you is having the happiest day of her life. It's as if the man you see is a bear... or a penguin.
The emotional core of your character will be given to you by the screenwriter, and you're going to need to demonstrate those qualities behaviorally. As Ifs are a shortcut. Stephanie Gunning, my writer, was once cast in an independent film for a supporting character known only as the Depressed Woman. She did her audition for the director as if she was a wet dog waiting in the rain for her master to come back. She didn't move her arms (because dogs don't have arms), but let them hang heavily at her sides. And she imagined the unpleasant sensation of water pouring down and plastering her hair against her head, knowing there was nothing to do about it. The feeling was abandonment. She got to this way of doing her audition by asking herself what depression looked like. The image that popped into her mind right away was the wet dog. She never second-guessed it. In rehearsing for the audition, she created a muscle memory of the experience.
When you look for an As If, grab hold of the first images that come to mind. You can trust these because your instant creativity is the purest; it's closest to the core of your life experience. Some people have trouble working imaginatively because their minds get in the way. The mind rationalizes and tries to justify impulses, which can dilute them. Nonetheless subconscious imagery is powerful. It comes from deep inside the body.
Here's an example from a time when I worked with an actress on the role of May in the play Fool for Love by Sam Shepard, focusing on a scene in which May recalls walking with her mother to look for her father. She talks about coming across a house and looking through the window, and seeing the other family that her father had inside. He had another wife and a son, and she and her mother watched them all having dinner together. The problem for my student was that the father did not seem real to her in the scene. She didn't believe in what she was saying yet.
"What does the playwright imply you feel about the father sitting there at the table eating chicken with a woman and a kid who is not you?" I asked her. "Is it sadness? Is it anger?" Then I suggested, "Generate that emotion a little, and just let an image come to you." A second later she experienced an involuntary body shudder, like when it's very cold out and you begin shivering. Because the reaction was so immediate and dramatic, I felt I had to ask her, though I rarely do, "What image came to you?"
She replied, "Pizza... But I can't figure out the reason."
My advice to her was not to try parsing the image. Knowing "why" doesn't help an actor. What would help her was having the memory of the shudder. That image was stored in her muscle memory. There would be reality for her now in the scene because she had an actual experience to recall. She didn't have to work on it. She could trust it. I also told her that the shiver might or might not happen again. She could let it go and be spontaneous with whatever honestly came up when she performed the play.
Personalizing the Other Actor's Lines
Whenever the other character in your scene expresses a point of view, you can also personalize that line by translating what you're hearing into your own P.O.V. For instance, if the other makes an accusation, such as, "You are such a lowlife, dishonorable bastard for cheating on your wife," in the margin of your script you might write, "I'm better than that!" In that moment, you're being insulted. The reality of the moment comes from revealing how you feel about it. Even if you don't say a word, during an audition the camera will be shooting a close-up on your face as you're listening to those lines. Ask yourself: What would that moment be like for you? Don't try to act the story, the entire plot of the script. Just act that one moment by personalizing it. It's as if...
All really great acting happens when an actor is not talking. It occurs when the actor cannot talk, but there's clearly been a "pinch" and the actor is feeling an "ouch." The camera loves those moments because the audience sees the scene reflected through the character's eyes. Think back on scenes you've watched on TV where someone is staring horrified at a brutal murder scene or the twisted remnants of a catastrophic car crash. You didn't need to see a dead body yourself, because you saw it in the actor's response.
What Do You Do with One Line?
You can build the history of a character around a single line of dialogue by crafting a specific As If for the person who you're saying that line to, and by daydreaming a specific memory (or memories) of your history together. My student James DuMont did this when he auditioned for the role of a pizza parlor manager in the 2011 black comedy, Killer Joe. One of the lead actors, Gina Gershon, plays a waitress who is hatching a plot with her brother to murder their mother. In the sides James read from, the description said that the manager "lurks in the background" watching while the uniformed waitress, Sharla, talks on the phone. Then he tells her to get off the line. Not much to go on for an actor—or was it enough? We worked together on his preparation for this audition.
We began by looking at how he could personalize the waitress: Who was she to him? In the stage directions it said that the waitress keeps moving away from the manager. We knew she would be sexy, because Gina Gershon specializes in playing seductive women. We also knew her character was "white trash" because of her name: Sharla. In addition, we knew that he doesn't fire her, even though she talks on the telephone at work, which is against the rules, as the line he was given about "no personal calls" made clear.
How could those clues we found through Sherlock Holmesing be added up? In our coaching session, James decided that they implied she was "hot" and he "wanted her." That's the reason he would let her improper workplace behavior slide. That the script described him as lurking was a creepy choice of words, so he must be a "creepy" guy.
I coached James by asking him, "How many times has he told her no personal calls?" To heighten the meaning of his line and create a history behind it, he decided that they'd had the same conversation about no calls being allowed on duty many times before.
Even though it was a one-line scene for him, he needed to find a turning point for his character. "Why does this scene take place for his character?" Right before the manager speaks to the waitress, the script says that she laughs. I advised James to craft his impulse to approach Sharla and to say his line on the sound of her laughter. From there James put in his creative filler through daydreaming. In that way, he personalized his audition.
It's worth mentioning that although James did not get cast for this particular part, since he's been using this approach to his auditions his career has really begun to take off. In the last two years, he's made twenty movies, and he shot a recurring role as the character of Bill in five episodes of the second season of the TNT series Men of a Certain Age. It just proves my point: You must audition for your career, not the job.
These steps are an example of how you can make a viable scene from few details. You can use even one or two lines to reveal the truth of any human being. As an actor in film and television, your victories come from your moments themselves, not from the film as a whole. You won't hear the applause of an audience. Your reward is in the satisfaction of doing excellent work. Making specific choices in an audition that read truthfully on camera about the moments in your scenes that are related to people, things, places, and events is a victory you can celebrate no matter whether you are cast or not.
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