Your actors aren’t giving you what you want. Jeff Turboff explains why learning the craft of acting helps directors, and how to direct and act at once.
You’re on set, shooting your film. First day of principal photography. But your actors aren’t giving you what you want. What do you do? If you’re like a lot of directors, you tell your actors, “Say it like this!” You give them a line reading, yell, “Action!” and they give it to you just the way you said it, and you think, “Well, good enough,” and you move on. What you may or may not know is, you might have just alienated your cast and given them the impression that you see them as puppets. And in doing so, you may have also committed to pretty much wooden performances for the rest of the project. Either that, or they just know you’re not a director who knows what actors do, and they’re essentially on their own for the duration of the film. It’s not your fault though really. You conveyed the way you want it to sound. The way it sounded in your head when you wrote the film, right? But this isn’t the way actors work. And if you’ve cast your film with truly skilled performers, you’re actually seriously handicapping your project by not being able to speak their language. Understanding that is a big step toward making more believable movies.
As a filmmaker, learning something about the craft of acting is arguably one of the single most important things you can do to up your game. I took up acting a little over two years ago to help make me a better writer and director, and it has. (In the process though, it’s become a passion for me in its own right.) Actors want good roles. Actable roles. Stuff they can sink their teeth into. Multi-dimensional characters with full rich lives. Just what we on the other side of the camera want for our characters. Because of the fact that our work as writers and directors ultimately ends up in the hands of actors who must bring our vision to life, why should we handicap ourselves by not understanding how actors do what they do? Actors… good actors… are craftsmen and craftswomen with a highly technical skill of understanding and delivering the emotional intention of a story and each of its moments, as envisioned by the writer and director.
Though what they do is often mysterious to us as filmmakers, rest assured, their craft is a fairly technical one with an array of tools and terms; objective, super objective, back story, moment before, substitutions, body center, circles of attention… the list goes on. Believable performances largely come out of the plethora of details that an actor works at putting into the life of the character, whether those details are salient to the character or not. This is the milieu of an actor’s craft. What we want to see on the screen when we watch a film is a person with a real life, and the more the actor has that stuff going on in his or her life, the more we as audience members are willing to go along for the ride with him or her. A strong actor will have amazing presence, ready relaxation, and freedom of expression. And as directors, we need to make it our duty to help them develop those necessary details and achieve these prerequisite conditions that yield great performances.
After two years of actor training, I decided I’d gotten a little tired of just doing student films, and decided to write something for myself to star in with one of my fellow acting students, Caycee Black. We chose horror and developed a story together, JIMBO, for which I then wrote the screenplay. Single location, small scale, high drama. This would hopefully give us a leg up as fairly new actors by putting us in something I was pretty sure I could knock out of the park. I knew that I’d understand the story, I’d believe in its merits, I’d know my characters inside and out, and I could control many of the variables like production design, shooting strategy, and control over the edit. But now, with a couple of years of actor training, I also knew I could not only get the technical side of this storytelling task down, but also, I had tools I could use to explore character, both for myself and with my star actress, Caycee.
We workshopped the characters and the relationship between them for countless hours of rehearsals, using a bunch of techniques gleaned from the approaches of Meisner, Stanislavski, Chekhov, and others, as taught to us by our acting coach, Bob McAndrew, as well as stuff I’d learned about Method by attending a few months at The Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. Other rehearsal techniques I invented for the project. The fact that Caycee and I had the same teacher meant we could really talk acting shorthand together. And the fact that I as a director having studied acting, could talk language that she understood as a performer, meant the possibility of really deeply exploring nuances of character and relationship that I’m sure I would never have been able to articulate and explore with her if I didn’t have the vocabulary of an actor. This was absolutely key for us to get performances that felt real, and which felt matched to each other for tone and intensity and so forth.
In Greek mythology, the newly deceased who cannot pay the ferryman Charon for safe passage across the river Styx are left to wander the shores for a hundred years. In the same way, if you can’t ferry your actors to safe passage to the other shore, they will forever wander, never reaching their destination, which is a believable performance of your screenplay. You see, actors need to be able to talk about character, emotion, and relationship, not just know where to stand and how to sound reading a line. A good director can usher them to those places he or she needs to by understanding how they work. And this business of learning what it is that actors do is almost completely experiential. You really can’t get it from books. I’m here now to advocate to you, as directors, to learn the craft of acting. It’s possibly the single most important thing I’ve done in terms of my growth as a filmmaker. Good actors will know something about the filmmaking side of things, such as the fact that a tight frame means they can’t move as much as a looser frame. And a good director will understand the actor’s craft as well. You can usher your actor to those places he or she needs to go when you understand what is important to an actor in his or her process. If you’re one of those directors, like I used to be, who rolls eyes at the idea of an actor’s process, chances are your films are going to be the kind that has audiences rolling their own eyes. Good actors are hard enough to find as it is. Make it easier by becoming the kind of director that can nurture solid performances.
Now, with JIMBO, I wore a lot of hats, and one of my biggest challenges was being on both sides of the camera at once. I had to monitor my own performance as well as continue to guide the performance of my co-star, I had to be mindful of the mise-en-scene, think about how things would cut together in the edit room, etc. It never felt like too much though, one, because I had a great crew I trusted a lot, but also because of the great number of hours Caycee and I put into rehearsing and discussing the piece. By the time we got to set, we had such a good understanding of story and character that our biggest challenges as actors were getting the moment before right, keeping the energy high, and having a good technical quality to our voices. We never practiced how we would say our lines, but we always had a great understanding of what each moment in the film meant to each of us as characters, as well as the journey for each of us from start to finish, and that process we went through in rehearsals allowed us an amazing latitude of freedom to be in the moment, true to our emotions, present for each other, without any sense of contrivance, and ultimately (we hope), completely believable (well, as believable as a story with supernatural elements can be, anyway.) I guess you all will be the judges of that when the film is released to festivals beginning sometime around mid-2015.
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