Film professor William Dickerson shares a quick directing tip: how to use action verbs to adjust the intensity of an actor’s performance on set.
A quick tip on adjusting the intensity of your actor’s performance.
As a professor in the Cinema & Media Arts department at Biola University, I have had the privilege of traveling to Germany, Indonesia and Japan to make films with my students. It is both a significant cross-cultural experience and a way for my students to gain firsthand production experience on a feature film.
Our latest venture, Cicada, is a 100-minute lighthearted drama in the Japanese language that is currently screening at film festivals across the country. Ten students comprised the core of the crew that was making this film with me day in and day out. There were also three alumni from our previous shorts, who had key leadership positions: DP Daniel McNutt, 1st AC Trevor Smith and Key Grip Joey Kennedy.
Because these projects are rooted in academia, there are limited resources with which we can make a movie. As I have learned over the years, limitations produce creativity. My students and I are forced to be creative in how we approach the filmmaking process. Today I am sharing a directing tip that dictated how we scheduled and shot our feature, Cicada.
Legendary screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) has a quote that I love: “A movie, I think, is really only four or five moments between two people; the rest of it exists to give those moments their impact and resonance. The script exists for that. Everything does.”
Taking Towne’s philosophy, and keeping in mind our limited shooting schedule, I wrote down the five key moments of the film – the five moments that would give the film its resonance. These were not the scenes that were the most elaborately staged or technically difficult. These were the moments that would ruin the film if they were melodramatic or understated, but would give the story its impact if they were performed just right.
We had 20 days to shoot 90 pages, so we had to work at a fairly quick pace. Each camera set-up received an average of only 2-3 takes. Working in a language not our own – with very little rehearsal time – placed us in difficult positions at times. But as the director, I had to know where to place our focus and how to best use our limited resources.
Out of 119 scenes in Cicada, I chose only five moments that we needed to absolutely nail tonally to give the film its heart. So when we arrived at each of those shots, our 1st AD Lydia Dunham knew that we needed to give them more time.
In every scene in a film, characters have goals they set out to achieve: to win an argument; to seduce a woman; to escape the clutches of a captor. In acting terms, these goals are called objectives. The means through which an actor goes about achieving these objectives is to use an action verb.
While the actor prepares action verbs for use in her scenes, you should also prepare a list of your own in the event the actor needs directorial guidance. The list of verbs that I occasionally reference is organized so that I can tweak the intensity of the performance. Sometimes an actor takes a verb and either makes a stronger choice than I’d like (often perceived as “overacting”), or makes a subtler choice than I’d like. Some directors handle these two problems by giving direction like: do it “smaller,” or do it “bigger.”
Unfortunately, when actors play results like these, their performances may feel false. The emotions that the actor releases should be byproducts of the techniques she is using to achieve the character’s objective. An actor isn’t sad because the director instructs her to be sad, but rather she’s sad because her character is trying to warn her boyfriend that she’s thinking of leaving him, and he’s not listening to her. If the actor isn’t being persuasive enough, or you think she could use a stronger tactic, instead of warning, she could reprimand him. If he still doesn’t respond, the actor can teach him a lesson, in one last ditch effort to get him to respond. If you want her to be more subtle and less intense, she could give him a cold shoulder.
If the actor uses the right action verb to drive her performance, the emotion will bubble to the surface on its own.
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- Film directing: getting good performances
- Coverage and the master shot
- Camera angles in film: a beginner’s guide
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