“Give me a verb.” Director John Badham explains how to collaborate with actors using action verbs and playable direction instead of vague results.
“Give me a verb. I love to be given verbs. Give me a verb to play, give me an action. And I’m yours. I love a director who can speak in action, in terms of using verbs. To say, ‘In this scene, you want to seduce him.’ Really clarify, give me a purpose.”
– Jeanne Tripplehorn
Intellectual discussions about scenes and character are the death of good acting and directing. Too many English Literature classes have trained us to look at the bigger thematic pictures, which on a set, will get everyone hopelessly lost in psychobabble and cosmic themes. It’s not the actor’s job to play the larger themes. It’s his job to do the actions… that create the themes.
Acting is about behavior. Whether it’s The Matrix or The Miser, it is about what we do. If you can’t answer the question, “What is the character ‘doing’ in the scene?” Then, you don’t know what the scene is about. You only think you know.
If we are going to successfully collaborate with our actors we must, must, must learn to communicate with them by using strong, active verbs to describe the action of their characters. If you use grandiose terms you are only confusing matters. Judith Weston’s superb book Directing Actors lists pages of terrific usable verbs for acting, and shows what a single verb can do for an actor’s approach to a scene.
If you can’t break a dramatic scene down into actable objectives that can be described by strong, actable verbs, the scene is no good. It has no place in the movie or the play. You may shoot it anyway, but it will always stop the movie cold.
This makes sense. Everything we do in the world is an action. Every action is for a reason. Even if we do nothing, that itself is an action. The choice may be ours, or it may be forced upon us.
For example:
Action – we go to sleep at night as an active choice, to get rest. If we can’t sleep there is some reason – we are upset or perhaps we had coffee after dinner. We react to this discovery in some way – we try to force sleep by counting sheep or taking a sleep aid. Whatever we do, we act in some way.
We never do things without some end in mind. If a branch falls off a tree and hits us, we are acted upon. We may be knocked down involuntarily, but our body reacts to stabilize itself. So we have action, and reaction, then the reaction to the reaction and so forth. The great acting teacher Sanford Meisner said acting is very simple: it is “pinch”, followed by “ouch!” Keep your scenes simple, by breaking them down into action / reaction.
Make your actors do the work. Draw them out by getting them to articulate what their character wants to get from the other person. Very likely you will hear answers that are intellectual or unspecific and therefore un-actable. Don’t accept this. Press for an active verb. If the actor doesn’t give you one, keep asking questions to lead him that way. “What are you trying to make him give you?”
Any right answer will contain at least three things:
1. A verb: “I am trying to convince.”
2. A receiver: “I am trying to convince him.”
3. A desired response: “I am trying to convince him to go with me.”
Let’s get technical briefly so that we can all be speaking the same language in terms of objectives, actions and adjustments.
Everyone uses them slightly differently but the principles are fairly uniform. Some of the other common phrases are: intentions, beats, arcs, journey and given circumstances. It really doesn’t matter what words we use, they are all about understanding a character’s behavior.
Conflict is the basic foundation
of drama. Conflict between characters leads to the sequence of action-reaction, “pinch-ouch.” If there is no conflict, there is no drama.
things a character brings to a scene with them: their physical state, their mental state, their past history, as well as what is going on around them. Given circumstances are part of the homework that the actor has to do for himself. He has to understand the entire life and psychology of the character he is playing. That understanding affects how he will perform the action called for in the script.
character in each scene wants to do at that very moment. There is no such thing as no objective. When a character achieves or changes their objective they immediately have a new one.
A professional baseball pitcher throws a ball one way. A Little League reject throws it another way entirely. A new mother feeds her baby one way, a mother with six children, another. Stanislavsky said that the approach to an adjustment is to perform the objective “as-if”. Throw the ball “as-if” you were an uncoordinated kid. Feed the baby “as-if” you were scared you would choke him.
So the combination of these elements leads to how an action is performed.
In 2003, I directed Candice Bergen and a young actor named Bug Hall in a suspense movie for CBS titled Footsteps. In one scene, Candice’s character discovers a young intruder in her house. Her objective becomes to protect herself. While some people might choose to run, or plead for mercy, the character’s given circumstances make her choose to overpower the young thug, lock him in the closet and call the police.
The thief’s objective is now to escape, and he must try different tactics to achieve this goal.
1. He looks around to see if he can physically break out of the closet and run away from her. That doesn’t work.
2. He pleads with her, telling her that his parents will kill him when they find out. The adjustment is (to escape by) making her feel sorry for him so she will open the door. When she stonewalls him, he has to make another choice.
3. He tells her he is claustrophobic and stages a panic attack. It’s the same objective, (escape by) really making her feel sorry for him, just now he has raised the stakes.
It’s a fairly simple scene with an obvious objective. However, each take was starting with great energy and then immediately bogging down. The producers kept whispering to me “make Bug go faster.” I ignored them for a little while to give my actor time to get on solid ground. The scene got no better, in fact it got deadly.
This was now the time to use adjustments as a directing tool. I took Bug aside and said he should act “as-if” he could hear a cop car coming. If he’s caught, he’s going to jail, so he must find an escape route.
During the next take I yelled out, “There’s a siren! Cops are coming up the drive. They’re coming into the house!” Bug began to speed up, not mechanically, but in an organic way. We could see his panic. The scene began to click. Candice’s character had more to work with now that she sees her captive is up to something.
Here we see all characters thinking and reacting at different times to our If an actor is listening and reacting to the other actor in the moment he can respond in the way he chooses.
You can go to your actors and ask them to give you more pace, more energy, more tears. You will get much better results giving actors specific reasons why they speak faster, why they are more energetic.
Example: Two men stop on the street. One asks the other for directions. It’s a boring expositional scene. The actor giving directions takes forever to get the dialogue out. You’re in a hurry so you want to blurt out “faster.” Don’t say that. Give him something he can act. Tell him he is late for his train home, and if he misses this one he’ll have to wait two hours for the next one. Tell him it’s about to rain and he’s wearing a new suit. Any of these and a thousand more are much more interesting than “faster. “
Keep in mind, pace or speed is one of the last things you add to a scene. Don’t try to adjust the timing in your rehearsal, it’s destructive to do it too early. Wait till they know the scene first. In filmmaking, as in life, general John Badham (Point of No Return, Blue Thunder, Crossing Jordan) is a noted film and television director and producer. Badham is Professor of Media Arts at The Dodge School of Film and Media, Chapman University in Orange, CA. His book, I’ll Be In My Trailer: The Creative Wars Between Director & Actors (written with Craig Modderno), was released by Michael Wiese Productions in July, 2006.
Keep learning filmmaking
Want more lessons like this? Join StudentFilmmakers free for live webinars with working pros, and stream on-demand filmmaking classes in cinematography, directing, screenwriting, sound and post.
