Anna Magnani uses the full breadth and force of her personality in Luchino Visconti's Bellissima. An actor's personality is their performance. Range does not exist. Anna Magnani was known as “the volcanic mother of all Italian Cinema” and this is almost literally true in Luchino Visconti's...
Read More[caption id="attachment_175665685" align="aligncenter" width="682"] Catherine Deneuve in The Truth.[/caption] Jimmy Stewart once said that he would quit acting when he no longer liked himself on screen. I thought this was a pretty good rule to go by and so I adopted it for myself. I also...
Read More“there is nothing so interesting on stage as a man trying to get a knot out of his shoelaces.” - Bertolt Brecht Chantal Akerman's “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” is a three and a half hour masterpiece about the meticulous dom...
Read MoreSubscribe | @GreatActingBlog [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="563"] ”Please see who I am. Please fall in love with me, not a fantasy.” - Kim Novak[/caption] Like all great art, a hidden truth is revealed when the real and the imaginary combine, and the viewer experiences the clatter of...
Read More[caption id="attachment_175664532" align="aligncenter" width="700"] David Mamet and John Malkovich in rehearsals for Bitter Wheat.[/caption] I stopped going to the theatre a few years back because so much of what I saw was dead. Theatres had become museums; places where we go to see re-creations of classic...
Read MoreSubscribe The script for my new feature film was completed earlier this year. It's a neo-absurdist mystery noir, a psychological twilight thriller, called Composure. Here's how Ray Milland influenced it's direction...
Read MoreIsabelle Huppert, Michael Redgrave, Charles Laughton, Charlie Chaplin and Michel Piccoli - insight here from five of the greatest actors, each with a mighty body of work, and who reached [and continue to reach] a level of craft one can only aspire to. These quotes...
Read More"When asked to describe his enduring collaboration with Swinton over the years, Guadagnino pauses. “Tilda is a filmmaker, not just an actress. She has a great knowledge of the machine of the making of a movie and this is very profound, because it’s like working...
Read MoreSubscribe | @GreatActingBlog Hepburn plays Arianne Chavasse, the daughter of a private detective who specialises in creating dossiers on illicit affairs for cheated spouses. Hepburn takes an unnatural interest in her father's work, delving into his filing cabinet and hungrily reading up on his juiciest cases....
Read MoreIn Billy Wilder's The Lost Weekend, Ray Milland delivers one of the great Hollywood performances. He plays Don Birham, a writer so plagued by self-doubt that he addicts himself to alcohol in order to cope. The action takes place over four days: Milland is supposed...
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