The Great Acting Blog

Audrey Hepburn In Love In The Afternoon – Performance Is Personality

29.07.2018 , The Great Acting Blog , 3 Comments

Subscribe | @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....

The Great Acting Blog: “How To Play Weak”

12.07.2018 , The Great Acting Blog , 13 Comments

We don’t like showing we are in a weak position, we don’t like showing that we need something. We don’t like revealing a vulnerability - it’s degrading, it’s embarrassing, it may even be humiliating, and we leave ourselves wide open to being damaged. This is...

The Great Acting Blog: “David Mamet Discusses His New Play”

12.05.2018 , The Great Acting Blog , 1 Comment

https://soundcloud.com/theeconomist/the-economist-asks-what-is Davis Mamet on terrific form discussing his new play, Bitter Wheat, inspired by an interchange he had with an actress, #metoo and Harvey Weinstein. Here's an excerpt from the interview...

Ray Milland In The Lost Weekend – A Defence Of A Great Performance | The Great Acting Blog

08.04.2018 , The Great Acting Blog , 31 Comments

In 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...

A Script Is Like A Dream

01.01.2018 , Distracted, The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

A work of art is the expression of a feeling experienced by the artist: it is feeling fashioned into a fantastic form by the imagination. This is certainly true of a film script. The literal action of a script, the surface incidents, may be fictional, they may be weird,...

The Great Acting Blog: “Freedom In A Strait-Jacket – Conversation With The Actor”

03.12.2017 , Distracted, The Great Acting Blog , 1 Comment

The next in our series of posts reflecting on the process of producing Distracted, focuses on the work of actor, John Giles. He plays Detective Mountjoy, a cop who needs to win a promotion otherwise his wife will leave him. After John's last shot on the film, I...

The Great Acting Blog: “The Dignity Of The Actor”

16.10.2017 , Distracted, The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Post-production continues on Distracted - sound design and refining the visual aesthetic. It's a big job and we are progressing nicely with it. As we head toward completion, I begin to reflect on the past year, producing Distracted, and have decided to formulate my thoughts...

Advice To Actors From 10 True Greats | The Great Acting Blog

05.07.2017 , The Great Acting Blog , 21 Comments

Despite our good intentions, despite our best endevours, despite our best laid plans, sometimes our attempts to achieve our most important goals become so convoluted, so mangled by the stresses and strains of day-to-day living, that we lose sight of the vision that inspired us...

John Hurt – An Extraordinary Sensibility | The Great Acting Blog

18.02.2017 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

[caption id="attachment_175661512" align="aligncenter" width="540"] John Hurt (1940 - 2017)[/caption] Tolstoy explained it to us when he said that a true work of art was the transmission of a feeling experienced by the artist. The viewer, in turn, receives the work, and so experiences the same feeling. John Hurt is...

The Great Acting Blog: “Creativity Doesn’t Run Out”

26.12.2016 , The Great Acting Blog , 1 Comment

Follow @JamesDevereaux Watching Woody Allen's latest feature, Cafe Society, I was struck by it's energy and precision, by the strength of it's ideas, by the truth of it's observations (which proves Allen still wonders at the world), but most of all, I was struck by the...

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