The Great Acting Blog

The Great Acting Blog: “”I Think I Let Him Play A F***y Vampire” – Mario Mentrup Q & A- Part 1″

06.02.2012 , The Great Acting Blog , 45 Comments

Mario is an actor, musician, and filmmaker, who lives and works in Berlin. In 2007 he wrote, directed and played the lead role in the feature film, I Do Adore. The film itself is superb, as was Mario's performance in it. I was intrigued to...

The Great Acting Blog: “An Online Actors’ Lab”

25.01.2012 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

This week, I was due to shoot Phone Box Gun, but had to move that back to next month as one of my actors became unavailable. However, I didn't want to waste the time this freed up, and so decided to go and shoot an...

The Great Acting Blog: “The Audition Lowdown”

18.01.2012 , The Great Acting Blog , 46 Comments

Check out a clip from the film, above. For those unfamiliar with the film, The Audition is about an actor, Tony Wallis, who is being seen for a part in a play. He breaks the ice with his interviewer then starts to speak the lines...

Creative Impulse, Acting And Ambivalence | The Great Acting Blog

11.01.2012 , The Great Acting Blog , 39 Comments

In Marco Ferreri's Tales Of Ordinary Madness, Ben Gazzara plays Charles Serking, an incarnation of Charles Bukowski, upon whose work and life the film is based. Those already familiar with Bukowski, will not be surprised to learn that Gazzara spen...

Gerard Depardieu In Under The Sun Of Satan | The Great Acting Blog

04.01.2012 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Gerard Depardieu plays Dossignan, a rural priest engaged in an intense spiritual struggle, a struggle so demanding it regularly brings Depardieu to ill health, one feels even worse might befall him if he didn't have his Dean, Menou-Segrais (played...

The Great Acting Blog: “5 Best Performances In Films I Happened To See In 2011”

28.12.2011 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

Here are my 5 selections for this year. I based them on the fact that they piqued me in an unusual way, asked me to re-examine my own work, or I saw something in them that I loved, and wanted to define. I have excluded...

The Great Acting Blog: “Flipping Between Mindsets”

21.12.2011 , The Great Acting Blog , 37 Comments

Before I head back to Ireland to complete filming on Rouzbeh Rashidi's HE (which is going to be an utterly sublime feature, by the way), I intend to squeeze in a quickie short film, called Phone Box Gun. It'll be a Kaurismakian film noir, about...

The Great Acting Blog: “A Tragic View”

14.12.2011 , The Great Acting Blog , 34 Comments

“I like the futility of effort – the uphill road to failure is a very human thing” - Jean-Pierre Melville My penchant for Samurai films has lead me to Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece, Harakiri. The film is set in the world of the 17th century...

The Great Acting Blog: “Create Precisely The Body Of Work You Want”

07.12.2011 , The Great Acting Blog , 22 Comments

I've always been fascinated by Hollywood mythology, so it's surprising that it took me until this week to watch Sophia Coppola's 2010 film, Somewhere. The film charts the empty, lonely life of Stephen Dorff's movie star, Johnny Marco, who lives at...

The Great Acting Blog: “Independence Of Thought”

30.11.2011 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

This week, I attended a short film event, and was struck by one the films, in the sense that it was technically very flashy, very clever, this filmmaker certainly knew how to use a computer. The problem with the film however, was that it was...