actor-director relationship Archives

The Great Acting Blog: “The Good Director”

25.02.2014 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

The good director understands that his idea of the way a certain moment in a scene should be played, is only one person's view, and that it may not even be the strongest. He knows instinctively when to back off an actor's performance. If an actor...

The Great Acting Blog: “How Much Creative Freedom Should Actors Have?”

07.11.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 2 Comments

Actors cannot go through their career hoping to encounter the perfect director who will provide them with the perfect working conditions they desire. In fact, part of the art of the actor is coping with the demands thrown at him by a myriad of different...

The Great Acting Blog: “A Lack Of Confidence?”

03.10.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 16 Comments

The debate about how much space a director should give to an actor within a production rages on. Some say that the actor should do whatever the hell the director tells them to do while others think that manipulation is direction. One thing is certain...

The Great Acting Blog: “How The Director Sets The Actor Free”

26.09.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 1 Comment

To follow on from yesterday's post, I wanted to expand a little bit on the notion of giving the actor space to create. As a general rule, I believe the primary task of the director is to assist the actors in expressing the writer's intentions*, and...

The Great Acting Blog: “Actors Not Puppets”

25.09.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 0 Comments

For the actor to do his best work, the optimum conditions for him to do so need to be created within the production. If the director is all over the actor, if he wants to control him, then the actor will not do his best...

The Great Acting Blog: “Actors’ Craft, Not Directors’ Tricks”

17.09.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 5 Comments

A piece in the Guardian caught my eye recently when it brought into focus once again the actor-director relationship. The broad gist of it questioned whether some of the lengths directors go to in order to get performances from their actors go too far,...

The Great Acting Blog: “Do Your Own Thing”

07.08.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 2 Comments

I've often written on this blog that actors should take full responsibility for their work and not wait around for directors to give them instructions. The lack of responsibility has grown up precisely because of the directorial dominance of the actor which has emerged in...

The Great Acting Blog: “Know What You’re Doing And Know What You Want”

08.05.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 9 Comments

"Nobody respects us". - Something I overheard an actor saying this week. The director-actor relationship is unique. During the course of his work, the actor makes himself incredibly vulnerable, which is to say he loses his self-consciousness (which is a tool for protecting the self) in...

The Great Acting Blog: “Actors Are Not Children”

27.02.2013 , The Great Acting Blog , 1 Comment

[twitter-follow username="ejamesdevereaux" scheme="dark"] That actors are children, is a myth put about by certain theatre directors, the object of which, is to help those directors maintain a position of power - it functions as a Trojan Horse: the comment is a designed to seem like some...

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