The Great Acting Blog: “Actors’ Craft, Not Directors’ Tricks”
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, and direction becomes abuse. The article sites famous examples of this, such as Hitchcock attaching live birds to Tippi Hedren during the filming of The Birds, and Kubrick forcing Shelly Duvall to do 127 takes of the bat-swinging scene in The Shining. This kind of behaviour is artistically permissible when filed under “manipulation” – it may seem unkind but at least the director was able to “draw” remarkable results from the actor, or that’s what they say at least.
I don’t know if any of this stuff should be described as abuse or not. Abuse is a pretty strong word. What I do know is this: any attempt to manipulate the actor in order to get a result, is a denial that acting is an art and a craft. In effect, the manipulator is saying that the actor cannot deliver the desired result via the technical means of their trade (in the way the cinematographer or the screenwriter would) because no such means exist. The only way therefore, is to trick the result from the actor (usually by putting them literally in the same position as the character – see Tippi Hedren above). If this were not the case, then they would simply articulate what they thought the scene was about, in simple actable terms, and let the actor do their stuff, trusting them. There would be no need for the manipulation.
If however, the director resorts to trickery because the actor is not competent, we might ask why they hired them in the first place. If the actor is competent though, then they should be allowed to get on with their work, delivering the contribution that was the reason they were brought onto the project in the first place.
The Great Acting Blog: “Sorry, But Acting Has Got Nothing Whatsoever To Do With Realism” – The Great Acting Blog/ 18.09.2013
[…] Following on from yesterday’s post about directors who manipulate actors in order to get a “real” response from them. I want to go further and say that not only is manipulation wrong, but it’s objective, namely this “realism”, is beside the point. […]
Richard/ 18.09.2013
directors hire certain actors for a variety of reasons beyond competency, but I would say in this case its down to individual directors desires, like actors, they are all individuals, some will resort to trickery to get an authentic reaction to external stimuli which is hard to organically re create for any human, actor or not..Lars Von Trier firing shot guns behind an actress and edited out in post one example springs to mind to elicit a genuine extreme fright in a horror movie of his, he simply wanted his movie to be more intense then other horrors out there so tried this method of getting the response he wanted
James Devereaux actor/ 18.09.2013
Von Trier behaves the way he does because he believes that actors only care about their performance, and nothing else. Of course, the truth is all good know actors know that the best thing for them is that the film the as whole becomes a success.
chicagoworksinprogress/ 20.09.2013
🙂
work jazz/ 11.10.2023
work jazz