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

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.

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