Recent projects include working with leading actors on the films: 

The Lady, The Door, Berbarian Sound Studio, Sherlock Holmes, The Last Station, Control.

I’m delighted Mel has shared her extensive knowledge and experience in a guestpost for The Great Acting Blog, which is both practical and insightful, and with it’s use of video clips from classic movies, will prove to be, I’m sure, a wonderful resource for practitioners and enthusiasts.  

Concealing and Revealing

(thoughts from Mel Churcher…)

Actors are often obsessed with sub-text and when they find it, they want to share it. But what is sub-text? Literally it is what lies beneath the words. But we deal in sub-text all the time, even when we are not telling lies or trying to hide. Every association, clutch at the heart, memory or link we make as we talk, look around or communicate is a form of sub-text. If I say, ‘I’ve got to go and pick up Johnnie from school’, there is a whole world within that line – a life with and caring for Johnnie, pictures of the journey, a happy excuse to go or a duty to be done and so on.

If I look around my room or out of my window, everything I see evokes associations, feelings, memories and needs.

In life, these connections are already there but for a role, you have to build them. You can use improvisations, research, psychological gesture, substitutions, sense memories and especially any physical imaginative or practical work that stores muscle memory. Always act out stories that you have to tell at home so that when you tell them on set, your body has real memories of what happened.

(You will find many ways to rehearse alone in ‘A Screen Acting Workshop + DVD’ published this year by Nick Hern or my earlier book, ‘Acting for Film: Truth 24 Times a Second’ published by Virgin Books and also available on Kindle.)

  But once these connections and deep feelings and thoughts are stored, they must be trusted and relied upon without you feeling any need to parade them. You must not show us your preparation or how hard you’ve worked. Just like life, we will see it when we’re meant to or it will seep out in spite of yourself. Just like life, you may have to work hard not to show it if you wouldn’t want others to see it. The difficult words may be simply statements thrown away or they may be pulled out like thorns to extricate you from the situation. It all depends on what you, in the role, want to do – to conceal or to reveal and whether that is easy or hard. You may even smile or laugh when you talk about the most painful things.

Watch any documentaries or newsreels when people talk about terrible things that have happened to them. They don’t lose their warmth,  personality or even humour. They don’t stand back and comment on how the story should make you, the listener, feel. They are factual, practical, often laid-back and sometimes surprisingly funny. Their action is to share the pictures in their head with you, not to ‘feel’ it again. In fact, this is often the last thing they want to do.

 ‘Sub-text’, when used in acting training,  is usually focused upon the want or need that lies beneath the surface of the actual words or action. The first thing to ask yourself is, do you want the listener to understand this need?

1. ‘Would you like a drink sometime?’ (I fancy you like mad but you mustn’t know that – I’ll play it cool.)  

2. ‘Would you like a drink sometime?’ (I need you to know that I’m here for you whenever you want me.)

The speaker in example 1. will not give an inkling of the desires running underneath. He or she does not want the listener to read the subtext.

The speaker in example 2 will be trying to make contact and to see something back from the other perso
n that shows the proposition has been understood. The speaker wants the listener to understand the subtext.

But we don’t even think about this in life as sub-text. We just know what the stakes are and whether we have to conceal or reveal our thoughts. And if we are alone, we just think. There is no-one to share it with, but we are not concealing anything either. In film, if you are alone,  this is the same. You are not having to conceal anything from anyone else but there is no-one to explain those feelings to, either.

We are not trying to ‘show’ our thoughts – we are just having them. And reacting to them ourselves, if we need to.

If there are other people in the room who mustn’t understand those thoughts we will not give them away. If Kevin Spacey, in ‘The Usual Suspects’ gives the game away and we know his story is fiction, there is no film:

Of course, if we want the other person to guess our thoughts then we can share them, as Lauren Bacall does in this famous clip from ‘To Have and Have Not’: