The Great Acting Blog: “Filmmakers’ Artifice, Actors’ Truth”

The Great Acting Blog: “Filmmakers’ Artifice, Actors’ Truth”

I have been editing my short film, The Audition, and have come to realise that, to a certain extent, editing is a brilliant way of learning about acting, because the editor is selecting and arranging the performances depending on the needs of the film, and clearly, a great deal of analyzing the performances takes place in order to get this job done. The Audition is a very gentle film, the drama is slight, and therefore, the performances need to be very precise in terms of expressing the individual beats of the film, otherwise there would be nothing to see – The Audition doesn’t have big moments in it to masque generalized acting. Not only do the performances need to be precise, but so too does the editing, each little expression in each shot needs to be weighed up very carefully, the juxtaposing of differing nuances can alter the meaning of the film – again, there is nothing broad about the The Audition; a look, an inflection, a gesture, all of these expressions are crucial in such a minimal work.

So far this process has lead to an affirmation of many of the ideas and principles I have been exploring and trying to articulate here on this blog recently. Upon reviewing the footage, I was shocked by one of the first things I noticed, which was that I almost mumble (but not quite) one of the early lines in the film, my speech is tense, I speak it almost in a staccato – this is the symptom of an underlying tension. However, as the scene progresses, so does my performance, and I begin to relax and speak freely, and my personality begins to shine through. My initial shock wore off, as I reflected upon it, and understood that this is very much the pattern of an audition in life – to begin with we are cautious and reserved, frightened of failure, but as we break the ice and then hit our straps, we loosen up – from this particular moment in the film then, I can infer something general about life – there is a provocative little truth to it, and it is arrived at by allowing the moment to unfold as it will, not applying some outside ideal to the dialogue, a perfect recital would have given a lie to the scene. The performance should be an actuality, not a reference.

It is the actor’s job to bring truth to the scene, whereas it is the filmmakers job to supply the fantasy, or, put another way: it is the actor’s job to be truthful under imaginary circumstances created by the filmmaker. On The Audition, I am both actor and filmmaker, and so there is a convergence of aesthetics as it were. For me, cinema is not a realistic art form: the script, the camerawork, the editing, are formalized – the dialogue for example, has a deliberately precise rhythmn. The object of this formalism is to draw attention to the fact that the film is an artifice, and it is the actor’s responsibility to anchor this artifice with truth. The combination of filmmaker’s artifice and actor’s truth mean that the film corresponds to our dream life, and our fantasy life, that world which lies below and on the margin of our consciousness, not necessarily articulate, not necessarily understood, but fabulous nonetheless. The actor is the audience’s (and the filmmaker’s) representative within the film, the actor provides them with access into the film. That the actor give  a truthful performance is crucial, because this enables the audience to participate fully in the film. As with a dream or a fantasy, no matter how weird and wonderful it is, we always recognise the truth of ourselves within it. The same needs to be true of a film.