The Great Acting Blog: “Use Your Imagination”

As I mentioned in the last blogpost, we were to employ improvisation during this section of the film, in order to give it a quality of uncertainty. This approach yielded some extraordinary results, and  made my understanding of the film and the characters richer still. This is one of the true joys of working, that every step you take with the material, you perceive something new, the meaning behind an earlier seemingly instinctive decision is revealed. One such decision involved a cigar. During an improvisation, I had my character, Jimmy, smoke a cigar in a scene where the characters are resting from their journey. It was an idea which had just popped into my head a few days earlier, I didn’t think too deeply about it, and just thought I’d run with it and see what would happen. Well, the cigar turned out in the end, to play a key role on two fronts. Firstly, it helped to show a chasm open up between Billy and Jimmy: we see Billy’s resentment toward Jimmy grow, because he is anxious to get on and arrive at their destination, but Jimmy is just sitting down on a log and chilling out with his cigar. Secondly, later in their journey, Billy gets angry with Jimmy when they arrive at a part of the forest which he is convinced they were at before,  he fears Jimmy is leading them round in circles. Jimmy denies this, and a fierce argument ensues, until Billy spots the butt of Jimmy’s cigar on the ground and offers it as evidence. Jimmy says it’s just a bit of twig. Ultimately, whether it really was the cigar or not, is ambiguous, and this ambiguity will challenge the viewers’ perception of the characters upon the screen – exactly where I want the film to be.

The cigar has easily and economically created two wonderful moments of complexity for Noirish Project. I had not envisaged these moments at all- the decision to use the cigar had been flip on my part -and yet they fit beautifully with the objectives of the film . Did I get lucky? Perhaps. But I like to think I enjoyed the benefit of trusting my imagination, not being intellectual or conceptual, but trusting my innate creativity (which each of us possesses), and letting it guide me to an answer (or at least to formulating a question). I often work in this way, and these little moments spring up far too often for it to be mere co-incidence. There is nothing more fertile and constructive than the human imagination.

We will be journeying into the forest once again, as we weren’t able to get everything we needed on account of being rudely interrupted by the snow. Of course, I will post updates here.