The Great Acting Blog: “What Is Going On Here?”

The Great Acting Blog: “What Is Going On Here?”

Being an actor is about being a student of human behaviour. Actors spend a great deal of their lives analysing scripts, or, to put it another way, they spend a great deal of their lives trying to work-out just what the hell is going on. Actors need to understand the scene so that they can play the scene, and the first question asked is; what is my character literally doing in the scene? Actors study what the character says and does, and draw conclusions from that, draw conclusions about what the character is trying to accomplish, his objective. This form of analysis inevitably spills over into the real world, and actors quite rightly use it to understand the actions of real people and not just fictional characters who only exist on the page. One of the lessons from this, is that what people say should be taken with a pinch of salt, people say all kinds of things, it’s what they actually do that counts.

Quentin Tarantino is the latest Hollywood filmmaker to censor his work, by toning down the violence in Django Unchained,  in order to satisfy the Chinese government, and so gain access to Chinese audiences. A spokesperson said; “these slight adjustments will not affect the basic quality of the film”. This is of course nonsense. If a filmmaker can cut something from his film without it affecting the basics, then what was the something doing there in the first place? Afterall, the sound drama should only include the essential, ie – that without which the work could not function. We can infer from Tarantino’s censorship that the violence levels in his films are not essential to them.* So why was the violence put there at all? Answer: to provide thrills. Tarantino is not interested in making a work of drama, but in making profits by providing thrills for the audience. And by altering his work for the Chinese, what he’s doing is trying to maximise those profits. Fine. But let us see things as they really are. For Tarantino, the aesthetic integrity of a film does not have to be respected because the film does not exist of itself: the object of making Django Unchained was to generate cash, and Django Unchained can only be defined in relation to it’s ability to perform that task.

*although someone did sharply say earlier, that if you cut the inessential out of Tarantino’s films, what exactly would be left?