If I Can Dream

I loved this tweet session with Michael Herwick, producer on If I Can Dream. Everyone should take note, because this is exactly how you build a relationship with your audience:

Sam Bailey Begins Pre-Production!

For Mr. Sam Bailey, today is a day to celebrate!

 

First and foremost, the final draft of Sam Bailey is complete.  While the script can be altered by anything from budgetary issues to casting choices, the screenplay I was dreaming of when I first began contemplating this story is now on the page.  If you’d  like to read the script, you can find it on the 8 Sided Forum:  http://bit.ly/dd5bNh

 

What’s more, I’ve completed the first round of blocking – which is the process of figuring out where to put the actors, where to put the cameras, and how everything moves around as the scene progresses.  While this seems like a less creative process than storyboarding,  it’s how I play out the process of shooting and editing the film in my mind. As I begin the storyboarding process, I’ve already got a good sense of how the scene looks IN MOTION, as well as how the shots I choose will play into the film as a whole.  If you’d like to look at my blocking charts, I’ve got those on the Forum as well:  http://bit.ly/9BCOpt

 

Now I’ve got a sense of how many set-ups I’ll need for each location.  In turn, that means we can start building a production schedule, bargaining for locations, and all the rest.  Finally, we can start breaking the production of this film into a series of practical questions with tangible answers.  In many respects, that’s the whole job of a director.

 

Break out the champagne!   Sam Bailey just graduated!

Action and Emotion

As my twitter followers will know, Gerard, Dan and I attended a Cinematheque screening of RoboCop at the Aero a few Fridays back. Peter Weller was in attendance, and he had some very interesting things to say about how acting theory has changed over the last ten years. Since that time, I’ve been reflecting on what he said – and it’s made me conscious of some very important issues.

Peter Weller is a Meisner-trained actor, and I’m a big proponent of all the Meisner fundamentals. Like all modern acting theory, Meisner flows from Stanislavski and is focused on giving the actor an objective, rather than a feeling. By pursuing that objective with truth and openness, the actor has an experience that the audience can share.

Those are the basics, but Peter Weller focused on the specific issue of props and action, and how it relates to emotion in life. Young actors today, according to Weller, are bent on exploring the emotion of a given action. If an actor is confessing something, the actor gets a close-up so we can see how vulnerable they are. If the actor is shooting someone, the actor gets another close-up so we can read the tension and conflict in their face.

This style of performance, in my opinion, has become even more pervasive since the Matrix hit theaters. Nowadays, we’ve gotten so accustomed to watching intense action in slow motion that the actor is given the opportunity to express the emotion of an intense, complicated, quick action in a beat-by-beat format.

When we play music beat-by-beat, we consider it elementary. When we recite poetry beat-by-beat, it’s boring. Why would anyone think acting is different?

Part of the reason Brando is considered the best of the Meisner actors is that he used action, compulsively, to conceal emotion. In the middle of a scene, he’d start fiddling with props just to change the visual subject matter. By redirecting our attention, Brando actually acknowledges the presence of his emotions in a much more realistic, truthful way. At the same time, he doesn’t make them transparent.

Why do actors like props so much? Why do we like watching actors smoke in movies? Those tools give them a way to redirect the focus of the scene in a way that tells us they’re FEELING SOMETHING, without spelling out what it is in Kindergarten terms. How do we know they’re feeling something? When we feel something, we use the same misdirections. On a basic level, we understand what they’re doing.

What’s more, by hiding that feeling with busywork, they give the scene more dimension. As audience members, we get caught up in the action of the busywork… and the true emotion of the scene becomes more of an undercurrent. Sometimes that undercurrent is blatant and obvious, and other times it’s subtle – that’s what creates the emotional ebb and flow of the film. At the same time, it should never be reduced to one dimension.

Weller commented that “Young actors today are always waiting for the close-up.” He’s right. Maybe more and more untrained actors are showing up in Hollywood, and maybe we’ve lost something in the educational system. Either way, I’m very grateful for the observation.

On small films like Sam Bailey, having those layers is critical to the film’s creative and financial success. On larger movies it’s the difference between having a movie people will watch, and having a movie people will love.

Thank you, Peter Weller. I owe you one.