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Acting — the primer
For a director, this is not about learning to act — it is about knowing what an actor is doing, so you can ask for something else.
ACT · Production · 51 lessons · 17h 46m
What it actually is
Most people arriving at this department are not planning to perform. They are directors who have discovered that the one part of the job they cannot prepare on a spreadsheet is the part where a person has to be believable, and that they have no vocabulary for it. That is the gap this department fills: enough understanding of the process to have a useful conversation with somebody who is inside it.
The first thing worth internalising is that screen acting and stage acting are different disciplines that share a name. The stage is a projection medium: everything must reach the back row. The screen is a detection medium, closer to surveillance — the camera sees a thought cross a face and an audience reads it. Almost everything that reads as overacting on screen is stage technique arriving in the wrong room.
The second is that performance is mostly decided at casting. The famous claim that casting is ninety per cent of directing is an exaggeration that nobody in the industry seriously disputes. Working out what a role actually requires — and then casting somebody for whom that thing is close to effortless — solves more problems than any amount of skilled direction applied to the wrong person.
What is still being argued about
Live disagreements between people who know what they are doing. You will find confident advice on both sides of each.
- Method versus technique — Whether an actor should generate a real emotion or construct a convincing representation of one is the oldest argument in the field and it is not close to settled. What has shifted is the tone: sustained immersion is now widely discussed as a labour practice rather than a mystique, and "he stayed in character for nine months" reads to a lot of the industry as a description of a difficult colleague rather than a commitment. The technical objection is separate and older — that a genuinely distressed actor cannot reliably hit a mark on take eleven.
- Rehearse, or protect the first time — One position holds that rehearsal is where the work gets done and the shoot is execution. The other holds that screen performance has a freshness that rehearsal spends, and that the best take is often the second one, before anybody knows what they are doing. Directors tend to hold this view strongly and change it depending on the actor, which suggests it is a question about people rather than a principle.
- Whether a director should give line readings — Almost every book says never — that demonstrating the line reduces an actor to an impersonator. In practice a large number of respected directors do it, sparingly and late, when a scene is not landing and time has run out. The defensible version of the rule is that a line reading is a last resort that costs you something, not that it is forbidden.
On the day
A note that names a feeling is not a note. "Be angrier" tells an actor the result you want and nothing they can do; "you have already decided to leave, you are just being polite about it" is something a person can play. If you can only describe the outcome, you have not yet worked out what is wrong.
Where to start
- Directing Actors — The most directly useful material here for anybody who will be running a set rather than standing in front of a camera.
- Casting — Because the decisions made here constrain everything the direction can subsequently achieve.
- Screen Technique — What the camera actually does to a performance — eyelines, stillness, scale — and why stage habits do not survive it.
- Rehearsal — How the time before the shoot is best spent, on a schedule that will not give you much of it.
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