In Roy Blount Jr’s recent book, Alphabet Juice, he says “Movie dialog isn’t written anymore. It’s improvised by the stars.” To what extent is that really true? If it is, that would explain what I find quite perplexing in movie reviews, where someone will virtually swoon over an actor’s performance and persona, when I’m thinking that actor’s merely acting out someone else’s script. Does anyone here really know?
I think it depends on the movie and the star and what the director allows them to do.
Certain stars are known for their improvised style of acting (Jack Black, Robin Williams, Vince Vaughn, Jim Carey) and it works well.
Others seem to follow the script verbatim like Natalie Portman and Hayden Christiansen in Star Wars and it sounds awful.
Most actors stick fairly closely to the script. The amount of leeway they are given depends a great deal on the director, and usually if they want to make any changes to the dialogue ahead of time they need the director to okay it, so that everyone else on set (especially the other actors) will know what’s going on. If the dialogue sounds stilted or awkward, it’s not necessarily the actor’s fault; sometimes they are just given bad dialogue by the script and either are not allowed to change it or don’t try to.
There are exceptions of course, some actors like the ones named by Hampshire are well known for ad-libbing. Some movies are very lightly scripted, like Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries, and are heavily improvised. That’s the exception to the rule, though. Most actors, and especially non-stars, are going to read the lines they are given.
From what I understand, they tried to improve it (both in wording and in delivery), but Lucas wouldn’t let them.
I believe it. Wasn’t it Harrison Ford who told him “You can write stuff like this but you can’t actually say it.”
As I heard it, it was: “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it.”
I can’t speak to movies, but I’ve attended a few tapings of some high-profile TV shows (a few tapings as a studio walk-in, a couple times as an invited guest by the producers/directors).
In my experience, regular series TV actors definitely memorize their lines, and repeat them without cue cards (exceptions include live shows like Saturday Night Live or The Tonight Show, and I’m guessing dailies like soap operas have their own workarounds). What happens next, however, is up to the director’s discretion.
Some directors will be happy with the first reading and go with that shoot.
Some directors will want multiple takes, but mostly for atmospherics-- the lines said are the same, they just want to hear them repeated differently.
Some directors will want multiple takes with multiple readings-- allowing the actors to mix it up a bit, or perhaps tacitly accepting that most actors don’t memorize their lines all that well, and invariably mix up their performances from take to take.
Also, depending upon how many cameras the director has available, multiple takes may be unavoidable in order to capture different angles. When you’re filming a sitcom, you can get away with one camera, maybe two, to capture all the action. An hour-long drama, however, will typically involve a minimum of two, even three cameras for most setups.
In between takes, a director will either just let the actors run through it again, or they’ll intervene with some suggestions/changes. “Say this line angry this time,” or “Play the scene a little bit jokey this time.” They may also rearrange the cameras, reposition the actors, change the set, the lighting, etc. Basically, tweaking the raw materials.
What happens next is that in editing, a director can splice together multiple line readings and multiple angles using multiple voice and soundtracks. You can get a “scene” that never actually existed in real life, the scene you finally watch is an amalgamation of multiple takes.
Again, it’s up to the director to choose how they want to shoot it, and what they’re happy with. Some directors more than others have a realtime “eye” for this and can thus spot the moment they have a “perfect cut”. In the digital age, however, most TV directors (and I’m guessing many feature filmmakers) I’ve seen prefer to take a lot of cuts knowing they can stitch together something useful in editing.
As for film, some directors are legendary for their notorious use of multiple takes-- Michael Mann shoots miles of film, Stanley Kubrick was notorious in the number of his takes (hundreds per scene, usually), and this is one of my favorite Hollywood stories, about Jack Lemmon:
*His first day on a sound stage, with George Cukor directing, he’s all revved up. He rattles down half a page of dialogue – and then there’s “Cut!” and he looks at Cukor. Cukor comes up to him and says, “It was just wonderful, you’re going to be a big, big star. However… when it comes to that big speech, please, please, a little less, a little bit less. You know, in the theatre, we’re back in a long shot and you have to pour it on. But in film, you cut to close up and you cannot be that strong.”
So he does it again, less. And again Cukor says, “Wonderful! Absolutely marvellous. Now let’s do it again, a little bit less.” Now after ten or eleven times, Mr Cukor admonishing him “a little less,” Mr Lemmon says, “Mr Cukor, for God’s sake, you know pretty soon I won’t be acting at all.”
Cukor says, “Now you’re getting the idea.”*
One famous story of this occured during the filming of It’s a Wonderful Life. In the scene in Martini’s, Jimmy Stewart gave a phenomenal performance, with the perfect expression on his face, perfect delivery, and so on, but the cameras were all zoomed out for the wide shot. Capra asked him if he could do that again, for a close-up, but Stewart didn’t think he could. So Capra manually cropped and enlarged every single frame of that scene to get the close-up he wanted.
Moving to Cafe Society from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
And I’ve heard it as, “George, you can write this shit, but you can’t make me say it.”
Bill Murray is famous for ad-libbing most of his role in Ghostbusters.
Is it just coincidence that three of those four (Black, Williams and Carey) all have reputations for getting on the nerves of audiences?
It’s the other way around, actually. Sitcoms, or at least those which are recorded before a live studio audience, tend to be filmed with three cameras running simultaneously. This allows multiple angles to be recorded without the need for several takes. Most dramas, and some sitcoms, are shot with a single camera. Every time the camera angle changes, the camera needs to be repositioned and the scene reshot.
Your post strikes me as…odd. I have a prejuduice in favor of writers, of course, but the fact that the words are written by someone other than the writer does not mean that performers are interchangeable. Consider Brandon Routh’s masterful, subtle, humorous, and heart-warming performance as Superman, for instance, and contrast it with Christopher’s Reeve’s boring, hammy, cheese-filled rendition.
Anyone whose irony meter exploded during the last sentence should contact Customer Service for a refund, cause I ain’t doing jack to help.
It is actually very rare for films to be made up of almost entierly improvised dialogue. There are some directors who work this way, but they are usually the screenwriter too. What is LESS rare in film, is to have actors paraphrase dialogue. This happens all the time. It isn’t the same as the actors making up their own dialogue, and can be kept in check by any director who is paying attention. But I can see how many screenwriters would feel like actors make up their own dialogue.
I believe it, too. This isn’t quite an example of dialogue, but in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the famous fight scene between Indy and the swordsman was supposed to be really rough-and-tumble, with whip work from Ford against the bad guy’s sword. But Ford was suffering from dysentery and didn’t want to be in front of the camera any longer than necessary. He asked director Steven Spielberg if he could just shoot the guy. Spielberg agreed and scrapped most of the fight scene. When Lucas heard about it later, he was reportedly furious.
If only every actor in the Star Wars prequels had infuriated him so.
I’ve never heard Lucas was furious about this, though it does sound like him.
Do you have a cite for that?
Amen.
Huh? What on earth do you mean by this? Do you think acting doesn’t entail creating a performance and persona? 
I mean, sure, an actor could just stand there and give a flat line reading of the script, but it would be incredibly boring to watch and no one would find it believable. What do you think an actor’s job is, if not bringing in emotion and interpretation and three dimensional, human depth to the text on the page?