How do they teach acting?

Cafe Society
61

Well, yes. I chose this example quite deliberately, with the intent of leading into the context you describe. First, because it’s important to understand that film is a director’s medium, not an actor’s, because the actor (with very rare exceptions) has basically no control over how the footage is cut together during editing. The experienced film actor is very conscious that he or she is simply giving the director and editor raw material, a variety of choices and nuances across multiple takes, and must trust that they will assemble a coherent performance out of all these bits and pieces during post.

Further, it’s true that Kubrick wasn’t entirely honest with Scott as to the purpose of these takes (though this has been overblown quite a bit, similar to stories of Kubrick “abusively” directing Shelley Duvall during The Shining, which are just bullshit). And yet, even despite this, Scott remains committed to the performance from a technical, professional standpoint. While he turns up the silliness as requested, he nevertheless stays focused on everything an actor must do, playing his circumstances and actions against the other actors. Just because Kubrick asked him to go hammy, it doesn’t mean he threw out his actor’s toolbox.

So, yeah. That’s where I was going with this, but I was hoping people would actually go watch the movies as I suggested before I brought it up. Oh well.

62

Do you think anyone can be taught to act to a somewhat credible level, or are some of us too self-conscious on just too awful that we would never rise above being part of a crowd shot?

My only frame of reference is community theater which can feature some spectacularly awful performances. On the other hand, they did get up there and do it. I auditioned only once and I knew as I spoke the lines aloud that I was embarrassing myself and I gave up all dreams of stardom at that moment.

63

My brief acting experience comes as a very minor role in a low budget movie years ago.

I had just one line. I don’t recall getting much in the way of notes from the director so I think he was fine with my performance. The closest was timing; I had to give my line then “recoil” which I improvised, and I guess he liked it because he had me do it the same way every time. (I remember I pictured a vampire recoiling from a cross or garlic and I was channeling that image which worked I guess.) But I had to change the timing between my line and action a couple of times.

Then he just had me do it again a bunch of times (maybe 6-8 I guess). And one of those takes was what went in the film. I don’t know which one because I felt like they were all the same.

I know that for a “real” actor you might have a bunch of alternate ways to deliver a line and even different dialog to try for a scene, and you don’t know which will get used in the final cut, if any (since scenes are cut all the time). The editor makes a movie or TV show as much if not more than the actor or directors.

A perfect example I think is this parody trailer for the movie The Shining:

Every single scene in that trailer is from the actual movie. Nothing is changed or made up. But through careful selection of particular scenes, narration, the way scenes are cut and stitched together, and the background music choices, it looks like a goofy, feel-good family comedy.

That’s the power of editing. That’s also how many “reality” shows craft a story that probably didn’t happen; you take real unscripted moments and stitch them together to create a narrative.

That’s sort of going off-topic but I do think it’s worth remembering. It’s almost like taking a musical performance from an artist, adding autotune and background vocals, and transforming it to be worthy of being an album track.

64

True with one caveat: when Nicholson is heard saying, “I’m your new foster father!”, that line is actually from the film About Schmidt (see clip here). But yes, every scene and straight line reading is from the film. There was a kind of trend back when this trailer came out to cut trailers or t.v. show intros to put them in another genre (stalker film to rom-com, action film to wacky comedy, or like this, a horror film into a heart-warming drama), which not only goes to show what can be done with editing, but also how little difference there is between these in what is on the page versus the interpretation of the director and actors. Pretty Woman was originally a pretty dire, Leaving Las Vegas style drama that was turned into a Julia Roberts vehicle with a few directorial decisions and a not-very-aggressive rewrite, and it is quite easy to frame Hamlet as a Martin McDonagh-style dark comedy full of misunderstandings and accidental deaths instead of the tragedy it is frequently interpreted as.

Stranger

65

Good catch, I missed that.

66

No, not anyone, not at all. In fact, some people can’t even handle being in the background. (Next time you watch a movie and there’s any kind of scene with a large population of extras, say like in a restaurant, ignore what’s happening in the foreground and note what people are doing at the other tables or whatever. It’s amazing how instantly you can recognize when someone isn’t inside the scene and is self-consciously trying to look like they’re acting.)

I’ve seen and been part of acting ensembles at all levels, from school through amateur to semi-pro and pro, on stage and on film, and there are people that just cannot, cannot, get out of their own heads, no matter how much you try to crack their shell of self-consciousness and get them to focus on the other person in the scene.

And this isn’t necessarily about shyness or nervousness, either. I once knew a guy who was pressed into service at his job, performing something in a company-meeting sketch; the other co-workers were predictably stiff and amateurish, but this guy had no stage fright, declaiming and booming with confidence. He got positive feedback, and he decided to try his luck in an actual community theater show. He was terrible — not because he froze up, but because he was fake and stagey, “putting on” a performance the way he thought he was supposed to, not listening to the other actors, hammily emoting inside his personal envelope. It was self-conscious because he was focused entirely on himself, watching himself, controlling himself like a puppet, instead of just being a normal human being, interacting with other humans in the performance space. The other actors hated working with him, and it ended up being an unsatisfying experience for him because he didn’t get the same accolades as before, so he never went out for another role (to my knowledge).

It was definitely an educational experience for me, watching him attempt to act, seeing how he was basically hovering above himself, looking down and operating his body and voice like a marionette, oblivious to anything the other actors were doing. It changed the way I think about “self consciousness” in an actor, and it emphasized for me the importance of the most critical starting point for any good performance: get out of your own head.

Some people simply can’t do that, no matter what.

67

Something I heard a while back was that the difference between you and Tom Cruise is: well, yes, that he’s going to be better than you’d be when they’re actually filming a scene, which is why he makes so much money as a movie star and you don’t.

But the other difference between you and him is: say they’re not ready to actually film a scene. Say he’s not in costume — and he’s reading lines off the script in his hand while he’s sitting in a metal folding chair, instead of standing up with a sword or a gun that he should be brandishing — and he’s interspersing his lines with a bland casting director, instead of getting to respond to someone who has Oscar-caliber talent: Cruise is still giving maybe 90% of a Hollywood A-List performance. Sure, give him a costume and props and a costar and he gets 100% of the way there, but he can pretty much bring the effect without that.

And the gag is, you’d maybe think that’s a spectrum, but it’s not; they added, IIRC, that some movie stars who can absolutely bring it on the set are nothing special at a street-clothes table read or a no-real-help audition or whatever; and that — on rare occasions — they’ve come across someone who gives 90% of a Hollywood A-List performance in that folding chair and without a great partner to react to, which (a) gets folks thinking he’s the next big thing, only he (b) proves disappointing when he then gives no more than that same 90% when it’s for real: that’s still pretty terrific, there are plenty of people who can’t even do that, but there are other actors who lack that guy’s land-the-role skill despite in fact having the nail-that-role skill he lacks.

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Sure, he’s a good actor. But I think it’s more than acting skill and talent that make a "movie star.’ You need enough good looks and charisma for people to love you. I have little doubt that there are many actors who are better than Tom Cruise and you’ll never know their names. I haven’t seen every movie he’s made but he strikes me as playing the character of Tom Cruise more than anything.

69

I think that works in many industries.

Look at successful music performers… They are often extremely attractive and come across as likeable. Being attractive and likeable and talented opens doors that won’t open if you’re only talented.

Look at star athletes. Even people who rise to the top in business or politics.

It’s not absolutely required. There are many character actors who aren’t extremely attractive and/or don’t come across as charismatic and yet find success. But most of the people at the top have that as well, just because of course it helps.

70

There was a clip in a Cracked article (I think), in which a gun goes off in a restaurant, and you can see one of the child extras cover his ears before the gun appears. (#7 here 15 Movie Extras Who Pretty Much Said, "Hey, Look At Me!" | Cracked.com)

71

And…politics.

72

Maybe in his most recent work he’s tended more in that direction but his rise to fame was very much predicated on his ability to disappear into roles and become a chameleon in a wide range of emotional registers.

Compare how different the Tom Cruise characters were in Top Gun/Rainman/Born on the 4th of July/A Few Good Men/Eyes Wide Shut just to name a few.

73

I would dispute this, actually. The cool cockiness he displays in Top Gun Maverick is pretty different from the shallow smugness he shows in Edge of Tomorrow. In the former, he knows he can back up his boasts. In the latter, he’s a coward who hides inside a shell of unearned confidence. The two performances are not interchangeable.

The energy on screen may feel superficially similar, because we’ve been watching Tom Cruise be a movie star for decades and we’re well acquainted with his bag of tricks. But he’s smarter than people give him credit for, I think, in terms of how he manages his screen presence. When he flashes his toothy grin as Maverick, you get the sense that he knows himself and his capabilities perfectly well, and he’s smiling because the other person is underestimating him. But in Edge of Tomorrow, that grin serves a totally different purpose — Major Cage is uncomfortable and wants to charm his way past a difficult moment. But Cruise cannily understands our familiarity with his Cruise-ness, and deploys that smile strategically, so we can see the character is full of shit but we can also see that the charm has been a successful strategy for him in the past.

Cruise may be a repellent weirdo in his personal life, but the movie-star persona he’s consciously cultivated is one of the greatest in cinema history, and it gives him more latitude as a performer than casual audiences really grasp, I think.

74

I did not see 4th of July or Eyes Wide Shut but from what little I know of those you make a good case.

75

I liked that movie and I think he very convincingly played himself as a total weasel, which is a departure from most of his roles I’m familiar with.

And in Tropic Thunder he was almost totally unrecognizable as Tom Cruise; literally due to prosthetics and such, but his character was not “charming” at all, just a raging psychopath.

This article talks about how that small, quirky role may have rehabilitated him to a public that had gotten sick of him.