Meaning of "What's my motivation?"

[DKW]

I’ve seen this a number of times in various guises. As far as I can tell, it’s something an actor asks, but what the heck does it mean? The best I could come up with was “How do I do this?”; basically a request for guidance.

[HPL]

Sounds like just what it means.

Probably the actor is confused what the motivation the character has for acting this way. If the character is angry, why is the character angry?

At least, that’s what my take is. I’ve never worked in film or theater, but it’s a question that comes up when I’m writing a story or something. “Why is this character acting like this?”

[Horatio_Hellpop]

Sometimes actors’ scripts don’t have the entire script, just their character’s lines and cues. Seeing a line of dialogue for the first time, the context isn’t always clear, and there are many ways to read any given line.

[brianmelendez]

The question, “What’s my motivation,” invokes a school of acting known as “Method” acting, sometimes called the “Stanislavski Method” after its originator Konstantin Stanislavski, in which the actor steps into and becomes the character being portrayed:

What exactly do actors contribute to film artistry, and how do they do it? Lee Strasberg (1899-1982), a teacher and theorist of acting and a leader of the Actors Studio, suggested that the most effective film performers were those who did not act. “They try not to act but to be themselves, to respond or react,” he said. This may be a debatable proposition in the sense that performers’ images and roles are invariably constructed by such factors as studio publicity and genre codes, but it does relate to a central tenet of the Stanislavski Method: actors were not to emote in the traditional manner of stage conventions, but to speak and gesture in a manner one would use in private life. Konstantin Stanislavski, who was, director at the Moscow Art Theater, wrote a number of books on acting, the first of which, An Actor Prepares, was published in English translation in 1936. Before then, however, one of his students, Richard Boleslawsky (1889-1937), opened an acting school in New York and began teaching Stanislavskian principles (Boleslavsky went on to Hollywood and directed a number of films in the 1930s).

. . . .

After World War II, in the context of the Actors Studio, the Stanislavski Method was shorn of its radical Political connotations (the Group Theater became a particular target of anticommunist investigators) and emphasized an individualized, psychological approach to acting–The “Method” required a performer to draw on his or her own self, on experiences, memories, and emotions that could inform a characterization and shape how a character might speak or move. Characters were thus shown to have an interior life; rather than being stereotyped figures representing a single concept (the villain, the heroine), they could become complex human beings with multiple and contradictory feelings and desires.

From The Actors Studio: A Look at Stanislavski’s Method.

[raygirvan]

DKW: The question has, to some extent, come to signify preciousness, as in the scenario of the bit-part actor who asks “What’s my motivation?” for a ten-second scene of their emptying a garbage can. And there’s the excellent Olivier/Hoffman story.

[FatBaldGuy]

When a movie is filmed, it is not shot in the same sequence you see it on the screen. Scenes are shot in an order determined by location, availabilty of cast, etc.

It’s not uncommon to shoot scene 3, then scene 37, then scene 95, etc.

If the actor is working on scene 37, he may need to know that his girlfriend dumped him in scene 36 (which won’t be shot for another 2 weeks) to understand how his character is feeling.