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I used to blog as a movie critic on FOX's ON THE LOT. A movie interactive website that had mostly actors and film-makers. It had over one hundred thousand registered people before it was ruthlessly turned off with very little warning.
I got to know many actors and film-makers and my blog was featured on OTL.
It was a sad and bittersweet experience.
But I love directing and working with actors.
So here is one more essay....
Rehearsal is NOT about performance. It's about digging for information in the script so you can prepare to make a great performance....
Shooting is an extension of rehearsal: unpressured, exploratory, and free and better than rehearsal. A treat, an adventure...with everybody's best energy and concentration. It's moment by moment work, fresh simple, honest, and emotionally alive. No acting with a capital A. But you know something is happening.
There is spark, sizzle. Sometimes overt, but often subtle.
One thing that seperates good actors from average ones is how they handle the beats of a scene. A beat is the atomic unit of a scene. Most scenes have three major beats. Start, middle, and end, Some are more irregular with two, four, and maybe even one. I prefer the more irregular ones.
Each beat is broken up into smaller beats. Big beat A has a,b, and c. Then small a has mini a,b, and c. Mini a has mini-mini a,b, and c. The best actors master these subtle micro beats in their choice of playable tasks. Every line and even a single word becomes a riveting adventure.
This beat breakdown has a recursive pattern to it. Bigger beat waves being broken down into smaller beat waves. I define a beat by change in subject discussed or happening in a scene. not changes in emotional mood which I feel is not objective enough when trying to see where a scene is really going.
The smaller beat waves become gestures and subtle utterances....really tiny emotional events that ring rather LOUD.
Don't sweat it. This beat topography will come naturally to you once it sinks into your subconscious....this beat topography is embedded in nature. It's fractal-like in structure.
Scene A
A B C
a b c a b c a b c
a b c
You can go to more levels of smaller beats....but it becomes intuitve by then. It becomes a kind of performance fugue...
Don't sweat it!
It will come....
Every scene has a major emotional event and the smaller and smaller beats make up the intricate richness of this bigger emotional event.
When an actor digs deep enough and surfs these micro beat waves....
MAGIC Happens....
You want to watch that scene over and over again on your DVD player....
You are watching emotional discovery at its most absorbingly REAL.
It also becomes effortless....
Pax,
Michael
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