Friendly Enemies... or I've got a boat load to learn...

I just finished my first pass through Friendly Enemies by Delia Salvi for my Directing the Actor class. Holy Mother! I don't even know where to begin. It seems to be a pretty good book, but I can't help but feeling a little bit overwhelmed and under-qualified after reading it. In writing this book, Ms. Salvi is attempting to give Directors a better insight into the Actor's process, thereby improving their collaboration and relationships and thus their performances. The first part of the book deals with the terminology surrounding the Method Acting approach, which, according to Ms. Salvi, is the most complete and practiced approach to acting these days.

I'm liable to trust her as my knowledge of acting is limited to my two years experience in the Arapahoe High School drama club some 9 years ago. I encountered terms such as Theme, Objective, Conflict, Needs (the "Why"), Subtext, Obstacle, Action, Beat. All of which relate in very specific ways to the actor's performance. I would just like to apologize right here and now to all of the actors I've worked with for Directing for Results. An example of this is: "Okay, John, I'd like you to cry when you say 'I'll never see any of them again'." I am as guilty of this as mud is wet. My only defense is ignorance. See the problem, from the actor's perspective, with Directing for Results is that you're telling them their destination without telling them how to get there. What I learned from this book is that the director ultimately needs to be sort of like mapquest. You need to provide your actors with a route, an approach, without spelling out where exactly they are going to wind up. Your directions must be good enough for them to get there. And if they're not, then you must come up with a different route. And this takes us back to the "Holy Moly! Do I have a ton to learn!" sentiment that I'm feeling right now.

The actor's "instrument" is composed of his/her body, mind, and spirit. Much like a great pianist can coax a whole universe of sound from their piano, so the actor evokes moments of emotional human truth from his/hers. And the director's job is to help them do this. Historically, film directors, for the most part, haven't devoted a lot of time to understanding their actors or working with them, because the machinery of motion picture making is so complex. Rehearsals, which are fundamental in theater, are often not employed in professional film productions. Ms. Salvi's great hope is to bring the actor and the director onto the same team and to redefine the actor/director relationship in filmmaking. I'm really encouraged that the Film Department places such strong emphasis on this relationship and these skills that they would have us take the course, from the book's author(!), right off the bat. After finishing this book, directing actors, and especially directing them well, has been magnified into a much larger responsibility.

I met this actress the other day, Elizabeth Ballard, while waiting in line at the DMV and we had an awesome conversation about a lot of this stuff and she was really excited to hear me throwing around words such as objective and wants and was blown away to hear that UCLA puts such a strong emphasis on directing the actor. Apparently, she's worked on quite a few films where the directors simply didn't know how to communicate with the actors at all and she expressed how frustrating it was. I was thinking to myself, "I'm glad you haven't worked on any of mine". A piece of advice she gave me which was echoed a few weeks before by Kelly, a woman I met at Jeff's wedding who has been an Assistant Director on numerous features was, "Know what you want." Well... here's to figuring that out...