Week 2 - Script analysis and working with actors

Today's session was extremely helpful for me as it clearly outlined what I have to do when working with actors (as the director) We started off by looking at Judith Westin's writings on "Result Direction" She makes the following points:

• Don't judge the character: If we are speaking to the actors about how the character is then that distances us from the character. The actor will already have preset ideas about how the character has to be and will act instead of react. They won't be able to feel emotion as the character because they will feel separate from it.
• Don't ask actors "Can you do this?" or "Can you play the character like this?" or "Can you tone it down? or "Can you bring the energy up?": It puts unnecessary pressure and stress on the actors as they are continually worried about how they are being perceived and are therefore highly conscious of their own actions, thus delivering a stilted non-naturalistic depiction of the character.
• Don't tell actors how the character feels or ask them to give you an emotion on cue: Again, this puts pressure on the actor and creates a rift between actor and character, when you want them to be one, essentially.
• Don't tell characters how to read lines, or tell them which word to put emphasis on: For the reasons stated above!
• Highlight the through line of the story, by providing intention and objectives: When actors are more focused on their motivations within the scene, rather than how to act, they are more likely to react and depict the character in a realistic way. They fuse with the character and feel emotions as the character does.
• Use transitive action verbs in order to do this: To portray how the character feels something as opposed to how we superficially see it being felt. Adjectives describe what is happening, whereas action verbs portray what somebody/something does to somebody/something else. There is an active element of DOING, as opposed to consciously thinking and then doing - which is the type of acting which adjective description spawns. There can be many action verbs for each line of dialogue as words and meanings are ambiguous and thus the line could be read and understood by the actor in different ways. THE MORE PHYSICAL THE VERB IS THE BETTER. USE VERBS INSTEAD OF: emotions, attitudes, judgments, perceptions of the character, criticisms of acting etc.
• Use facts, and don't embellish with explanation: When stating a fact it is objective, but when explaining it, it becomes subjective as it is your opinion and point of view. The facts of the story line can reveal much more about the character than explanations. i.e. explanation: she is very attached to her mother vs. fact: She wrote a letter to her mother every day. You can create imaginative back story facts also, to give the actor an idea of what the character does and to try to understand their motives and possible reasoning. You can also use the WHAT IF technique to add to the way an actor plays a character. I.e. in a scene where a teacher scolds a child, you may ask "What if he was subject to violent punishments as a child?" USE FACTS INSTEAD OF: Psychoanalysing character,  embellishing explanations, stating what character is like, judging character, attitudes. With attitudes, you should question the point or objective of a piece of dialogue, instead of merely accepting it as being said in one set way. i.e. the line "I already told you that" is likely to be read exasperatedly, but you shouldn't jump to that conclusion. Rather you should establish that there was a conversation(s) preceding this dialogue and it is up to you to question what was previously said, under what conditions, did character B who is asking character A about the information again, not believe character A? or not listen? or was she/he distracted? Facts and questions provide CIRCUMSTANCES that generate behaviour and imply a point of view.
• Create images by providing sensory (factual) detail: Sensory memories are powerful evokers of emotion and subtext. Actors drawing upon their own memories and emotions will translate well into the film, as they will experience very similar emotions to the character. USE IMAGES INSTEAD OF: Emotions, explanations. USE IMAGES AS: Imaginative adjustments. For example, a way to adjust the acting of someone you want to be more cheerful may be by telling the actor to react to everything the other says as if it's good news. Or use the AS IF technique. For example, you might ask the actors during a love scene to play the scene as if it were a business deal. You might make these AS IF instructions separately, to only one person in the scene so that the other reacts in an interesting realistic way. 
• Outline central Events: The events of the script are most important as they tell its story. They most unfold emotionally and filmically so that they are at once surprising and inevitable. They also tell the audience what the movie is about. The central theme needs to be truly understood by the director; every decision that is made needs to work towards underlining the central theme. EVENTs refer more to emotional events rather than incidences. You don't want to indicate the event, you want to make it happen and let the audience in on it.
• Provide actors with physical tasks: Giving an actor something to do, rather than telling them something to be, helps to allow the actor to concentrate what they are doing and thus essentially be in the moment. Their concentration on the activity could also represent their emotional problem - letting the lines/dialogue come out of the physical task. Concentrating on the lines makes a performance seem stiff, whereas concentration on an imaginative task such as a physical task, verb, fact or image, takes the actor away from the lines and into a created reality.

All of the above points work best as a QUESTION as it puts the onus on them to explore and develop the character. E.g. "Do you think she wants to pick a fight?", "What if you had kissed in the past?", "Do you have any impulse to run away when she says that?"

Cape Fear:

In this youtube video, Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Juliette Lewis and others discuss the scene in which Scorsese directs De Niro to put his thumb in Lewis' mouth in the scene- without her knowing. This scene is about a rather sinister older man (De Niro) who has designs for a younger girl (Lewis), and this singular act speaks volumes in portraying that sinister nature. They discuss how Lewis' reaction is highly genuine in the scene because she is shocked and is reacting in reality as well as in character. Scorsese said, preceding the filming of this scene, he rehearsed the scene with the two actors, but encouraged them to improvise away from the script, and then he altered the script with regards to how they acted. I tried to do this within our film, but unfortunately the actors seemed to merely reword the script rather than to provide something more naturalistic. In this short documentary clip, a woman talks about Scorsese's technique for recording improvisation, by placing to cameras - one on each persons face, so that if one is struggling to act realistically, a cut away can be used in the editing process, to the others reaction. I think this is a really good idea to use in our film, and is something which we will have to look into in the future. 

I will also really try to use the styles of directing mentioned above, and will try to avoid the less constructive methods. I especially like the idea of adjusting scenes in the way that was done in Cape Fear, to incite shock and reaction. 

Following on from the analysis of Westin's text we carried out an exercise in which we took a section of the script "Training Day" and went through each piece of dialogue, adding action verbs to them. We soon realised, when we regrouped, that we all had a mix of similar, yet different ways that each piece of dialogue could be acted/said/read. We then watched the actual clip of the scene that we had analysed and noticed that it was highly different to the ways in which we had collectively imagined it to be. In the scene two police officers are in a car together. One is new to the force, and the other is his superior. Within the scene, the superior cop pressurizes the other into smoking the drugs that they just took off of some teenagers. We soon find out that the superior police officer is a "bent cop". In this scene we portrayed the superior character as very sinister throughout, and the other as highly defensive, but in the film clip the superior officer began as being quite laid-back and humorous, and the other character seemed to feel at ease with him, until the scene progressed to the climactic part in which the superior pulls a gun on the other. This created a higher sense of juxtaposition, shock and tension in the scene and was arguably a much better way of depicting it. What was also highlighted more so, was the trainee cop "tripping out", as this is only mildly referenced in the script. This gave us a real insight into how scripts can be developed into film in a number of different ways.