How to Direct The Actor |The Paradox of Acting

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How To Direct The Actor & The Paradox of Acting

The film school within Tisch has a course entitled “Directing the Actor” in which directors choose a scene to workshop, cast the scene and bring in the actors twice throughout the semester to run mock rehearsals in front of the class and professor, who then give feedback after the rehearsal regarding what techniques worked, what didn’t work, what the difficulties were, etc. The goals are to teach the directing students about the actor-director relationship and provide the student director with strategies on how to speak to actors beforehand and on set. They start off reading 5-6 books, starting with Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares, Judith Weston’s Directing Actors, Uta Hagen Respect for Acting and Meisner Adler and Strasberg methodology.

I few weeks ago, I auditioned to be one of the actors. I was accepted and I found the experience quite eye opening.

At 3:15pm, the director and the other actor and I were called into the room, walked to a table in the front of the room and started to rehearse.

We read through the scene and then talked about the first “beat.” And then we did it again, but this time I did it on my feet. We then talked a bit more, clarifying what was going on. It was the first time this was really useful for me because the direction was geared, up to that point, to “cleaning” up some of the beats or parts, making them more clear. The “actor” really does need an outside eye for this – you can’t “act”/rehearse AND “evaluate” at the same time how a whole multi-actor scene is going. You clearly need a director for this.

The Paradox of Acting

Then it got very interesting. After we started working more, and I was just taking it slow, trying as best I could to not “perform” but really discover, the discussion about the “beats” became more and more detailed, along the lines of ‘what are doing,’ ‘what’s going on at this or that point,’ etc.

The professor, Denny Lawrence, then stepped in to comment saying all the questions and details were great, but the danger or mistake was asking the actor how they felt about things before they got there. He said things like “she can’t know how she feels about that until that thing happens.” It was important not to try to go for a specific result, especially too soon. Actors, he said, need time to discover what’s going on and rehearsals shouldn’t’ get ahead of where they are at any one moment. (It’s easy for the actor on their own to do this, because they know what they’re going to say next. This is one of the paradoxes of acting: you know what’s coming, what you’re going to say next, but you’re attention cannot be on what’s coming, on what you’re going to say next — great acting looks and sounds like the actor is just finding the words he or she needs in the moment).

This is something Deborah Carlson of Word of Mouth Studio first pointed out to me over two years ago now, and I’m amazed that I keep hearing the same advice from experienced professional directors and other experienced professional actors.

It’s fundamental, and it’s at the heart of creating a performance that’s “moment to moment.” Famed acting teaching (and now also a director), Pasty Rodenburg, makes almost the identical point in this rehearsal, i.e., she says: She doesn’t know she falling in love until she does. She’s just working it out:

I’ve worked with many directors, most relatively inexperienced, just learning, learning through “doing” it, just the way I’m trying to learn acting by acting, and most inexperienced directors I’ve found don’t quite get this. They either have an idea of what the “character” is doing/feeling before they get into rehearsal or they want the actor to quickly decide on some specific actions and intentions, and then they want to “see” those specific actions or intentions (or something better than what the actor-director decided on), and it’s an approach that puts the cart before the house.

If one is working correctly, each moment unfolds out of the next, and the “intentions” and “actions” and “feelings” are all there but not because you or the director has decided what they should be beforehand, even if those decisions turn out ultimately to be correct. That’s not the point of rehearsal. If your goals in a performance are specific “intentions” or actions at specific points, your attention almost necessarily has to be forward in time, in anticipation; it has to be “there,” on that “target,” ahead of yourself, were you are right now — and that’s not the job.

Holland Taylor talks about good and bad directors, and says the worse directors sees the actor as something to move around and wants some end result without having any idea of the process that creates those results: