Acting in Films

Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making by Michael Caine
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a shorter book than I expected. Nevertheless, it has a great deal of valuable advice, especially for actors working in the movies. I don't anticipate doing this myself in the near future, but I do a bit of acting on stage (as an amateur) and some of what Caine says here is applicable to that. I like his basic down to earth approach, no frills, just good solid hard work. It's his professionalism that shines through in this book. Don't think of being an actor (a professional one, anyway) if you're not prepared to give your all to the time you're being paid to work.
He's helpful with learning lines, and with working on a character; while he's not a method actor, his 'method' is sound and useful. He's very helpful in making the distinction between stage work and screen work. There are still very good stage actors who get caught out when they first work in a movie.
The book started life as transcripts from a masterclass Caine did, which explains it's rather bitsy style. However, it's a good little book for actors, and I'm certainly glad to have come across it.

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Accident

One thing about picking up movies or TV series from the library is that you're never quite sure what will come to hand. There are all the common titles, of course - heaps of them - but many of those we've seen and don't want to see again, and others are ones we don't want to see at all.

So you have to take a risk, sometimes, and just go for something completely unknown, like the Soi Cheang film, Accident. Who's Soi Cheang? Well may you ask. His full name is Pou-Soi Cheang and he's a Hong Kong film director, assistant director, screenwriter, script supervisor, and actor. He directed Accident, and even though the fact that it's a film made in Hong Kong might lead you to believe it's going to be some cheesy, stunt-filled piece of fluff, it actually turns out to be a classy thriller. 

It has a sharply-written script that only gives away its secrets gradually.  It has a couple of truly surprising twists, and an ending that turns everything on its head.  As we watch we think we understand what's going on, and the characters themselves believe they know what they're about.  And then it all starts to unravel, both for the characters and the viewer.  

Primarily the film concerns a team of four, three men and a woman, who work together to produce accidents that cover up murders. These accidents are highly complicated and involve split-second timing to work. (In retrospect, they also rely on not a few coincidences, but let's not concern ourselves with that, as the film doesn't.) After an accident involving an unidentified woman at the very beginning of the film, we're led into a complex and puzzling sequence in which a man, held up in traffic, is killed in a 'freak' accident. We learn that he was a triad boss, so we don't feel too badly about his death. The team gathers together after the accident to debrief, and the young and handsome boss of the group complains about 'Uncle', an old man who has left a cigarette butt behind at the scene - which the boss has picked up, to avoid leaving any trace of the team's presence. This is the first indication that things might not be going well.

A second murder/accident is planned: a middle-aged son wants to get rid of his elderly and crippled father, who, as far as we can tell, has the son under his thumb, especially financially. The team don't ask why he wants to murder his father - that's not their business, although as it turns out, it might be wise if they did know. This second murder seems almost improbable in its execution, but worse, it turns into an even more improbable additional 'accident' that may or may not be an accident, and in which one of the team is killed. Is someone else playing them at their own game?  Is it the insurance agent the son keeps visiting over the next few days and weeks? 

From then on things get complicated, for the characters and the audience. Not complicated in the sense that we don't understand what's happening, but more in the sense that we have to keep questioning our assumptions about what we've been told. Cheang continually presents us with options - are we reading the story correctly? (There's a short sequence towards the end where we discover that not only are we reading things wrongly, but the main character is too.) He uses dazzling film techniques based on the best masters to present the story, and to continually undermine everything. 

Hitchcock is one model - there are Rear Window and Vertigo echoes throughout - but other more recent directors are summoned up as well. Cheang has learned from the best, and incorporated these lessons into a masterly style.  Cheang has been an actor in around forty films, though seldom in leading roles. He's worked as an assistant director on another thirty, and directed sixteen. The man is busy. Yet Accident shows no sign of a man in a hurry: every detail is important (though we don't always pick up on the details at the time) and shot after shot shows a director who has an eye for the right angle, the right framing.

Yes, looking back on the story there are things that are a little impossible, but in the course of the movie - as is so often the case with a film or a play, where we just accept that what happens makes sense - you take these events as right for the occasion.  The actors bring an intensity to their performances that carries us through the sticky bits, and visually the film is outstanding - another way in which we're distracted from any anomalies in the storyline.

By all accounts, Accident is one out of the box for the Hong Kong movie industry. It's certainly worth checking out.

Playing an unsympathetic role

In an article by Luaine Lee on actor Peter Mensah in the freebie paper that comes with the ODT on a Tuesday, I was interested to read the following quote:

Mensah admits it takes daring to be an actor. "Becuse the job requires that I put myself out there and just lay it open. It is a courageous thing to do for a living because you are emotionally bare at times..."


I'm not in the least taking the mickey out of Mensah here - he plays an in-your-face gladiator in the TV series, Spartacus. I agree that there's an element for actors in which they have to take risks, even in the most 'ordinary' roles. I'm still getting used to those first days of rehearsal when you're exploring the character you're playing and having to say and do things that don't necessarily come naturally to you. You have to get over 'yourself' and become something/someone else.

Curiously enough this can be even harder with a role that isn't particularly over-the-top, when you're playing someone 'ordinary.' The ordinary character can be harder to play because he requires less extrovertness. The person I've been playing in Shadowlands, over the last week or so, isn't particularly unusual, doesn't seem to stand out in a crowd (in fact, in the first act of the play he says less than ten lines all up) and seems difficult to play in any way but 'straight.' There are no quirks or peculiarities to him.

So it seems. However, it came to me during rehearsals that he's shallow in his Christianity, and is a surprising person for C S Lewis to have as a friend, because his narrow view of Christianity is quite at odds with Lewis'. I'm not sure how you play 'shallow.' Just speaking the lines doesn't cut it, and you have to find postures, gestures, and facial expressions that portray what he's thinking inside.

On Saturday night, after the performance, a friend who'd been in the audience said she didn't like him: "he's so unsympathetic." And while I hadn't thought consciously about this, I'd obviously brought this to the acting of the part. He is unsympathetic, and thinking about this since confirms that I'm getting hold of what's in the character.

Why I quoted Mensah at the beginning is because Rev Harrington (the role I play) isn't liked by the audience - and I was very aware of it once we actually had audiences. While other characters get audible response from the audience (and that's been the case with most parts I've played in recent years), Harrington doesn't. People will be thinking about how they react to him, no doubt, but you can't hear this, and it's rather isolating for the actor playing him. You have to trust your acting instincts and hope that what you're doing with the part is actually communicating to the audience - and that you're not making an absolute ninny of yourself in doing so. I think that's what Mensah is getting at.

By way of an afterthought: when I first started working on Harrington as a role, I was playing him sympathetically, as it happens. It's my natural default approach to a part, to find the good in a character, and 'enjoy being him.' And this isn't an impossible reading of the role, by any means. I was thinking through the lines again on the way home from the performance last night, and the part could be played this way, as someone who's a step behind the other characters he interacts with, and who's Christianity is still in a stage where he needs to learn some more depth.

But this would leave C S Lewis as something of a bully, because in a couple of scenes in the second act, instead of us having something of an argy-bargy about the issues, as we do now, Lewis would be trampling over the sensitivities of a lesser soul. And I don't think that would put him in a very good light.

Of course, Lewis himself could be played differently. In an early scene, Joy Gresham accuses him of using his intellect to undermine an argument she's making, and in the second act she talks of him being an 'intellectual bully.' This line isn't pursued in this particular production, but in an entirely different one it could easily be.

The fascinations of what you can do with words on a page....

Mensah on the left putting everything out there, and on the right in everyday mode.

The Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer - parody

You Tube and other sites becoming the playground of hundreds of superb filmmakers, people who love movies and can take them off, or provide short, snappy stories, and much more.

The one below is a parody trailer of all those movie dramas/thrillers you've ever seen, well-put together and looking as though there's some real money behind it, but actually made by a couple of film-school graduates in Atlanta.



It runs the gamut of nice hero about to get involved in things over his head, older woman character (actress who's been out of work for a while and has been trying out the latest cocoa butter stretch marks creams to improve her figure), heroine who does a lot of running away from things in the later part of the movie, oddball character who may or may not be autistic, and sundry other bodies randomly slotted in just to arouse the audience's interest. But there's much more slipped into place as well. Worth repeated viewings.
To see it in it's proper wide format, double click on the video to go to the You Tube Version.

I am a writer

I am a writer.
Let me write that one more time.
I am a writer.
My heart sings when I write.
I declare this is the truth.
The next step of the path is the scribbler's step.

From the 'dedication' page of Brainlash: maximise your recovery from mild brain injury, by Gail Denton.

These lines, which she heads with: Journal entry, April 26, 1993 (three years before the book was first published), apply equally to me, though maybe for the word writer I'd substitute the word, 'artist' which covers everything I do, the writing, the piano playing, the composing, the acting - the performing in general.

Thanks Gail, for these encouraging words!

Alec Guinness

A Commonplace Book, by Alec Guinness, which I discovered by accident the other day at the library, is a wonderful collection of quotes, odd dreams, poems, comments, wit, and a delight in life. There are plenty of wise sayings amongst them but in spite of that a few of the slight less wise ones took my fancy:

The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious opinions. Samuel Butler.
Guinness comments: I am tempted to add: the first two diminish with age and only the last is rigid.

Guinness tells a little story:
On our return from church:
Lapsed Catholic: 'Have a nice mass?'
Self wanted to reply: 'Oh, you know, the same old thing. The Real Presence at the altar, body, blood, soul, divinity of Christ, as usual.'

A quote from Sydney Smith, writing in the Edinburgh Review, in an article called, Catholics.
Little or nothing is to be expected from the shame of deferring what is is so wicked and perilous to defer. Profligacy in taking office is so extreme, that we have no doubt public men may be found, who, in half a century, would postpone all remedies for a pestilence, if the preservation of their places depended upon the propagation of the virus.

A quote from Matthew Arnold: It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself.

There are several other bits I'd like to quote - I'll just have to find them again!

Playing

Last year I took a small but important role in a full-length play for the first time in four decades. This year I landed myself a bigger part, that of Uncle Andrew in The Magician’s Nephew, the second of C S Lewis’ Narnia stories to be dramatised by our church.

It’s no surprise that we use the word ‘play’ for things associated with at least two of the arts: theatre and music. Being Uncle Andrew was like having the opportunity as a sixty-year-old to return to childhood, and to remember again how much fun it is to play – in what might be called a ‘controlled environment.’ Uncle Andrew’s a spoilt child, self-centred; a two-year old in adult’s clothing. I could put on his garb without suffering any consequences for his bad behaviour.
I loved performing for the audiences (physically exhausting, yet also energising), but I enjoyed the rehearsals even more. They were a return to that time of your life when you laugh without restraint.

At the rehearsals there wasn’t the pressure to get everything right. Certainly we did lots of serious hard work, making sure things went smoothly, fitting in with each other. But I don’t think I’ve laughed so much in ages as I did during the rehearsals themselves - and even more during the tea breaks. For some reason Lewis’ nonsense line, ‘Womfle pomy shompf’ (uttered by Uncle Andrew when his top hat is pushed down over his head) brought us all near to hysteria. (Though it never raised an out-loud laugh during the performances.)

There were the ‘deplorable’ words – or lack of them - and the attempts of the actress playing Jadis to find something explosive but incomprehensible that would do for a ‘spell’ to bring Aunt Letitia to her knees. And the same actress’ refusal to admit that in spite of her character saying she could see through walls and into the minds of men, she was not only singularly unsuccessful at this at any time, but remarkably dense about what the inept humans were up to.

Nor could she take her task seriously when she had to grasp Uncle Andrew’s chin, twisting it this way and that while she inspected his face for signs of a ‘real’ magician. Equally, as Uncle Andrew, I wasted long minutes of one rehearsal because I couldn’t burst in on Aunt Letitia and inquire ‘what on earth’ she was doing with the mattress, without collapsing in a heap. Those actors’ moments of madness you see at the end of movies don’t only happen to movie stars.

The boy playing Digory delighted in holding the fake guinea-pig (named Russell by the cast) like he was a wet sock, or giving him a goal kick into the stalls. Russell suffered much during the show, getting a nightly short sharp shift from Polly, who had to make sure he ‘vanished’ off the stage.

Digory also had a couple of ‘deplorable’ words. In one scene, the word ‘wondering’ always came out as ‘I should think a person would go on wandering all his life…’ It was rather like the mispronunciation of the TV3 sports newsreader (Clint Brown) who always calls the Warriors, the 'Worriers.' (And well he might!) Digory was equally unable to get his tongue around the line, ‘In an asylum, do you mean?’ Only the producer’s desire to keep to Lewis’ original text as far as possible kept her from substituting, ‘In a madhouse…’