Directing Actors--25th Anniversary Edition by Judith Weston

Author:Judith Weston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michael Wiese Productions
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

LIVING THE CHARACTER’S EXPERIENCE

Some actors create the character’s experience as preparation. Rather than imagining the experiences of the character or finding parallels from their own life, they put themselves through some part of the character’s experience themselves. You could call this another approach to research. Daniel Day-Lewis spent months in a wheelchair to prepare to play Christy Brown in My Left Foot. As did Eric Stoltz, for his role in The Waterdance. Steven Spielberg put the actors through boot camp to prepare for Saving Private Ryan.

Sometimes these activities are denigrated as “method-y,” but to me they are common sense. Said Michael Mann, “I’m a great believer that whatever the central activity the character is supposed to do in his life, that an actor should be able to do it, to really understand the character.” In preparation for shooting Collateral, Mann designed a program of target practice and close quarter combat to give Tom Cruise a sense of the kind of training he would have had in the U.S. Army Special Forces. This included exercises (under careful supervision by an expert) using live ammunition. Mann said this was important, so that when the actor is on the set firing blanks, behind the blanks is the sensation of firing live ammunition. “The real value is what it does to the actor believing in himself,” Mann said in his commentary.

Matt Damon has said that for The Bourne Identity, he boxed every day for six months, even though the character Jason Bourne is not a boxer, but a covert operations assassin. It was director Doug Limon’s idea that Damon should train as a boxer, telling Damon there’s “something about the way a boxer walks, a directness, an economy of movement—they’re on the front foot.”

In The Lives of Others, the character Dreyman has been presented, on his birthday, with the sheet music for Sonata for a Good Man; the next day, the friend who gave it to him takes his own life. The character Dreyman becomes seized by a compulsion to learn the piece. The actor, Sebastian Koch, as well as director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, felt it would be important for Koch to learn the piece himself. Koch did not even know how to play the piano! He took lessons. He practiced four hours every day. It was “a sort of meditation” that connected him to his character.

“You can really tell in a movie when an actor picks up an empty suitcase.”—Pedro Almodóvar

In the Volver scene in which Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) drags the body of her dead husband to the restaurant freezer, director Pedro Almodóvar made sure it was a heavy load for real. As preparation for Volver, Penélope Cruz spent time cleaning her house; she’d gotten “a bit out of training because of living in hotel rooms,” and realized that in order to play Raimunda, she had better know “how to move a broom.”

David Dobkin, director of Wedding Crashers, asked Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson to take dance training—not to make them look

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