PRESENCE/PERFORMANCE: Directing Actors for the Screen

PRESENCE /

PERFORMANCE

Directing Actors for the Screen

Roger Tucker

FABULATOR

(London)

FABULATOR

(London)

FIRST EDITION

Roger Tucker © 2025

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

FABULATOR (London)

94 Liner House

London E16 2SJ

[email protected]

IBNs:

Hb 78-1-83709-111-

9

Pb 978-1-83709-

110-2

Db 978-1-83709-109-

6

World-wide Distribution: Ingram Spark

[email protected]

TO

my family and

LIFE BEYOND THE SCREEN

Foreword . . .

The book is divided into three main sections, with an Intro and an Outro.

The Intro begins by laying the underlying argument on the nature of screen presence and performance.

Following this, it surveys the current state of play in the theory and teaching of acting and directing for the screen. It then goes on to establish the essential element which underlies a production — that is, the director’s vision.

The first main section, Primer, explores the neurological, psychological, and imaginal properties that make the endeavour possible.

The second, Preparation, works through the period of pre-production from casting to the inauguration of the shoot, but with an emphasis on how performance for the screen is developed by the leading actors working both alone and in one-on-one sessions with the director.

The third part, Production, runs through all the stages of the actual shoot, focusing on the relationship between actor and director, both in terms of superficial mores and the deep melding of two imaginal minds into one work. In the final Outro section, there are two summary essays grappling with the elusive concepts of "The Star’s

Charisma and The Director’s Spell", followed by a list of sources.

Contents

INTRO

1. Premise: Acting & Acting-Out

2. The State of Play

3. The Director’s Vision

Primer

4. The Actor's Intuition

5. Knowing Me, Knowing You

6. The Magic If & The As-If Frame

7. Trance-Acting

8. The Actor & the Double

9. The Face in the Mirror

10. Into the Dream Space

11. Character as Subpersonality

12. Analysis Paralysis

13. The Actionist Tendency

14. Emotions & Emoting

15. Indicating & Actualising

16. The Flow of Experience

17. The Inside Story

18. The Actor Unmasked

19. Seeing & Being Seen

2o. The Chimera of Character

21. Being, Telling & Selling

22. Acting as Fantasy

23. Moment to Moment

24. The Actor’s Secret

25. The Actor as Artist

Preparation

26. Star Quest

27. Casting & Callbacks

28. The Read-Through

29. The One-on-One

30. Stalking the Character

31. The Imaginal Rehearsal

32. Interactions

33. Defining Moments

34. Finding the Spine

35. The Opposite Number

36. The Matrix of Feeling

37. The Dimensional Moment

38. Inscape & Outlook

39. The Object of Attention

40. The Inner Score

41. Tracking the Impulse

Production

43. Revision Reboot

44. Co-ordinating Expectations

45. Actors on Set

46. Blocking by Impulse

47. The Actor and the Camera

48. The Actor’s Process

49. The Director’s Praxis

50. Rehearse/Shoot Strategy

51. The Shoot Itself!

52. Director’s Notes

53. Beyond the Positive

54. Root Interventions

55. That Vital Spark

56. The Character in Person

57. Making Adjustments

58. The Mantle of Feeling

59. Tracing the Undertow

60. The Affect Trajectory

61. The Search for Meaning

62. Configuring The Moment

63. The Performance Edge

Outro

64. The Star’s Charisma

65. The Director’s Spell

INTRO

As an actor you invent things because of the

vision of the director.

No vision, no invention.

Simon Abkarian (245)

1. PREMISE:

ACTING & ACTING-OUT

– dreams and drift of a new epoch —

One does not go to see them act; one goes to see them be. (110)

James Baldwin

The birth of cinema marked not just the arrival of a mechanical, if magical, way of recording people and places, but soon, included the first visual record performances in the theatre of some of the most lauded actors of the day. The result something unexpected and quite new.

What first struck the spectator was, perhaps, what one theorist called the redemption of physical reality, but when it came to human presence on film, it was not just the faithful rendition of the physical that was so striking, but the spiritual through the physical.

Scenes from theatre of the day, when filmed and projected onto a cinema screen, appeared in a new light. It was not the human drama portrayed that struck home with the audience, but rather, the elaborate system of signs and gestures that the great thespians had perfected to convey the inner drama of the play to their audience that filled the deep, wide space in layer upon layer, of the theatre auditorium. Projected onto the flat, square, white screen, a performance that had once been venerated to those with fresh eyes appeared comic and often faintly ridiculous.

Soon to follow, the early filming of theatrical tableaux was the startling introduction of the close-up. This was done for the first time in a two-reeler called, The Lonsdale Operator, where D. W. Griffith cut in a close shot to reveal that, what, at a distance, had appeared, when held in the heroine’s hand to be a gun, was just a workman’s wrench.

Nowadays, we would call this type of shot a cut-in; however, the first real close-up came just a year later, in Griffith’s film Friends, with a shot revealing Mary Pickford’s puzzled expression over which lover she should choose. It was an expression of such subtlety that it simply could not be read in long shot, so Griffiths moved his camera in closer. Simple and logical as this might seem, it marked an artistic evolution from film as a recording medium for the portrayal of action to film as a direct revelation of an inner state of being.

The development of the cinema went in two-step with the simultaneous development of psychoanalysis. Whereas previously it would have been a gross impertinence to suggest that a man had any other thoughts and intentions to those he professed, Freud introduced the idea of an ever-present unconscious which harboured secret wishes that we would prefer not to acknowledge.

In similar vein, a man would rarely look deeply into another’s eyes and facial expression. Except those with whom he was in intimate relations, and then, only briefly and on appropriate occasions. Now, the cinema close-up invited distant strangers to peer into the depths of another soul. And so, a new level of intimacy was created between audience and

The close-up, the correctly illuminated,

directed, and acted close-up of an actor, is and remains the height of cinematography. There is nothing better. That incredibly

strange and mysterious contact you can

suddenly experience with another soul

through an actor's gaze. (131)

Ingmar Bergman

Among the acting fraternity, the idea soon took hold: that for work on film expressions had to be made smaller, as if the audience were only a few feet away and not the distance from stage to the back of the stalls. Or as Gloria Swanson, in character as Norma Desmond, in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, so unforgettably put it — I am big. It’s the movies that got small But, it was soon realised, that small alone was never enough.

Along with the development of psychoanalysis went an intense interest in hypnotism and the imaginary. Freud began his studies at Jean-Marie Charcot’s monumental institution in Paris. Le Saltpetriere, which gradually became focused on an exhaustive study of hysterics. These patients were described as having an illness with no physical cause. The symptoms were real, but the causes were imaginary. And this principle became the driving force of the burgeoning stars of the silver screen. They had no need to master the elaborate code of gesture and attitude, as practiced by the great Thespians of the day; they, simply, had to imagine the reality of the scene unfolding before them as the camera recorded every subtlety of their expression. This however, called for quite extraordinary powers of concentration.

There were plenty of complaints from the critics that the new movie actors were not acting at all. Indeed, they were not acting in the sense of acting out (or putting on a show) they were simply being before the camera, with a presence that was truly cinematic. Garbo, the brightest of them all, had simply been a department store model before meeting her mentor, Mauritz Stiller, appeared to be doing nothing for most of the time, but found the process exhausting and could not bear anyone to watch her other than those directly involved in the filming.

However, perhaps the closeup reached its culmination in Carl Dreyer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, in which every nuance of the narrative is carried by close-ups of Renee Jeanne Falconetti playing Joan, with wider shots used only for scene-setting or pacing. She was said to have been driven to emotional collapse by her relentlessly demanding director, and never made another film and is said to have taken her own life.

The great artistic pioneers of the silent film were, however, abruptly brought to a stop by the inevitable invention of the talkies. The new sound equipment was so cumbersome that, in effect, it reduced the movies to tableaux of smart talk. The 180-degree rule (where the camera is not allowed to cross the line between two characters in conversation) was equivalent to the re-introduction of the proscenium arch (where the audience was relegated to one side, while the life of the play belonged to the other. This, in turn, lead to, perhaps, the most icon set-up of the Hollywood studios — alternating over-the-shoulder matching close-eps. However, as the edge of a shoulder can give so much away, actors had to learn the discipline of exactly repeating the timing of the same action over and over again.

Before WWII had drawn to a close, filmmakers in Europe, deprived of studios, began filming in the war-torn streets, often employing ordinary people to re-enact their stories on-screen. Who could imagine living a life in war-torn streets better than those who had actually been there? This resulted in a degree of authenticity and directness that was quite shocking to audiences. The rhetorical flourishes of past performances suddenly seemed out of date, and the truth of emotion, rather than a false intensity, became the benchmarks by which performances would be judged. Directors, such as Roberto Rossellini in Italy and Robert Bresson in France, led the movement of stripping away the last vestiges of theatricality in favour of a cinematic truth.

The Hollywood studios, bustling with European immigrants, soon took note and began pursuing a parallel process but, ironically, to ta quite contrary effect. Just as the Neo-Realists had recruited non-actors from the street to play out their personal experiences on-screen; so, in Hollywood, potential players with charisma, but little or no acting experience, were chosen for their striking personalities and looks and then taught how to be themselves before the camera, while immersed in the fantasy of being someone else.

Acting coaches, such as Josephine Dillon and Sophie Rosenstein, were then employed to make it appear as if the story emanated from the actors, it was a return to an emphasis on presentation, but in a vernacular vein. Writers follow suit: it is well-known that the Hollywood studios were able to employ many of the finest writers of the twentieth century, men who knew all the literary tropes and stylistic tricks, but the dialogue that they wrote was quite distinct from what they had done before.

Konstantin Stanislavsky, the great contemporary guru of acting, had little or no interest in cinema. However, one of his early pupils, Richard Boleslavsky, was drawn to the new medium, and set off for America, along with another pupil Maria Oupenskya, well ahead of the master. While Stanislavsky insisted that his company, through exhaustive rehearsals, reach a group consensus, with the director merely giving an objective opinion, as facilitator, Boleslavsky immediately saw that in the movies, this would not work.

From the earliest days, a different practice had grown up: the director was of paramount importance and the actors had to learn to prepare for their roles in advance, working, by and large, without rehearsal, alone or in one-on-one in consultation with the director. As controller of the viewpoint from which the narrative was told, was seen to be as important to the film ass the personality of the dreamer was to the dream.

… your actual work is done in solitude — entirely inside of yourself … gradually, it will take you less time. It will be just like recalling a tune. Finally, the flash of thought will be sufficient … You will define the whole thing inside of your being (029)

Richard Bolesl7vsky

Psychoanalysis was sweeping the country. Stanislavsky not only knew nothing of cinema practice, but also claimed to know nothing of Freud and psychoanalysis. However, his drive for personal truth became entwined with depth psychology in the minds of his young audience, which included Lee Strasbourg, who would go on to invent, what became known as, The Method. After an extensive exploration of their own past, students of The Method were encouraged to substitute these real life incidents for analogous situations in the play. Often these were actually written in the margin of the play text as a kind of index. Students thus ended up acting, not so much the work in production, but a patchwork of their personal experiences.

Stanislavsky, himself, encouraged his actors to portray traumatic incidents by reference to events from their own past. In one class, the star pupil was Michael Chekhov, the nephew of the great playwright Anton Chekhov, whom Stanislavsky knew personally. After the class, Stanislavsky went to Michael and told him how moved he had been and mentioned that he had not known that his old friend had passed away. His pupil then let drop that he had made it all up and that his uncle was still alive. Stanislavsky was furious and promptly kicked his star pupil out of the class.

The young Chekhov, however, had made his point: truth in acting comes from the depth of imagination, not from whether the scene is history or fiction. in developing The Method, Strasberg made the same mistake, seeking to separate real life from the life of mere imagination.

The oftener and more intently you look into your image, the sooner it awakens in you

those feelings, emotions, and will, impulses so necessary to your performance of the

character. This 'looking and seeing is

nothing but rehearsing by means of your

Michael Chekhov This process we call The Imaginal Rehearsal — or simply shared dreaming.

In Europe cineasts started to study just what the studios had attempted to by-pass — the director as creative source or visioner of the movie. This was not just a theory but a politique. As a result, an astonishing burst of creativity followed which made the studios seem out-of-touch. In America, there was a counter movement away from the myth of the solitary genius, an ideal of free expression and spontaneity. This was sweeping through youth culture and beyond, with Action Painting, Living Theatre, Happenings and Encounter groups.

The name most associated with improvisation in American cinema is John Cassavetes, who did produce a startling new cinema, but not quite in the way he professed. We now know that, after the first (and incomplete) shoot for his first film, Shadows, all his movies were entirely scripted. What gave them tan improvised feel was that Cassavetes restricted his direction to the character and refused to give any indication of the way the scene should be acted. In our terms, he restricted himself to giving notes on presence, and none at all on performance — the very opposite of the way many directors work.

Cassavetes created the impression that his films were improvised by refusing to disclose the character’s inner score, leaving the actors in a perpetual state of uncertainty. This gave the impression that, as in life, they were inventing their response to the ongoing circumstances from moment to moment. It was acting in the present tense.

The modern screenplay is, largely, stripped bare of descriptions of a character’s thoughts and feelings, which can often leave the non-professional reader feeling all at sea. This is justifiably done to free reign to the invention of actor and director, working together. The director in the unrolling of his or her outer vision of the film, the actor on the inner score of his/her character.

To summarise, the actor’s job, above all else, is to bring home what it means to be alive in that place, at that particular moment in time. To achieve this, even to a modest extent, the actor has to be in a radically different inner place than the director. That is, not just to see the character, but to see through the character’s eyes.

Only when the character’s presence in the dramatic situation is firmly established is it possible for actor and director to move on to finessing the performance. The actor’s role is, first and foremost, to discover the embodied experience of that character and the impulse that will lead inexorably to the fatal action, that will bring damnation or salvation.

While the actor is living the moment in the first-person subjective position, it is the director’s job to remain outside, in the second-person objective position, to judge the performance taking shape before the camera.

When the two come together as one, together, the inner and the outer amplifying each other, presence and performance, time It is only after presence has been firmly established through the power of the actor’s visceral imagination that one can move on to finesse performance.

• It is only after presence has been firmly established

through the power of the actor’s visceral imagination that one can move on to finesse performance.

• The character’s experience is the province of the actor,

while the dramatic outcome in the situation — the result, the final outcome — is that of the director. he result, the final outcome — is that of the director.

• The actor’s job is not to tell/show/prove/demonstrate

anything, but to bring life to the moment — and so bring home what it means to be alive.

2. THE STATE OF PLAY

— what they teach and what they don’t —

With new technologies, actors have to

reinvent acting techniques. The techniques of the past don't support them in these

situations, where partners, sets, and

chronology have been stripped away. (052)

F. Emmanuelle Chaulet

The training of actors has, understandably, always been rooted in theatre practice. This largely consists of exercises, improvisations, workshops, rehearsals, and performances with their peers as the audience. These exploratory experiences are then worked over, stage by stage, in group discussions with the instructor as a guide. This has been idealistically described as an extension of play, with the focus on process and discovery, both of self and others, rather than on results. However, when student days are over, and they step onto a film set as professional actors, they will find that very different values rule.

Without realising it, actors apprentice

themselves to methods that can be more of a roadblock than an open door when it comes

to acting on camera. What we look for in film acting — and what makes stars — is an indelible sense of self and a clear worldview. (147)

Michael Laskin

A movie set is not an empty space where actors can indulge their whims and inclinations; it is a space that has been mulled over and prepared in the minds of many people over weeks and months, even years. Long before the actors are cast, the director is called upon to pitch his or her vision. (How could one cast if there was not already a vision?) Financiers and accountants will have been assessing the director’s ideas in terms of costs and returns. In low-budget productions, the director might even be required to produce shot lists at the planning stage and well ahead of meeting with actors. While objections will usually be met with reassurances that it can be changed later, these are generally understood as being internal changes, and the scale and reach will implicitly have been set by those who turn sketches into numbers. In high-budget pictures, where complex special effects and a wealth of digital processing time may be required, the demand for detail ahead of time will become even more crucial, and, at least for key sequences, shot-by-shot storyboarding is required.

Acting school exercises cost next to nothing and afford the time, and time again, to ponder, whereas, in a professional context, everything is measured against schedule and budget, and the director is seeking the most succinct and efficient way to communicate his vision to crew and cast in order to deliver the promised work. In this situation, those ploys often suggested in class, such as tossing questions back onto the actor who asked, can be not only a waste of time but an insult to the experienced professional who simply wants to know what the director wants. This is not the time for open-ended explorations, reinventing the story, or extemporising the theme. These things should already have been done in the actor’s imagination, in consultation with the director, before arriving on set ready to offer up their own interpretation of the role. So, there must be a clear distinction between training, preparation — and performance.

Almost all didactic talk about acting, in theory, and in practice, presupposes a lengthy system of rehearsal, over weeks and months and, in Stanislavsky’s case, even years. Understandably, it is through exercises and rehearsals that actors are taught, but this process is based on stage work. In work for the screen, formal rehearsals have always been a rarity, and now more than ever. Yet this does not seem to have been fully accepted by many of the writers of textbooks. For instance, Judith Weston’s major work, The Film Director’s Intuition (263), devotes over a hundred pages to rehearsal. While she accepts that industry finances militate against rehearsals, she seems to think that this is something that actors and directors should fight for as of right. She does not appear to recognise that many, even those much lauded for work in the theatre, prefer NOT to rehearse when it comes to working on film.

First, testimony from an Oscar-nominated and Golden Globe-winning actress who began her career on stage in London:

My biggest problems with films happen when a director rehearses me you have to know where you’re going to sit, where you’re going to stand, where the director wants you, where

the lighting man needs you to be, your mark, and all those technical things. And you need to have had some discussion or thought

about how you’re going to play the scene if it’s of any complexity. (But after that) … the best film acting seems to happen when the camera prints that first revelatory moment. (132)

Lynn Redgrave

And from a director considered to be a master of cinema whose films were noted for the outstanding performance of their actors.

In the film, you have to be very fast, and it’s important never to rehearse before. … You see, in the film, you have to work together with the actors in a very emotional, intuitive way at every moment. You use very few

rehearsals and, if possible, very few takes,

because the actor, when we are making or shooting a picture, he is absolutely open. He works intuitively, creatively, just in the

moment. If I want him to repeat what he has made two days later, he can’t. (131)

Ingmar Bergman

In stage work, rehearsals are commonly used as a vehicle for group-think, in which the actors, under the guidance and moderation of the director, move towards a consensus about the interpretation of the play they are going to perform. This was a process that under Stanislavsky at The Moscow Arts Theatre could go on for months, with the ensemble sitting around a table. Even in the subsidised theatres of the West, this analysis and discussion phase could last for several weeks before the blocking of the actor’s moves even began. There was a tendency for this to be taken for granted as a necessary practice because the director was only considered to be an advisor presenting an objective view and not someone with the overall creative authority that is today assumed by the film director. On a film set, the director’s notes are generally given individually and often privately to the key players. There is no time for group discussions or free play. The decisive authority of the director is the central pole around which the whole show turns.

It isn’t a question of who is right, but who is the director. (244)

Lee Strasberg

The one thing that seems to be most frowned upon by teachers is what they call results direction. This comes from a complete misunderstanding of the director’s role. The director’s domain is precisely that of results; the actor’s domain is that of process. Even swashbuckling directors, such as Quentin Tarantino, can be shy of simply asking for what they want. (249) This can result in the most ridiculous circumlocutions and convoluted instructions that do nothing but perplex the actor and waste time. While sooner or later, under pressure, most directors resort to confessing what it is that they want, all the while hedging it with quite unnecessary apologies. The actor’s task is to translate the director’s demands into their own private and intimate process, which is honed to produce the feeling state required for the performance. This is not something the director can ever do for them, nor should they try.

Now I want result direction. All I want to know is what result the director wants— I’ll do the homework. I’ll get the result. The interesting thing is that once I know what he wants, I

know there are possibly twenty ways to get the result, and the fun and delicious hell is trying to decide which way to do it. (046)

Jack Lemmon

Inexperienced actors, who are unsure of themselves, are often fearful of what they refer to as emotional mapping — which calls for specific emotional reactions at certain points in a scene. While the response of every actor is, in some respect, particular and different from any other, the language of emotions is universal and immediately recognised across cultural boundaries. It can, therefore, form an immediate and all-important, empathetic bond with an audience. A common expression in the acting world is that an actor is his or her own instrument; and, just as you would expect a professional musician to be able to play the right notes in the correct order, so a properly trained actor should, with due preparation, be able to express the emotion that is called for by the director and/or the dramatic situation. A feeling defines a state of mind; any feeling that may arise is simply not good enough. While there may well be room for personal variation, as in the jazz rendition of a tune, there are certain points where the emotion throughline is pinned precisely to events and where the actor must deliver there and then.

Real acting is about learning how to express emotions from deep within yourself, having a well of openness inside of you that can allow all kinds of experience and feelings to enter, and then you can give them back through a character. And the richer you are as an actor, the more colours you have on your palette,

the more areas you can touch to exhibit the infinite complexity of human behaviour, which is what acting at its best reveals. (270)

Henry Jaglom

In theatre circles, it has become almost an orthodoxy to focus on acting as doing rather than feeling. Where the social purpose of theatre in the community is considered to be its core purpose, this may be a liberating practice, particularly so in bringing fixed texts to life; but this is not an approach that is at all suited to being transposed to acting and directing for the screen. With the power of the close-up, a relentless externalisation appears lopsided and empty; a less demonstrative and more intimate process is needed. In fact, for the actor on-screen, the action is often less important than the feeling that may transform it. Indeed, in the editing process, the action may be eclipsed only to be revealed by its effect in the aftermath, while an emotional moment is far more likely to be extended and emphasised through chain reactions, atmospheric shots, mood images, and music.

The first time I made a film, the actors (or

rather actresses since there were only women involved) were no longer people — right from the first moment … More than anything, it was because they were speaking externally. They had an external manner of speaking that I had not expected at all … I love watching (actors) at the theatre and go there often. But it’s just not the same thing at all. It’s not the same work … (036)

Robert Bresson The cultural upheaval of the 60s, with its emphasis on authenticity and spontaneity, led to attempts to introduce elements of improvisation in on-screen acting. Acting students were prompted to listen to their scene partners and only react when something happened to spark a genuine reaction. By listening, of course, was meant the use of all the senses to observe their scene partner’s intimate reactions in minute detail. Again, this may be good training but is not the way anyone listens in real life — except in very particular situations of precarious uncertainty, extreme intimacy, or of suspicion. In general, people listen for meaning, not the exact configuration of words, gestures, and semi-autonomic reactions. So with on-screen performance, it is only in occasional and specific scenes where it is essential for actors to play off each other. In fact, under the exigencies of the modern production scene, partners might often not even be present on-set or are otherwise obscured by complex rigs.

You’re sort of acting in the middle of nowhere. You’re sort of acting in a bubble of nothing. But then I got used to it very quickly. And it feels natural. And you feel a real sense of achievement when you feel that you have nailed the impact of an image … It’s very different, and it’s exciting. (174)

Clive Owen

This idea of actors playing spontaneously off one another had the effect of rendering them no longer able to handle the continuities that the studios had previously taken for granted. Incredibly, it even led some actors to feel, during the shoot, that they were not being authentic if they exactly repeated a line the same way twice. This, in turn, often leads to a scatter-gun approach of offering up a bag of alternatives from which the director and editor could choose — instead of boldly putting forward their considered performance. Some directors attempted to cope with this continuity incompetence by espousing the jump-cut style of cinema verité and pop videos. Sometimes this was exhilarating; more often, it simply appeared clumsy and disruptive of the prevailing mood. Those directors wanting to avoid that were forced to go backwards and forwards reshooting to try to get a sequence that hung smoothly together.

As an actor, when you are on the set, with a structure around you that is so beautifully organised, that’s a great thing. Then all you have to do is be. I would have loved to have worked with Hitchcock. (177)

Helen Mirren

While the acting teachers rumble forlornly on, urging more time and greater freedom for the actor on-set, paradoxically, some of the best performances are done under the tight restraints of the storyboard. Despite Alfred Hitchcock’s professed lack of interest in acting — and notorious aside that actors should be treated like cattle — some of Hollywood’s strongest and most iconic actors, the like of James Stewart and Cary Grant, worked with him again and again; and some of those less strong, like Doris Day, gave him their very best performance. Even Tippi Hendry, who bitterly complained of his bullying and sexual harassment, still turned in a performance that she would never again equal. The explanation for this, I believe, lies in the ability of the storyboard to go beyond words in making the narrative so vivid and compelling that the actors instinctively respond to it in their own imagination. Why did actors love working with Hitchcock? Quite simply because he was a director with a very strong vision and, by means of the storyboard, was able to communicate that with what Frank Miller has called a fierce clarity. (174) Of all the books on the shelf offering advice on how to direct actors for the screen, the most dispiriting are those authors reeking of faux humility who seem to teeter from one foot to the other: on one side — how to pussyfoot around stroppy actors and know when you are beaten; and on the other — how to trick them into doing what you want while hiding behind fawning admiration. Indeed, the tyro director with real ambition better look elsewhere for inspiration!

For example, Mark Travis shies away from using the term director at all and toys with other possibilities, like facilitator or midwife.

"The ultimate goal of the director is to stop directing. By this, I mean we need to stop

trying to make things happen the way we

want them to happen. Stop telling your actors what you want them to do. Stop trying to

control the behaviour and the emotions of your characters. Let go." (255)

Whatever Mark’s ambitions might once have been, it is clear that he has since lost the plot. In a similar vein, the wistfully named Regge Life opts for the term sherpa.

"Sherpas don’t tell a climber what to do. Anyone setting out to scale Everest has

learned how to climb. They have to have

mastered climbing and accomplished more than the basics to even be allowed on Everest. The Sherpas rely on their climber’s knowledge of the rules of the mountain, so if there is an unexpected turn of events, they can react in

the Moment. In the end, the Sherpa’s job is to guide." (152)

Such self-abnegation will earn no respect on set. You cannot fulfil your role as a director if you are in awe of the actors or, indeed, in contempt. You must assume equal status as a professional requirement. Before the bathroom mirror, you may feel like an imposter and be as humble and wretched as your hang-ups demand, but when you step onto the set, you must put that well behind you. The job of a film director is not to be the actors’ midwife, or a sherpa. lugging their baggage up the mountain, or, to use John Badham’s epithet, the actor’s bitch (009); it is, first and foremost, to be the visioneer of the screen experience.

• A role for the theatre must be rehearsed, but for the

screen, where being is more important than doing, it is a different matter.

• The director, you must assume equal status with each

and every member of the cast as a professional requirement.

• The director’s domain is precisely that of results; the

actor’s domain is that of process.

3. THE DIRECTOR’S VISION

— centre pole of the whole endeavour —

Before I make the movie, I watch the movie. (250)

Quentin Tarantino

When I first saw Tarkovsky’s extraordinary film Stalker, I was immediately struck by it as a metaphor for the director’s process: an intense solitary man, The Stalker, is charged with leading his skeptical companions across a wasteland to a room in the ruins where, he claims, dreams come true. However, he argues that he cannot lead them straight there as that would expose them to great danger. Instead, they must trace a crooked path which he determines by threading a length of bandage through a rusty nut, whirling it about his head, and releasing it to trace a course into the distance.

The rusty nuts with their flare-like streamers mark the path forward, like the key images of the director’s vision. Arbitrary and irrational as it might seem, unless the route is followed — you are lost. The unpredictable breeze that rustles through the vegetation of the zone is like the stirring of the unconscious — it either reflects what you have been thinking or prompts you to think about what it will soon reveal. And the promised dream that may come true in a magic room at the end of the journey is, of course, the realisation of the work as it is assembled in the editing suite.

You see it and feel it and know it all at once… It’s like you turn on your TV and the first thing is a white flash… and it, kinda, comes on as an image, and then out comes a sound and a feeling… and you just see it. And all you’ve got to do then — is focus on that. (157)

David Lynch

Directing and acting alike are made possible through faith in the imagination — through seeing, hearing, and feeling what is present at first only in the mind. The process may begin with an inspiration of the director’s own or in the moment the director comes upon a new script, proposal, or hint of filmic possibility. If the idea takes, images will spontaneously begin to arise and combine; of strangers and half-remembered friends, of places old and new, of the interplay of darkness and light, of emotion, body movement, the tone of voice, of rhythm. It is only after this instinctive grasp of the flickering possibilities of life on-screen that analysis can be sketched out and practical plans made.

How else would a director begin than by paying attention to the images unreeling before his mind’s eye? The vision may sometimes appear to come whole and complete in itself, from out of the blue, but that is really never the case. In fact, a vision is nothing more than a shimmer of possibility that demands to be completed. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his study of the imagination, pointed out that someone may be convinced that they have a vivid image of The Parthenon in their mind’s eye, but if you ask them to count the pillars along the front — they cannot. (219) A vision is always just an intuition of something incomplete that leaves a thousand questions demanding to be answered. The blonde of which you dreamed may turn out to be a brunette, but the vision acts as a touchstone. The answer to any question must, in some small way, always clarify the vision, not cloud it over. And whether it does this is the test of the proposal in question.

... before the perception of the creator hovers a given image, emotionally embodying his theme. The task that confronts him is to

transform this image into a few basic partial representations which, in their combination and juxtaposition, shall evoke in the

consciousness and feelings of the spectator that same initial apprehension… (081)

Sergei Eisenstein

The theme or controlling idea (169) is an abstract thing that may emerge through deep questioning and act as a guide of last resort, but a film must surely begin simply as images, in sounds and visions of an imaginary kind. For the director, this embryonic movie will, necessarily, burst into flickering life long before any actor is cast, before any reading or rehearsal is held, before any budget or schedule is made. With love and attention, it will then grow in strength, through the buffeting of contrary wills and unruly happenstance, to pave the way forward for an entire production, from the first sketch through to completion. So, of course, above all else, the director must stubbornly hang onto his vision — to the very end.

What, then, are we to make of this tart comment by Judith Weston, a leading teacher in this field?

" … a director can become complacently

attached to his moviola of the mind — an idealised fantasy of the completed movie

which he stubbornly or wistfully runs over and over in his head. It’s not at all uncommon for

novice directors to mistake such fantasies for vision." (264)

A fantasy will soon enough come to grief on the rocks of reality; a vision will find an opening to break through to the fertile ground beyond — but only the director, deep in his gut, will know the difference. Many a tentative vision, exposed too soon to the light, has been prematurely written off as fantasy before someone came along to prove otherwise.

Sam Mendes has said that to do a film, a director must have a secret way in. Sometimes this may be a big idea; sometimes, it is just something small, something quite simple. But…

… it’s not enough just to admire a script; you have to have a way in that is yours, and yours alone. (021)

Just as the actors should be allowed their secret keys to the character they seek to inhabit; the director needs to keep the simple ideas at the core of his/her movie cloaked in darkness. To become workable, these concepts must be transposed into sensory images that beg to be seen.

The competent director conveys a singular attitude about the script, be it romantic,

violent, or victorious. The good director

conveys a more complex, layered vision of the narrative. The great director transforms the narrative into something surprising and

revelatory... Only the ambition of the director can elevate the audience’s experience. (066)

Ken Dancyger

Often the director’s vision will begin with a single key image, frequently from the off-centre and appearing to be quite trivial. Soon this will be joined in his imagination by another highlighting some salient, perhaps unexpected, characteristic, and gradually these points of attraction will multiply and spread out to form a feeling matrix in which the whole film will coalesce. Once set, these enchained images may seed the development of the movie from beginning to end, like an acorn to an oak tree, from first imaginings to the posters and promotions for the final film; and beyond. Indeed, these images may eventually