The Science of On-Camera Acting Read online

  The Science of On-Camera Acting

  Andréa Morris

  with commentary by Dr. Paul Ekman

  Copyright © 2014 Andréa Morris

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Published by Becoming Media

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014914093

  LCCN Imprint Name: Becoming Media Production and Publishing Company,

  Los Angeles, CA

  e-book formatting by bookow.com

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to my wonderful family, especially my beloved parents and gifted husband. Thanks to my C.S. editor Joe, and to Steve Passiouras at bookow.com for his keen eye, artful touch, and for going above and beyond. Thanks also to the many fine actors I've had the honor of experimenting with over the years. Lastly, much thanks to Dr. Paul Ekman for his insights into the art of screen acting and his contributions to this book.

  Table of Contents

  Part I What the Camera Sees

  Part II Preparing the Role

  Part III Mechanics of Screen Acting

  Part IV Epilogue

  Part I

  What the Camera Sees

  The I of the Camera

  “What is it that drew you to study the human face?” I ask Dr. Paul Ekman, the pioneer of micro expressions who inspired the Fox TV series Lie to Me starring Tim Roth. Named by the American Psychological Association as one of the top one hundred most influential psychologists of the twentieth century, Dr. Ekman consults with police officers, FBI and CIA agents, and politicians. His research revolutionized our understanding of the science of facial expression and emotion. Most recently his work with the Dalai Lama was published in the 2008 book Emotional Awareness. With an enthusiasm that catalyzed a decryption system for the human face, he answers my question. “I just can’t think of anything that’s more fascinating. I mean, when you think of what the face does, it’s our primary signal-system for identity. It’s how we tell one person from another. We don’t do it by smell as other animals do. We do it by the appearance of their face, all the variation in their features and the location and shape that gives everybody a different look. That’s sort of a stage, and on this stage you have these expressions temporarily changing the appearance of these features. And then you have the primary sensory organs, sight, and hearing, speaking. So the face is an amazingly complicated and commanding system. We know from neuroscience research that there’s a very large part of the brain dedicated to dealing with the face because of this richness of information.” He pauses. “So I can’t understand why everyone isn’t studying the face.”

  ***

  Applying the scientific method to art lets us distinguish between creative processes that generate results, and those that are redundant, misguided, or worse yet, inhibit the artist and must be unlearned. The following principles applied to screen acting focus exclusively on what works for the camera and provide insight into the technological mediator between you and your audience, giving actor and director an understanding of what’s taking place in translation. Yet the uniqueness of each performance underscores the crucial fact that the scientific model doesn’t sterilize art. Instead, science dissolves the scaffolding of dogma and grants unobstructed access to a moment infused with impulse and creativity, where something seemingly irreducible and ineffable emerges.

  When applied to the arts, science offers conduits to inspiration completely outside its own analytic structure. Some may see science and the arts as a counterintuitive coupling. They are, in fact, worthy collaborators.

  The Science of On-Camera Acting is predicated on pragmatism and simplification. With that in mind, it must be said that an actor’s method is ultimately whatever works best for the actor. I personally define “whatever works” as whatever produces great on-camera performances and doesn’t make you miserable.

  I encourage you to experiment on-camera, testing this approach against others. I’m fascinated by how and why things work, but learning something that works is the chief concern of this book. The development of this method didn’t begin with an ounce of theory; it was all on-camera work, experimentation using visual, camera-based biofeedback. There was no time to invent actor problems. As you will see, almost every classic acting problem can be overcome in twenty minutes or less. This book isn’t about quick fixes for big problems, but if there’s a quick fix for a problem, maybe it was never as big as it seemed.

  * * *

  “The invention of the camera has changed not only what we see, but how we see it.”

  John Berger, author and BAFTA Award winner for his BBC series Ways of Seeing, speaking about the actor’s most important collaborator1

  * * *

  The T on the ground was bright-neon blue, taped to the linoleum only moments before, but was already curling up along the edges where I’d kneaded it with the tip of a pristine white sneaker. I was twelve, on the set of my first film. I watched as everyone involved in the production functioned like cells in a body, working together to bring about a rich sensory experience. In the center of the dither was a quiet, mysterious, mechanical eye, like the eye at the center of a tornado, its perspective driving everything whirling around it. I stared at this mountain of machinery with its silvery lens reflecting rings that disappeared into blackness.

  The camera’s eye seemed inscrutable. When sneaking in to watch dailies, what I saw on the screen differed from my memory of what we had shot just hours earlier.2 The difference between the actor’s perspective and the camera’s perspective of the exact same event raised questions that seemed important for someone wanting to do this professionally.

  One afternoon, I was strapped in a corset and other apparel from the nineteenth century, sitting in the dining nook of a trailer and listening to a science show on CBC radio. The guest was talking about how phenomena in our natural world that seem chaotic and haphazard are actually orderly; all it takes is a shift in our perspective. I wondered if the camera’s perspective had more to teach us than what most of us were paying attention to.

  Many filmmakers have found the camera’s eye beguiling. In his 1923 manifesto Kino Eye (translation Cinema Eye), Russian director Dziga Vertov wrote:

  * * *

  “I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I, the machine, show you a world the way only I can see it. I free myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects. I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies. This is I, the machine, maneuvering in the chaotic movements, recording one movement after another in the most complex combinations. Freed from the boundaries of time and space. I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I want them to be. My way leads towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus, I explain in a new way the world unknown to you.”3

  * * *

  Early on I was fortunate to work with acclaimed actors who shared numerous tips and insights, and I watched them integrate their creative impulses into the framework of a highly technical medium. The opportunity to engage with pros was invaluable, and similar expert advice is widely available on Inside the Actors Studio and various other interview shows, blogs, podcasts and news outlets. Yet, for the amount of time actors spend working to sur
mount the odds, there is sparse discussion about how to prevail over the monolithic barrier to entry into a field saturated with competition: The audition process demands that you juggle every kind of role in every type of project being thrown at you with only a day to prepare. It requires that you cultivate a tremendous amount of grit under pressure while staying open and vulnerable. And it demands you do all this exceedingly well on-camera. The standby cold reading and audition workshops are eager to address these challenges, and most offer theories with helpful highlights. Yet they ultimately come up short when applied to the daily variables of working and auditioning.

  * * *

  “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up…It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

  Pablo Picasso4

  * * *

  As a child I quickly learned that for most roles the choices were simple and fairly obvious. Be yourself. React honestly, in the moment, truthfully. No problem. I got that. I was a kid. That sort of thing comes easily for kids. But once in a while I’d get auditions for roles I couldn’t make work. These were instances where playing the “truth” of the moment didn’t seem to be enough. My agent said this reflected a lack of experience and the difference between an actor with natural instincts and a trained actor. I signed up for acting classes, attended a school for the arts, and lived in New York City in the summer while attending the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts youth program.

  In exact parallel to my creative education, any natural ability I’d started with quickly devolved into something muddled and stilted. The training created an out-of-body experience from the character, detached from its core, floating above it on the operating table, dissecting it with my mind while it lay there, lifeless. The paradox of working to improve skills and getting to use those skills professionally, while unwittingly neutering any creativity, brought on a certain level of anxiety that culminated in a wooden performance featured at a Toronto Film Festival Gala Premiere. It was an eminently unflattering teenage nightmare being played out on a fifty-foot screen for 2,630 audience members.

  * * *

  “I learned much more about acting from philosophy courses, psychology courses, history, and anthropology than I ever learned in acting class.”

  Tim Robbins5

  * * *

  Things went from bad to worse, but I was too stubborn to let humiliation stop me. In my midteens I relocated to Los Angeles where I’d only get callbacks for characters who were completely traumatized. I took a break from acting and enrolled in college, where my underused cognitive skills stretched their figurative legs and ran off some steam. Over the next four years I focused on philosophy and science, recovering from my acting training by forgetting it. Dr. Ekman’s work was featured prominently in psychology courses and offered a deeper understanding of the intricacies taking place watching a face in close-up.

  Philosophy of mind explored theories about who we are, and physiological psychology offered scientific studies that tested important parts of these theories. Then one day I was struck by a communication breakdown between departments. We were arguing the logical validity of a clever theory of mind in philosophy class, while neuroscience had abandoned it because it had been proven to have nothing to do with how the brain actually works. This departure from common sense—theory not keeping up with scientific progress—and the gap between the sciences and humanities6 made me wonder what impact this had on acting training.

  * * *

  “I became a scientist in my process…”

  Matthew McConaughey7

  * * *

  Chapter Endnotes

  1 Berger, John. Ways of Seeing: Based on the BBC Television Series with John Berger. (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1990).

  2 We’re becoming a little more familiar with the dissociative phenomena via daily photos and videos of ourselves on social media.

  3 Vertov, Dziga, and Annette Michelson. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

  4 Picasso, Pablo, “The Artist Pablo Picasso” www.theartistpablopicasso.com/pablo-picasso-painting-Les-Demoiselles-dAvignon.htm, accessed July 6, 2014.

  5 Robbins, Tim, "Tim Robbins Director - Interviews." Industry Central, www.industrycentral.net/director_interviews/TR01.HTM, accessed August 6, 2014.

  6 Kostarelos, Kostas, “I Have a Dream, that One Day Scientists and Philosophers will Join Hands,” theguardian.com, www.theguardian.com/science/small-world/2013/dec/19/scientists-philosophers-sciences-humanities-nanotechnology, accessed July 6, 2014.

  7 Whipp, Glenn, “Matthew McConaughey’s Advice for a Career McConaissance,” www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-matthew-mcconaughey-20131114,0,5190927.story#ixzz2rBzk1WhC, accessed July 6, 2014.

  Problems with Traditional Analytic Approaches

  If traditional training has served you swimmingly, then wonderful. As we established, the most important thing is whatever works for you. But if you find yourself relating to some of the struggles traditional approaches can concuss, it’s unlikely a failing on your part as much as contemporary training being out of touch with what science now tells us about ourselves. The birth of modern neuroscience happened around the same time the major acting approaches were popularized. What we now know about the brain is light years from what we knew when the field was first established. Yet the vast majority of acting training today is some derivation of older acting approaches that were based on misguided psychological tropes of their time.

  A reliance on language and concepts

  I am of the school of thought that the actor’s job is to serve the story and language of the script. Paradoxically however, the actor’s work is nonlinguistic. This distinction is often overlooked to the detriment of an actor in training. The standard model for teaching and learning relies on language and concepts, while evidence increasingly suggests an actor’s most powerful creative resources are located in a part of the brain that can’t process language or concepts. One of the biggest problems with the standard teaching paradigm’s reliance on language and concepts is that:

  * * *

  “When pressure-filled situations create an inner monologue of worries in your head that taps verbal brainpower, performing activities that also rely heavily on these same verbal resources is more difficult.”

  Sian Beilock, cognitive scientist1

  * * *

  In other words, breaking down a scene’s subtext, objectives, obstacles, and backstory, and memorizing lines, etc., all use concepts and language that draw from the verbal part of your brain. Yet your inner critic is also verbal, and draws from this same region of the brain, using up finite brainpower. When worries enter your brain and your inner critic starts chattering, there’s finite verbal brainpower left over, and verbal worry will push out the verbal work. Think of your inner critic as a rhinoceros and the analytic-acting homework as an aardvark. Both are competing to drink from a tiny watering hole in the sweltering Savanna. Who is going to get the water? Who is going to get squashed trying?

  Creativity and working memory

  It’s a common figure of speech, but ultimately it is misleading to talk about the right side of your brain as creative and the left as analytic. A summary of studies compiled by Scott Barry Kaufman in his review in Scientific American2 talks about multiple neural networks at play when creative juices are flowing. However, traditional training for actors tends to place emphasis on a central intellectual faculty of mind: working memory. Working memory is the root of our conscious awareness, our identity, the “I” in “I think therefore I am.”

  * * *

  “Working memory is that part of your consciousness that you’re aware of at any given time…It’s not something you can turn off. If you turn it off that’s called a coma.”

  Dr. Peter Doolittle, Virginia Tech Professor of Education Psychology3

  * * *

  Working memory
is how we focus on the task at hand, and also how we keep more than one thing in our mind at one time. Working memory holds high esteem in our culture. When your IQ is tested, it is your working memory that is being tested. Working memory is where things pass through your awareness, but it’s not where anything stays. Eventually new skills are delegated to more powerful areas of the brain, where feats both simple and great can be executed unconsciously. In other words, skills are delivered from your conscious and explicit working memory to your unconscious, implicit memory, where the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience says, “perceptual priming, contextual priming and classical conditioning for emotional stimuli” take place.4 Working memory is pretty remarkable, but our individual capacity for working memory varies between weak and extremely weak. It used to be believed that working memory allows most of us to hold up to seven things in our head at one time, but neuroimaging now suggests it’s more like four.5 Think of the majesty and weakness of working memory like the majesty and fragility of a hummingbird. Hummingbirds are almost chimerical creatures, able to hover in the air with their tiny wings batting seventy times per second, but they’re also quite fragile.