Acting in Film

and fired the shot. The sound technician had full volume on his earphones, and the sound of the shot nearly burst his eardrums. Ile went away and took a lot of aspirin.
    Don't get infected by the pace or energy level of another actor's speech. Sometimes underplaying can spread like an epidemic. Keep your own sense of the volume and energy levels you're on. This awareness will also help you to match your previous delivery during a retake because unless the director asks you to change your delivery, you have to be able to reproduce it again and again.

Accents
    Approach with caution. If you decide to use an accent, you will be bound to expend at least 50 percent of your concentration on that accent, sapping valuable energy that won't be available when the moment most needs it. If you possibly can, play a part in your own manner of speech. That's always preferable to adopting an accent, unless, of course, the accent is the performance. In Treasure Island, for example, Robert Newton made his manner of speech the entire performance, and it worked.

    BULLSEYE!
    Directed by Michael Winner. 21st Century Productions, 1990.
    Pictured witbSally Kirkland, Roger Moore, and Deborah Barrymore.

    And about British accents: it's not that Americans don't understand them; the real problem is that we speak twice as fast as Americans do. If you are British and do a picture that is going to be shown in the States, speak slower. I've trained myself to speak very slowly, and Americans accept me, even in an American part. I'm accepted in a Woody Allen picture set in Manhattan because I say "elevator" instead of "lift," "sidewalk" instead of "pavement," "apartment" instead of "flat," and I don't clip along at the British rate of speech. I use their phraseology and I slow down.
    It has always annoyed me that people think a Cockney accent is the whole performance. I played three entirely different kinds of Cockney in Alfie, The Ipcresss File, and Get Carter-totally different characters-but everyone said, "Here's his old Cockney performance again." No one says, "Here's Laurence Olivier's old Shakespearean king again." So I played a German in The Last Valley. I thought that the obvious trap was to play a German like a man trying to do a German accent; so I decided to play my character like a German trying to speak perfect English. I hired dialect records and listened to them non-stop for a few days. Then I put it out of my mind and tried to speak good English but with a German's basic speech pattern. I think it worked out pretty well.
    Another German accent was required for The Eagle Has Landed, but this posed an interesting variation. I needed two versions of a German accent. In some scenes, my character was supposed to be speaking German to other Germans, but the script was in English, so any "accent" had to be almost subliminal. Then in other scenes, the character was in England passing himself off as an Englishman, speaking what for him was a foreign language. For that accent, I invented a sort of brusque, clipped sound (which, I hope, was a fairly subtle solution).

Sound and Dubbing
    In British films, the sound technician tries to get rid of any extraneous noises on the sound track-for example, the noise of cutlery on a plate. He puts bits of putty under the plates and all that. The Americans just live with the clatter. That's because the British make talking pictures; Americans make moving pictures. We British filmmakers have a theatre tradition, whereas Hollywood was about 3,000 miles away from America's theatre center. In the wide open spaces around California, they first put Westerns on film, while in Europe we started out with Sarah Bernhardt doing bits from the classics. So an American sound technician says, "That's the sound it makes when you put a knife down, so we'll leave it like that." But as an actor, you can help yourself by not putting the knife down just when you say, "I love you, darling." And never shut a door or open a drawer on your own line.
    After a film is finished, you may be called in to do some post-synching or dubbing-fitting a new sound (such as a section of your speech) in place of what they've got. Maybe an airplane went over when you said one of your lines or maybe the director wants a different inflection. For me, post-synching is a laborious pain in the neck and a great deal of hard work that ends up diminishing my performance in those bits by about 25 percent. Dubbing always happens a long time after you've