Acting in Film

drunk keeps hitting his chest) because I didn't want Rita to see me drunk. I sat in a way that made me seem a foot shorter because I let my muscles go. Drunks are somehow small and rather pitiful. That Frank is a drunk is tragic, even though he appears at times to be funny.

GENRE
    Our lives are not comedies or tragedies or dramas. They are a fascinating mixture, an alchemy, really, of all three. You make a mistake if you pigeonhole a script in any one category because you then seriously limit your character. In a comedy film, "trying to be funny" is certain death. First you have to be a real man or woman. Then you slide on the banana skin, and then it will be funny. If you are a comedian sliding on a funny banana peel, nobody will laugh because you're not real. The history of the cinema is littered with great comics who failed on the screen largely because they weren't actors; they coud not be real up there. Jack Benny's funny routines never failed in the theatre, but initially, when he did his schtick on the screen, he died. The reason? He was being a funny comedian instead of being a real person to whom something funny happened. If you want to borrow from theatre experience in a film comedy, the best way is in the timing of laughs. In film comedies, theatre actors are especially helped by stage know-hove because they have a sense memory of a live audience's laughter. I time the laughs according to how the film crew laughed the first time they heard the scene in rehearsal.

    THE SWARM
    Directed by Irwin Allen. AIP/Warner Brothers, 1978.
    Pictured with Katharine Ross.
    In film, a character is a real person. You have to refrain from turning that real person into a type. Some early film directors like John Ford could get away with characters that became archetypes (the chuckwagon cook who is a drunk, for example); but to do that in the cinema today would risk an audience's disbelief. When you look for qualities to use in building your character, avoid the obvious approach whenever possible. One critic compared Educating Rita to My Fair Lady because in both cases the girl is changed when her mind and tongue are liberated by a teacher. In My Fair Lady, Eliza falls in love with Professor Higgins. It would have been easy to be seduced by the cliche of Rita and Frank falling for each other in Educating Rita; but I found none of that in our script. I felt very strongly that although Frank does fall in love with Rita, it's never spoken about and is totally unrequited. If the audience of Educating Rita had wanted to search for a prototype, the model might have been the Emil Jannings character in The Blue Angel, the sad figure who gets nowhere with the girl. It shouldn't occur to an audience (except maybe to an audience of critics) to look anywhere else for an explanation of a character other than in the film being viewed.

    When you are stealing details to build characters on, steal only what was real in the first place, not some dusty stereotype. Since I knew that the tannings character in The Blue Angel had a realistic ingredient for Frank, I stole some of that. I gained 35 pounds and grew a beard because there never should have been the possibility of Rita's being sexually attracted to this fat old drunk. But I suspect nobody noticed my Blue Angel steal because Frank wasn't the same as that character any more than he was the same as Professor Higgins. Frank was unique.
LOVE SCENES
    Speaking of sexual attraction, love scenes often present special technical problems for actors. There's a lot to cope with there, in addition to characterization. Every one wonders what it can be like to make love to a total stranger in front of a camera. Well, it might seem like a good idea to get together and break the ice before the actual shooting, but I think that way lies disaster. You're liable to start the intimacy the night before. Then halfway through the picture, you've split up, aren't talking to each other, and miles of film romance lie before you.

    THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
    Directed by John Huston. Allied Artists, 1975.

    I find the way to deal with love scenes is to be extremely professional about the whole thing: this is a job, this is what the two of us happen to have been asked to do-lie in bed naked-and it doesn't matter that we have never met before. Actually, you're rarely naked, but you do get into some intimate positions and, of course, you do kiss properly. My solution to the potential awkwardness is to joke about it a