Acting in Film

360 degrees of shooting all around the house-and not a soundstage set either; a real New York City apartment, a real house. We'd go in at 8:30 in the morning, block out the moves, and shoot at 8:00 at night because it took so long to light. Woody rehearses everything down to the tiniest detail; his camera becomes a microscope. His pictures may look as if they are ad-libbed, but they are brought to that point by solid rehearsal, rehearsal, rehearsal. On camera the flow of the work from a sense of rehearsal-without the pitch of a take-makes for very relaxed and imaginatively disposed actors. Other directors will break it all up. Like John Huston. Ile'd cut in the middle of a master because he knew in his mind where he wanted the close-up-he didn't need to cover himself by shooting a master all the way through. A less experienced director would want all that footage to cover himself in case he changed his mind later during the editing, but Huston was a master of his craft. His mind was probably made up before the shooting began.

    Brian de Palma has a bit of a chilly personality, but I admire him as a director and technician. So when he offered me a rathar weird horror film called Dressed to Kill, I figured this was a gamble that might pay off. He was very demanding, often shooting on and on until he got precisely what he wanted. I remember one nine-page sequence that incorporated a 360-degree swing of the camera and required 26 takes (a record for me); whenever we actors got the scene right, the camera didn't and vice versa. That one sequence took a whole day to shoot.
    Sometimes a director will insist on a lot of takes for reasons that have little to do with perfecting craft. There's a famous story that Jack Hawkins tells about the filming of Ben Hur. He and Stephen Boyd were playing a scene, and the director, Willie Wyler, kept saying:

    "No, do it again."
    The actors said, "What should we do differently?"
    Wyler would say, "I don't know. Just do it again."
    Two days later, when they were on take 150, Wyler finally said:
    "Print it."
    Jack blew his top. "That's the same way we've been doing it for the last hundred takes!" he said.
    And Wyler said, "I know, but the next set wasn't ready yet."
    Some directors are famous bullies. But a bully needs a victim, and you have to make it clear that you're not the victim type. Before I started work on Hurry Sundown, I knew Otto Preminger's reputation for picking on people. So the moment I met him I said:
    "You mustn't shout at me."
    Taken aback, he said, "Why do you think I would?"
    Calmly, I said, "Friends of mine worked with you on Saint Joan, and they said you shouted."
    He said, "You shouldn't make friends with bad actors. I only shout at bad actors."
    He never shouted at me because I'd raised the issue straight away. And I did learn from him how to do a long take in a movie-seven minutes long.

    HANNAH AND HER SISTERS
    Directed by WoodyAllen. Orion, 1985.
    Academy Award-Michael &ine-Best Supporting Actor
    Pictured with Mia Farrow.
    Don't think there aren't gentle directors, though. Carol Reed carried tact so far that in order to save an actor's ego he'd disguise the reason he said, "Cut." Carol always carried a nail or coin in his hand, and when he had to stop a scene because it wasn't going well or because the actor had blown his lines, Carol would drop the nail on the floor and say, "Cut. We must have quiet, you know. Now, since we've stopped anyway, would you mind doing it again?"
    Some directors will ask you to improvise during a take, an impromptu approach that can strike panic into performers who are afraid of the slightest alteration from the working plan, the merest departure from the script. But script changes are routinely made at the last minute simply because the writer just hasn't allowed for the physical reality of the shoot. You've got to be flexible. Directors do a massive amount of planning and homework, and if after all that your director decides to throw it all out of the window and shoot spontaneously, then you must follow his lead. You aren't working on an assembly line. A stage set is more like a trampoline. Even with John Huston's meticulously prepared script of The Man Who Would Be King, we were expected to improvise. I remember one scene where I was drilling recruits. Now these were all Arabs who didn't understand a word of English. So I really drilled them, making it all up as I went along. There was one spectacular incompetent in the front row,