Acting in Film

it is never overcome. In other words, screen acting today is much more a matter of "being" than "performing."

    THE IPCRESS FILE
    Directed by SidneyJ. Furie. Universal, 1965.

    Audiences themselves have had a lot to do with the changes in film acting. They catch on very fast to what is truthful and what is not. Once audiences saw acting like Henry Fonda's in The Grapes of Wrath, they tuned in to the difference between behavior that is based on carefully observed reality and the stagier, less convincing stuff. Marion Brando's work in On the Waterfront was so relaxed and underplayed, it became another milestone in the development of film acting. Over the years, the modern cinema audience has been educated to watch for and catch the minute signals that an actor conveys. By wielding the subtlest bit of body language, the actor can produce an enormously powerful gesture on the screen. In The Caine Mutiny, the novel's author tells us that Captain Queeg plays nervously with two steel balls in his hand. In the film, Ilumphrey Bogart knew that most of the time, just the click of those balls on the sound track was all the audience would need-he didn't even have to look neurotic.
THE CAMERA WILL CATCH YOU EVERY TIME
    The close-up is the shot on which film relies most when it comes to transmitting the subtleties of emotion and thought. It can give an actor tremendous power, but that potential energy requires enormous concentration to be realized. The close-up camera won't mysteriously transform a drab moment into something spectacular unless the actor has found something spectacular in the moment. In fact it will do just the opposite: the close-up camera will seek out the tiniest uncertainty and magnify it. "Drying" (forgetting your lines) can be covered up on stage, where the actor is perhaps twenty feet from the front row of the audience; but the camera will betray the smallest unscheduled hesitation. If a member of the crew walks across my eye-line, off camera, when I'm doing a close-up, I immediately ask for a retake. I may not have thought my concentration lapsed-the director may assure me everything is fine-but the camera will have caught that minute flicker at the back of my eyes.

    If your concentration is total and your performance is truthful, you can lean back and the camera will catch you every time; it will never let you fall. It's watching you. It's your friend. Remember, it loves you. It listens to and records everything you do, no matter how minutely you do it. If theatre acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.
    The scale of a film performance may be smaller than that of a performance in the theatre, but the intensity is just as great. Perhaps greater. On stage you have the dramatic thrust of the whole play to help you along. In film you shoot isolated moments, probably in the wrong sequence, and you have to constantly crank yourself up to an intense pitch of concentration on every shot. There isn't any coasting along in films; your brain is basically working double time or you don't exist on the screen. And you would be surprised how large a "small" performance can be on film, provided it is rooted in naturalism. But don't just stand there and do nothing; and it won't help to make semaphore signals the way you do in the theatre. Don't imagine that you do everything theatrically but just at a reduced pitch, either. You must be thinking every moment because the camera looks into your mind, and the audience sees what the camera sees. The real key is in your mental transmission. If the mind is in overdrive, the body is headed in the right direction.

LESS IS MORE
    I sometimes encounter actors who think they're going to steal a scene by being big and bombastic. Those actors are using their bodies and voices instead of their brains. They don't realize that in terms of voice and action, less is more. You see the great theatre actor who can't be bothered to come to terms with the movie medium. Ile probably needs a new Mercedes, so he's condescended to cope with a cinema gig between productions of Titus Andronicus. Now put the camera on him. Watch. Everyone goes into hysterics. The voice is too loud, the movements-famous for causing whole theatre audiences to gasp-now seem suddenly exaggerated and false. If I'm playing opposite somebody who goes into orbit like that, I just come in underneath him. I stick to the naturalism I believe in, and he is left up there looking pretty