Judith Weston

Directing Actors

“Can you make it more quirky?”

Telling the actor what effect you want him to have on the audience is a perfect example of
directing by describing a result. Instructions of this ilk — such as “This scene should be
funny,” or “I need you to be more dangerous,” or “Can you give him an epic quality?” —
make an actor’s heart sink. The director wants him to do something different from what he is
doing — what can it be? From this point the actor-director relationship dissolves into a
guessing game, because the direction is so vague. The actor tries something — is this it?
Usually it never is, because the actor has begun to watch himself, to worry about how he is
doing, and what the performance looks like. It is death to an actor’s gifts to put his
concentration on the effect he is having on the audience. Describing to the actors the “mood”
of a scene or the movie falls into this category; e.g., sultry, distant, electric, etc.
Paradoxically, actors who try to play a mood can end up evoking exactly the opposite of what
the director was hoping for: efforts to “look” serious often produce an unintentionally
comical effect; efforts to “be” light and frothy can prove heavy-handed. This is because the
attention is wrongly placed; the actors’ eagerness to please you by coming up with the
desired effect has caused them to concentrate on the effort itself; consequently the effort itself
is the effect that finally reads. If you want the actors’ help in evoking a particular mood, you
might try instead an imaginative adjustment. An adjustment can be an “as if.” For example, if
you wanted a “chilly” atmosphere in a family dinner scene, you might ask the actors to play
the scene “as if the first person who makes a mistake in table manners will be sentenced to a
prison term. Sometimes very experienced actors have worked out sets of prearranged
adjustments that they can produce at will. They have a facility for coming up with a precise
mood or some other result on demand. Directors are relieved — the actor has “nailed it.” But
such facility can come to substitute for a genuine, moment-by-moment connection to the
material and the other actors. Actors call this “pulling out the old bag of tricks.” An extreme
example of an actor overusing her bag of tricks might be an actor typecast as a stock
character old maid in movies of the thirties and forties playing every role pursing her lips as
if she is constantly sucking on a lemon. If we want a performance of freshness, surprise, and
insight, we want to ask the actors for more than what is facile for them.

“Don’t say, ‘You always do that.’ It should be, ‘You always do that.’
This is called giving the actor a line reading, that is, telling the actor what inflection to give to
a line. For the line “You always do that,” there are at least four different line readings,
because there are four different words you can inflect: “You always do that,” “You always do
that,” “You always do that,” or “You always do that.” And the different readings make the
line mean different things. What’s wrong with giving line readings? Well, one problem is that
the actor might obey you, and repeat back the line with the new inflection but without any life
behind it. Of course it is their job to give it life, but sometimes the line reading makes no
sense to the actor; if he asks you what it means, you want to be able to do more to clarify the
direction than just repeat the line reading over and over. The meaning of the line, not the
inflection, or result, is what the director should be communicating to the actor. It is the
actor’s prerogative to create the delivery that conveys the meaning that the director wants.
The worst problem with giving line readings is that they may signify that the director doesn’t
really know what the line means, or what the intention of the character is, or what the scene is
about.

“Can you play him aggressive, but pleasant?”

You could call this the fine wine direction — “This character is frightened, but determined.”
“She is in love with him, but doesn’t want to hurt her sister.” “He is defensive yet
vulnerable.” “She is catatonic, yet curious.”
Directors think that by giving a direction like this they are calling attention to the complexity
of the character, but in reality they are asking for something completely confusing and
unplayable. People are surely complex, but they are not actually able to do two things at
once. They may say one thing while doing another. Or they may rapidly alternate what they
are doing from one thing to another. But that’s not the same thing as being “cautious yet
cheerful” at the same time. An actor can’t play two things at once. The two things cancel
each other out. Or the actor ends up faking one or both of them. Now, of course there isn’t
only one way of creating complexity in a character — after all, it’s complex. We’ll
investigate this issue more fully in Chapters on Actor’s Choices and Script Analysis.

“He’s a punk.” Or, “She’s self-destructive.” Or, “He’s a nebbish.” Or, “She’s a castrator.” Or,
“He’s stupid.”
These are negative judgments on the character. Judgment is the most dangerous consequence
of deciding “what the character is like.” If the actor is not on the character’s side, who will
be? No one is born bad. Characters get to be who they are because of the needs they have, the
things that happen to them, and the choices they make. The writer, the director, and the actor
together create a character who, like all of us, has both good and bad sides; they approach the
character experientially, placing him in a situation, allowing him to have needs and make
choices and not judging him. This idea is central to the artist-audience relationship. And it
applies to all genres of movies. Suspense is delicious to an audience. The basic posture of the
audience is what happens next? This is true even if we know that the hero is going to win, or
the lovers are going to get together — even if the movie is a “character piece” and all its
events are private and emotional. When the actor judges a character and telegraphs to the
audience, “I’m the good guy,” “I’m the loser,” or “I’m the villain,” he is playing a caricature
— who can care what happens to him? When the director directs by telling the actors: “You
are the hero,” and “You are the villain,” he is setting up a situation in which there can be no
suspense, in which the actors will be showing us the end of the movie at the beginning. This
is boring. The audience wants to participate in the emotional events of the movie, to feel
something happen to the characters right in front of them. This is more likely to happen if
there is in the characters some complexity and ambiguity. But, you may say, what about
comedy? fantasy? action-adventure? — where there is fun in the stereotypes and in the
certainty that the hero will prevail. Well, this is exactly why people say that comedy is harder
to do than drama, because you must have the style, energy, and special skills needed for the
particular genre, while maintaining the integrity of the characterisation. Even if you are
directing physical comedy or live-action characters based on cartoon figures, it is just as
important to find a central humanity to the character as when you are directing naturalistic
drama. The performances of Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman in “Batman Returns” and of
Claus Maria Brandauer as the villain of “Never Say Never Again” show that it is possible to
meet the demands of a genre movie without caricature. And of course serious drama loses
any opportunity for insight or revelation when good and evil are portrayed without ambiguity.
Villains portrayed as recognizably human are far more frightening than cardboard cutouts.
Heroes whom we see making choices and coping with problems are more appealing than
formula heroes. This accounts for the success of the movie “The Unforgiven”: Gene
Hackman plays the cruel sheriff as a regular guy who is doing his job; Clint Eastwood
portrays the hero as a man with many misgivings about the rightness of his actions. It is very
disappointing for a good actor to work with a director who judges the characters. It may
cause an instant loss of faith in the director or, at the least, a slow erosion of any chance to
collaborate and create. The director, in his preparation, should approach each character as if
he were going to play that character himself; he allows himself to believe in each character’s
reality. When he speaks to each actor, he takes the side of that character; he allows each actor
to prepare a fully realized character, allows the characters to honestly conflict with each
other, and trusts the script.

“Let’s give [this character] a hostile edge.”

I’m talking here about attitude, deciding the attitude, talking about the character in terms of
his attitude. People often think that deciding the character’s attitude is the way to develop the
relationships of the script; for example, deciding the character has a wary attitude toward his
brother, a tender attitude toward his sister, a hostile attitude toward his father, etc. This is
vague and general. Characters and relationships created this way tend to be generic and
formulaic. The very grave danger in asking actors for an attitude is that in attempting to do as
you ask they may start “playing attitude.” By “playing attitude” I mean the difference
between doing something and showing something. Playing attitude is playing at the character.
Playing attitude is analogous to talking at someone rather than talking to someone. When
actors play attitude they are posturing, they are showing us their performance. They are not
listening to each other. Nothing makes a performance look more amateurish than a failure to
listen and engage with the other actors. The first thing a director should learn, and the first-
last-and-always thing he should look for from his actors, is whether they are listening; that is,
whether they are genuinely affecting each other in the moment, or whether they are just
saying lines at each other, overlaying their words and movements with a predetermined,
canned attitude or unction. People confuse attitude with “edge.” Edge has become a catch-all
phrase. My impression is that most often when people talk about “edge,” they are referring to
something exciting and unpredictable. The way to create an exciting and unpredictable
performance is not by playing attitude, but by getting under the characters’ skins and into
their sub-world, and by setting up an atmosphere of creative trust and freedom where the
actors can engage and play off each other.
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When you ask for a general result, the worst thing that can happen is that you might get what
you have asked for: a generic brother-sister relationship, a clichéd villain, actors emoting,
posturing, telegraphing the dramatic moments and forcing the humour, with no connection to
the other actor or to the words or situation of the character. Most of the time when directors
give result direction or general direction, it means that the only ideas they have are clichés.
They haven’t gone beneath the most obvious, surface possibilities of the script. The choices
themselves are pedestrian and uninspiring. Whether your ideas are superficial or profound, if
you frame them in terms of result, you need to understand that you are asking the actors first
to figure out what you meant, and second to translate your wishes into something playable. If
you are going to give result direction, it’s very helpful at least to give the actor enough time
to make the translation, perhaps to mention, “I know I’m asking for a result here and you’re
going to have to find something playable, something that works for you.” If, on the other
hand, you want to save time on the set, it is vitally important that you spend time ahead of
shooting to prepare and to know your script and characters inside and out, and to learn how to
give direction in playable terms. It’s not just a question of vocabulary, it’s a different way to
approach a created reality. But I can give you a quick way to spot general, result direction in
the way you talk to actors about their characters: train yourself to notice when you are using
adjectives and explanations. First, a quick grammar review. Adjectives are modifiers of
nouns, and adverbs, their close kin, are modifiers of verbs. They describe the thing (noun) or
activity (verb) itself. Examples of adjectives are: happy, sad, seductive, angry, beautiful,
sweet, vicious, casual, bitter, abrasive. Examples of adverbs are: happily, sadly, seductively,
angrily, beautifully, sweetly, viciously, casually, bitterly, abrasively.