Changing Direction: A Practical Approach to Directing Actors in Film and Theatre

Foreword by Ang Lee

Lenore DeKoven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351034449
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Regia e produzione cinematografica

The second edition of this elegant and accessible primer offers a helpful reference and resource for directing actors in film, television, and theatre, useful to directors, actors, and writers. Combining underlying theory with dozens of exercises designed to reveal the actor's craft, Lenore DeKoven discusses constructing the throughline; analyzing the script; character needs; the casting and rehearsal processes; as well as the actor and the camera.

Distilling difficult concepts to their simplest form, DeKoven explains how to accurately capture and portray human behavior on stage and screen, offering creative solutions to issues she has encountered or anticipated after decades of experience. Excerpts from interviews with acclaimed actors offer insight into their work with directors, what inspires them, and what they really want from the director.

This second edition incorporates the film Moonlight (2016, Barry Jenkins) for analysis of the directing concepts discussed.

1
Introduction

Some years ago I heard a story that I love to tell my students. It concerns the saintly Mother Teresa whose humane works are legendary. It is said that when she arrived at heaven’s gate, God was waiting to greet her.

“Welcome, welcome,” he cried. “We are overjoyed to see you.”
“Thank you, O Lord,” murmured Mother Teresa, bowing humbly.
“Dear Mother Teresa,” said God. “You have lived such an exemplary life.
You have done so much for humanity. You deserve to be richly rewarded.
I’d like to give you a gift. What can I grant you? What have you always
wanted and never had the opportunity to receive or pursue?” Mother
Teresa bowed her head in deep thought. When she looked up at God finally her eyes shone.
“Well,” she smiled shyly, “I’ve always wanted to direct!”

Everyone wants to be in show business. The media-driven aura of glamour and wealth is irresistible. A cab driver, aware that he was driving me to Columbia University, asked me what I taught there. When I told him I was in the Graduate Film Division he immediately wanted to give me a screenplay he had written. Many would love to be actors, but the obvious demands and risks are daunting. But directing! Ahhh, that looks easy. You tell people when to move and where to sit and stand, make sure they say the right words, pick the sets, costumes, and music, and, to top it all off, you’re the boss and everyone looks up to you. Or at least that’s the common misconception regarding the director’s craft. What follows is intended to dispel that misconception and introduce the reader to the true complexity of the task and an approach that offers the means with which to tackle it. Having studied with some of the theatre and film greats of the post-Stanislavski era, I have over the years synthesized—from the infinite variety of their teaching— a functional process and a concise language that I use to simplify that task and to facilitate the all-important collaboration between actor and director in a time-saving and clear manner.

Well, then, what is it that we do? What is the nature of this craft we call directing? If we attempt to express it in its simplest and most basic terms, what defines our craft? You will find as we progress that my effort is always to reduce things to their simplest forms or, at times, find the lowest common denominator. That is because our work is often so complex that we need to address it layer by layer. Let me caution you at this point as I do with my classes. Because our craft is a layered process I will present it as such. As you embark on this journey with me I must ask for your patience. The complete understanding of the approach cannot be realized until the end of the trip.

What makes the work so complex? Well, that returns us to the question—what are we doing? What do directors and actors do? I get many answers when I ask this question of a class.

• “We’re putting together elements to make a film or a play”
• “We’re telling stories”
• “We’re making a script come to life”
• “We’re communicating our ideas to the world,” etc.

Yes, all of these answers are true. We are storytellers and communicators. But what is at the foundation of all that we do?

We are recreating human behavior. That is basically what we are doing—even when it involves science fiction, animals, animation, etc.—as it all stems from us, from our brains, our behavior, the sum total of what we are as human beings. Well, you say, when someone asks me what I do for a living, I’m not going to say I recreate human behavior. After all, there’s a lot more to directing than that. That’s true, but remember, we’re attempting to break down this very complex pursuit into layers that we can gradually assemble into the whole result. But what are these layers?

One cannot recreate behavior unless one makes a study of it in all its multifaceted and fascinating forms. Indeed, that study is a dynamic and ever-changing lifetime pursuit. It provides the food of the creative artist, the resource and the reservoir from which the memory can retrieve what it needs for the process of recreation. And the study halls are all around us wherever there is humanity behaving.

As a young girl just graduated from high school and too young to begin college, I attended the Dramatic Workshop of the New School for Social Research where Stella Adler and Herbert Berghof were teaching acting. I had some notable classmates, among them the great Maureen Stapleton and the legendary Marlon Brando. We were all young and eager to experiment and learn and the environment of the Workshop seemed an ideal place to grow. But I remember hearing Brando talk about how the New York subway at rush hour was his real classroom. And Maureen would tell us stories about her day job at the telephone company. Both of these environments offered a host of opportunities to study human behavior.

The next time you are in a room full of people—a dentist’s waiting room, a restaurant, a party, or on public transportation— observe and study. What are people doing? They’re all in the same circumstance but is everyone the same? What are the similarities in their behavior? What are the differences? Can you tell what they’re thinking? Can you guess what their occupations might be? How do they relate to their environment? What makes some people talk to each other so loudly that they invade the space of those around them? What makes others seem to be attempting to shut out the world around them?

At some point during the first meeting with my class, I will shout to the group “freeze just as you are!” and then ask the startled students to look around without moving their bodies. Although they are all sitting in a classroom listening to me, each one at that moment is doing something different from the others. One leans forward, hands on knees. One chews on a pencil, head tilted upward. Another stretches out in his chair, fingers drumming on his notebook. What is making them behave differently? And how can we believably recreate this scene with all of its variety? Because that is what the director must do. In arriving at movement for either the stage or the camera the director must recreate the life of each and every character present in a given circumstance—must figure out in collaboration with the actors what each might be doing, why they might be doing it, and how they might be doing it. The choices will be based on the knowledge of the script and characters and an understanding of what motivates the behavior that might occur in the scene.

How then do we conduct this study? It is not enough to say we must observe. What is required of any creative artist is sharpened sensory perception—all five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—must be activated in order to fully realize the work implied by this very general word, observation. (You will find in Chapter 2 that exercises for the sharpening of sensory perception are part of the basic training of the actor.) Yet alas, our contemporary environment conspires to rob us of the very attributes we need the most, and even more so if we live in an urban area. Take the sense of sight for example. We look, but do we really see? We are hurtling through life at such a pace in the ever-growing quest for creature necessities and comforts and the fulfillment of goals and dreams that we are forced to overlook most of the visual information we receive on a moment-to-moment basis.

An experiment that I often try on a new class always bears this out. It is usually a room containing about 12 people and after about an hour together I ask one individual to turn his or her back on us and tell us what each of us is wearing that day, in as much detail as possible. Invariably the response is something like this:

“Well, the woman next to me is wearing blue jeans and a tee shirt, and the guy in the next seat has on striped pants—I think they’re a sort of brown. And Mary has on a red blouse and a kind of loose skirt. Oh, and John has on really dirty sneakers.” (agonized pause) “That’s all I can remember.”

A vague and general response about clothing, which might be just as general about the behavior of those present, would not enable the director to recall the kind of useful information needed to make specific choices in the recreation of that scene.

Try this on yourself after sitting in a roomful of people for a while. How much are you seeing? And how much can you remember? Indeed we have actually trained ourselves to limit our sensory perception so as to avoid complete saturation and ultimate breakdown as there is such a bombardment of stimuli in our modern society. And yet detail and specificity are so important to our work and a functional memory for detail is essential.

Look at what’s happened to our sense of smell. There is so much pollution and proliferation of evil-smelling elements in our air that we limit our breathing in an act of self-protection. Thus, what is the first thing we do on a getaway to the country or the shore? “Aaah,” we say as we inhale deeply, perhaps for the first time in a while, “smell the air!” City dwellers have trained themselves to shorten their breathing intake so as not to offend their senses.

The loss of hearing in the current generation has been a topic of growing concern as the decibel levels rise ever higher. Particularly in the urban environment there is so much unwanted noise that we’ve subconsciously trained ourselves to screen out much of what we hear. In addition, we now have innovations such as the ubiquitous smartphone with which to aid us in that screening. Try this: Sit very still, close your eyes, and concentrate on hearing everything you possibly can. You will be surprised by what sounds emerge that you hadn’t even noticed before.

Sadly, even our sense of taste has been compromised. Because of mass production and the growing use of chemicals in our food, our taste buds seem to adjust to the tastelessness (as in the wax on our tomatoes) by craving more spices and other exotic additives.

The first order of business in the process of developing both the actor’s and the director’s crafts is the conscious sharpening of one’s sensory perception. It is a process of reclamation; a return to the child state at which time your senses were still pure and uncompromised.

Watch a small child at play. See how an infant examines an object by touching it, smelling it, tasting it. It doesn’t matter where it has been or whether it is caked with dirt. There is no censoring, no inhibition, no repression. These are all learned responses that the adult creative artist must learn how to eliminate. Watch some of our most brilliant actors, i.e., Robert DeNiro, Judi Dench, or Marlon Brando in his early days. These actors have the ability to communicate an almost child-like, no-holds-barred purity in the way in which they relate to the world around them. Their simplicity and sense of investigation, probing, and discovery make us believe that we are seeing the truth.

The question that follows is that once having made this study of behavior, how do we then communicate our understanding, knowledge, and vision to the actor? How do we create a collaborative process that helps the actor make choices for the character? Ah, there’s the rub! This is the point at which it all so often breaks down. Because in actuality we have not learned the language of the actor and the actor often finds it necessary to translate our language into something useful, something he/she is able to do. Often that translation will be incomplete or inaccurate through no fault of the actor. Our early schooling provides us with a prose-oriented awareness of how to communicate. We tend to speak in sentences and paragraphs. We use adjectives and adverbs unsparingly in an effort to paint a word picture of what we want the listener to know. Too often these words are of little use to the actor. It is always a surprise to my students when I inform them that the course they are about to experience actually involves the learning of a new language. We must learn the language of the actor, which, you will find, is quite different from that to which you are accustomed and have used successfully all your lives.

In the chapters that follow we will explore an approach to the craft of directing actors that goes beyond the common misconceptions of the task. I’ve stated that it is a language course and that the craft involves a layering process. Chapter by chapter we will learn how to build these layers into the structure of complex human behavior that will tell our stories. As we progress we will also be acquiring a new vocabulary—a kind of shorthand of communication that will enable us to share our vision and get what we need with speed, clarity, and specificity, not only with our actors, but with the rest of our creative team as well. As with the learning of any new language or expertise, I ask for your patience and persistence. By the time you reach the end of this book you will have an additional set of tools with which to pursue this most demanding craft.

2
The Actor and Training

It is my firm belief that any director worth his/her salt should have a grounding in the specifics of the actor’s training. However, if you are a trained actor or a director who has experienced actor training, you might want to skip the following chapter and go right to Chapter 3.

In both narrative film and theatre the actors provide the means by which we recreate human behavior and tell our stories. How do they arrive at the choices they make to become the characters in the scripts? And what is their language, their vocabulary? If we as directors are to communicate with them successfully, we must have some insight into their process. That word process should be plural, actually, as each actor usually has his or her own modus operandi, developed as a result of training and/or experience. It is currently assumed that an individual desirous of a career as an actor will seek some kind of training. In the old days, actors were often hired, particularly in film and later in television as well, for their type or their look with little attention to any ability to act. It was often casting by persona or charisma or blatant sex appeal. Many of the famous stars of yesteryear learned on the job and sometimes sought training in midcareer as demands changed. But as competition increased along with the skill of plastic surgeons who can now make anyone commercially beautiful, actors realized that they needed acting skill and sought training as a means to developing their craft and sharpening the competitive edge.

In most cases, the training now prevalent in this country derived originally from the basic concepts put forth by the famous Russian director Konstantin Stanislavski. But like the old telephone game in which the initial word becomes something very different after passing through 20 listeners and repeaters, there are now many different versions and approaches to the training, many stemming from the original root but some altogether different. We will look into some of the approaches to actors’ training in the chapter on casting.

Exercises

In order to viscerally understand the actor’s process I firmly believe that directors should experience some of the basic actors’ training exercises. After all, what actors have to do is the same as what we as directors do on a larger, more all-encompassing scale: we have to recreate human behavior. And to do that we have to sharpen our sensory perception and hone our ability to recall experience. A dancer must maintain his body, which is his instrument, by doing daily exercises at the barre. Similarly, I believe that the actor and director must have certain barre exercises with which to keep sensory perception and memory functioning at optimum levels.

Relaxation Exercise

Unlike the exercises you would do in the gym to get washboard abs or tighten the thighs, these demand a specific preparation. You must be completely relaxed. And, while this sounds simple, I’ve found that it is extremely difficult for an individual to fully relax under most everyday stresses. Yet this is what an actor must do in what is sometimes the most trying of circumstances: in the wings before an entrance on...