Two books on acting & more on performance value

Read two books on acting this past week. The first was "I'll be in my trailer," by John Badham, the director of Saturday Night Fever. Badham talks about working with actors from a director's point of view. You won't find anything about shots or camera angles here. You will find a lot about why actors won't do what you tell them to do and what to do when it happens and why you don't want them to anyway. Overall it's pretty instructional and the good, gossipy anecdotes make it a fun, quick read.



Also read "How to stop acting" which is written for actors by acting coach Harold Guskin. A lot of anecdotes about well-known celebs in this one too, but not so gossipy. Reading it made me realize how strange the craft of acting is... doing scenes, "taking it off the page..." What also seems foreign is Guskin's language oriented approach; for him, acting starts with the dialogue. But what about our film where the dialogue comes last? The central emphasis of this book is to deconstruct acting, to make acting fresher, more process-oriented and improvisational. It seems like this would work better for someone with a strong acting background than a beginner.

It's intriguing reading about acting. I've written a lot about "performance value" in our film. This partially has to do with acting, but also about the interaction between performer, camera, props and a situation. I often wonder if my take on this is enough to carry a film?

It's also interesting that these acting books all have that 20th century, SO existentialist vibe to them. They're always filled with discourses on truth and being in the moment. I can relate to this from a directorial point of view. I realize that my problem with most visual effects is not the effects themselves, but with the fact that they are untruthful and poorly performed. A good example would be the butterfly scene in the Japanese film Casshern. There's a scene that caught my eye because it reminded me of our bird scene. There is a flock of butterflies that soars across the sky and into the windshield of a driving car (if I remember it right). But the scene doesn't ring true. It reads as an image without understanding, as a poor performance. I remember something similar in a book on Bryce, that old 3D software package. The cover was a beach scene with starfish in tidepools. The water was tropical green, but the sky was hazy, cold and blue. It looked like a mashup of northern california and the tropics. The problem here was that the scene did not ring true. It was another image purged of any understanding, context, history or experience.