Stage Acting Versus Film Acting (Part One)

“A more honest trade” does not necessarily mean “a better trade.” Film acting and stage acting are different, and arguments as to which is “better” are pointless. Each has its own requirements, and good actors are good actors, stage or screen. Some actors are at their greatest on the stage, others in front of the camera, and some work brilliantly in both. Stage or film, the Art of Relating, which is the ability to relate to another actor, is indispensable. How and to what extent you relate depends on whether you are in front of the camera or on the stage. Successful actors know how to adjust in the crossover between the two mediums (Stage Acting Versus Film Acting).

A friend of mine, who is a now a successful film actor, tells a story that when he was fresh out of college with his degree in theater acting, his first professional job was a role in a low-budget feature film. He determined to knock ’em dead. He studied and restudied the script, analyzed his character, an planned his performance and his choices line by line. As is the case on a depressingly high number of films, he got no help from the director. Later, when my friend saw the finished film, he was surprised and embarrassed that in most of his scenes he was not believable. He looked especially bad in the scenes he had rehearsed the most diligently and in which he had carefully made his choices. Why was this? He knew he wasn’t that bad an actor. He looked at the film several times to figure out why he came across as poorly as he did, and on the fourth viewing, he saw the light. He had prepared for and acted as he would have for a stage play. Here’s what he had done.

He had planned ahead of time how to deliver each of his lines. His ideas stifled his natural delivery and turned his dialogue into line readings. Because he repeated his dialogue the same way on every take, the editor had no choice but to use my friend’s line readings in editing each scene. He had planned how he was going to react to the other actors’ lines. As a result, his reactions appeared contrived rather than spontaneous.

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He had projected his voice and his actions. He was unaware that the camera and the microphone were the audience. He did not realize that the camera was capable of intimacy and would record his feelings and thoughts without projecting.

He had thought that what he said was more important than what he felt, with the result that he communicated the wrong information. Dialogue is less important than what a character feels or thinks. He had decided what emotions he should feel, and was working hard to express them, coming off as an actor “indicating” emotions that were not there. Without time for rehearsal, predetermined emotions can look forced and dishonest.

He had no idea that the camera was picking up his real feelings, which were nervousness and fear. The fear made him stiff and uncomfortable in front of the camera. At moments he even showed a nervous quiver. He did not know that, with rare exceptions, a character in a movie is the actor’s own self. He spent the entire movie trying to be the characterization of a policeman rather than just accepting himself as the policeman. He did not know that his job was to see and listen to the other actors so intently that he recognized their feelings and to say his lines intuitively according to what he saw and heard. He came across as an actor who was not giving to or receiving from any other character in the film. The overall result was that he came across as a stiff, scared actor who was not participating in the story because he was not relating to his fellow actors. His ideas created line readings and made his performance unbelievable. He looked like an actor covering up his insecurity with overacting.

PREPARING FOR A ROLE:

For a stage role, you spend a lot of days rehearsing everything you are going to have to do every night for the run of the play. You and the director block your movement and action to make sure you and the other actors don’t run into each other and that you always end up in the right place at the right time. Day after day, you rehearse your performance, your entrances, exits, timing, and stage business. You prepare for the reality that during the play’s run you will have to repeat your entire performance every night. For film, things are different. Actor Tom Hanks, in a TV interview, described how he used to spend the night before acting in a film scene by analyzing the scene, marking the key points, identifying the beats, making his choices, planning how he should do each line, and determining how he should feel and move. Then when he gets on the set the next morning, the director makes him throw out everything he planned, and perform by relating to the other actors. Frank Sinatra always refused to rehearse performance. Laurence Olivier said that in making the movie Wuthering Heights, director William Wyler told him to relate instead of “act.” Gene Hackman said he learns his lines by rote without any planning, not allowing himself any emotional reaction, so that during shooting he can perform according to how he relates to the other actors. Meryl Streep said she usually reads the script once or twice and then performs by relating to and dealing with the other actors. Steven Spielberg said in an Actor’s Studio interview that he never rehearses, because he doesn’t want his actors to “act.”

THE DEMANDS OF PERFORMANCE:

In a stage play you know what you are going to do from the moment you first step onto the stage to final curtain. You often work from the emotions of other actors, but the camera’s intimacy and truth are not always demanded of you. When the curtain goes up, there is no looking back. You must know all your lines, movement, stage business, and interpretations; and you are under pressure to carry through to the final curtain. Some nights you are brilliant, other nights not so brilliant, and there’s nothing to do but approach the next performance with hope, determination, and good spirits. For film, you are not expected to give a sustained performance for more than one shot at a time, and never for the whole screenplay. Restricted by costs, availability of actors, locations, and convenience, the director shoots her movie in separate chunks at different times and hardly ever in the same order as in the script. It is not unusual for the last scene to be shot first, followed by the other scenes, not necessarily in script sequence. The special character of motion picture production results in constant changes and altered points of view during actual shooting, so that director and actors rarely, if ever, rehearse for a sustained performance from the beginning to end.

“All the good things, in any film, were a series of accidents.”

-Robert Altman

ONE GOOD PERFORMANCE:

For the camera, you have to give a good performance only once, and both you and the director concentrate on getting that one good performance. You may get it in one take, or you may have to do many takes before the director decides that you have done the right one. Your job is to perform under the pressure of Elia Kazan’s “severe and awesome trial” of the close-up. Once your best performance is “in the can,” it has been immortalized on film and you never have to do it again. Unlike for a stage play, film audiences in perpetuity will be able to see your best performance. For posterity’s sake, let’s hope it’s a good one.

Your best performance in a film comes from living in the moment of the scene, which may or may not be what you or your director had planned or expected. You may or may not act the whole scene at one time, depending on its length and on how the director plans her shooting. It is certain that you will do several takes of the scene in close-up and from different angles. When a good film director calls “Cut and print” and then calls for an additional take of a shot you have just done, she is not looking for repetition, even though your performance may have been brilliant. She is making one more try for something that she hopes will be knock-’em-out-of-their-socks brilliant. In the film, not rehearsing does not mean not preparing or not understanding the story. When a film director says she never rehearses, she is referring to dialogue and emotional relationships. Both you and your director rehearse blocking and camera movement, but the real performance comes when dialogue, emotions, and reactions are fresh and unrehearsed and the actors face each other with the camera running. The stage equivalent would be if the cast were to do its first rehearsal for performance on opening night. You don’t see this in the theater, and I think you would be hard put to find a professionally produced play in which the first rehearsal for performance is on opening night.

PROJECTING:

In the film, you are acting for the camera and the microphone, whose only purposes are to record everything you do and say with relentless intimacy. Not until much later will audiences be allowed to see what you performed privately for the camera. My actor friend, unaware that the microphone and the camera were so close to him, had projected his voice and his actions. On the screen he sounds as if he is talking to someone on the other side of the playground. If he had been in a stage play, he would have sounded okay. In the film, his third-balcony voice projection while speaking to an actor standing fourteen inches away from him makes him look ridiculous. In a film scene, the camera and the microphone are as close as the lover you are whispering to, so you don’t Projecting need to project your voice and actions. To avoid looking amateurish, talk naturally and don’t project.

“The chief requisite for an actor is the ability to do nothing well, which is by no means as easy as it sounds.”

-Alfred Hitchcock

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FILM AND THEATRE CLOSE-UPS:

When you sit in the front row at a play, you are close to the actors and you can see them in what might be called a stage version of a close-up, but it’s not anything like a movie close-up. In the front row, you are aware of the actors’ loud, projected voices, their taut neck and throat muscles, and the tiny meteors of saliva streaking through the light. In contrast, a movie close-up shows you a quiet reality with its normal level of human interaction. It is easy to say that all you have to do in going from stage acting to film acting is to be what actors call “broad” in the wide shots and subtle in the close-ups.” Not true. In a close-up, you have to be not only subtle but real, because it is in those close-ups where Kazan’s “severe and awful trial” takes place. The camera sees everything and demands absolute truth. If you’re scared or nervous or angry or sweating even a tiny little bit, the camera picks it up. It shows your insincerity, your truthfulness, your nothingness, your involvement, your emotions. You have to be there. The camera sees what you truly are at the moment. Good film acting teachers try to teach you how to successfully face that trial. Film is a medium of images, and a movie close-up of you having an emotional experience is a wordless image even though you may be speaking dialogue at the same time. If you do not experience an emotion stimulated in you by the other actor and the circumstances, the scene dies. Your emotion, not your words, communicates to the audience what is really going on.

EMOTIONS AND FEELINGS:

What’s the distinction between emotions and feelings? There is no difference. Feelings are emotions. When you feel happy, you are experiencing the emotion of happiness. Feeling sad is the emotion of sadness. Your feelings and emotions originate in the right side of your brain and have nothing to do with the logic of its left side. You can decide what to think, but you cannot decide what to feel. That’s why big macho football players cry and apologize for it when they are inducted into the hall of fame. They can’t help it. When you are acting, your feelings have to be like that—you can’t help it; they have to come from your true reaction to the other actor and to the circumstances of the scene. “I’m sorry,” the football player apologizes at his display of emotion and tries to suppress it. You, the actor, must welcome your emotion and certainly never suppress it. You cannot fake emotion, but there are actors who try to all the time.

There are many working actors of the kind whom Constantine Stanislavsky called “mechanical actors.” Although there are many fine actors in television, we see a perpetual parade of mediocre actors who try to “act” emotions. Stanislavsky said the mechanical actor uses his facial expression, mimicry, voice, and gestures to show us nothing but a dead mask of feeling that doesn’t exist. “Indicating” means trying to express a feeling not from within but from without by using body and voice devices that supposedly represent some emotion or another. When you deliberately decide ahead of time to evoke a specific emotion, you can only indicate that emotion, not experience it. Sanford Meisner said, “you can’t fake emotion.” The camera knows the difference.

“I don’t believe in rehearsing the emotion of a scene: you can rehearse the mechanics of a scene. The actual thing happens when the camera goes.”

-George Cukor

SUBTEXT:

Subtext is what you really are saying regardless of what your lines are saying. It is the true meaning underneath dialogue, and it is what you communicate when you talk to anyone in the film. The words you say in film seldom convey an equivalent meaning to the words said on the stage, because the real meaning of a film scene is found mainly in the subtext created by what you experience at the moment, which has little or nothing to do with words. Stage actors do not have the close-up to let audiences see their emotions as intimately as on film. On the stage, there is little subtext because dialogue explains virtually everything. In a film, when the dialogue explains the story or the situation or feelings, it comes across as fake and boring. Your performance on film, mainly in close-up, depends on your true reaction to the feelings of the other actors and the situation. Unlike stage actors’ preparation for their work on stage, most good film actors do not rehearse or plan exactly how they are going to react in a scene.

Subtext is that unspoken communication by way of your emotions or feelings. Regardless of what your script lines are, subtext is what you really mean and what the audience is really watching, even though it may not be logically aware of it. Through the subtext, the audience discovers your relationship to the other actors, and only when you are relating to each other can there be useful subtext.

People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another; a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person really thinks or feels.

-Alfred Hitchcock

You communicate subtext through your tone of voice, body language, looks, and emotions, but only if they come from your emotional response to the other actors and to the circumstances and not from indicating, as with mechanical actors. Subtext is an undercurrent that allows the audience to understand what is really going on between the actors. Subtext is virtually impossible to rehearse because it is experiential and difficult to duplicate. The director usually tries to set the blocking to help the actors in creating subtext.

One example of how film director Mark Rydell blocks a scene to help the actors with subtext is in the film, On Golden Pond. To understand how this works, it is important that you view this film and watch this scene both with and without the sound. Chelsea, played by Jane Fonda, arrives on a visit to the summer cottage of her parents, Norman and Ethel, played by Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn. Norman is a crusty, often abrasive man who has a sense of humor but is unable to express his feelings very well. Chelsea desperately wants his love and approval. When Chelsea (J. Fonda) enters the cottage, the director frames her and Norman (H. Fonda) in a close two-shot: we see Chelsea full-face and the back of Norman’s head. We see her feeling of happy expectancy. Here she encounters the close-up’s “severe and awesome trial” of being absolutely honest.

INT. LIVING ROOM. EVENING.

CLOSE TWO-SHOT ON J. FONDA. The back of H. Fonda’s head is to us.
J. FONDA
Hello Norman.

(She goes to kiss him, but just before her lips touch his
cheek, he very slightly pulls his head back. We see her
extreme pain for an instant. She continues and kisses him.)

J. FONDA
Happy birthday.

(She is once again expectant and happy. Hepburn comes in the
door and stands behind them in the same close shot.)

Consider the dialogue to this point: four words, “Hello, Norman,” and “Happy birthday.” Not much for a great actress to knock us dead with, yet Jane Fonda does it. There is a lot happening emotionally, and Fonda, as Chelsea, lets us see how she feels. She is happy at the prospect of greeting her father, and it is clear by her feelings that she expects to be received by him in the same way even though she has been burned in the past. When Norman pulls his head back when she attempts to kiss him, we see, for a brief instant, the intense pain it causes her. Then she is back to her feeling of happy expectation for a short moment when Norman gives his next line:

CLOSE-UP, H. FONDA

H. FONDA
(to Hepburn)
Look at this little fat girl,
Ethel.

Rydell blocked this scene so that Jane Fonda faces us in a close shot over Henry Fonda’s shoulder. We see exactly what is going on inside her. With the back of his head close in the right foreground, we see his slight unplanned movement backward that tells us what he is experiencing. The least bit of untruth on Jane’s part would kill the scene, but she truly experiences the emotions so honestly that we experience them with her. What she does is impressive. This is a good scene for film actors—and film directors—to study.

On stage it is almost impossible to achieve film’s intense intimacy. The same scene as it was done originally in the stage play with other actors is effective, but not as compelling as it is in the film close-up. Chelsea hugs her father, who hesitates briefly before returning the hug. The dialogue and body movements predominantly indicate the feelings of the actors, particularly when Chelsea’s father, instead of pulling back from her kiss as in the film, hesitate before he returns her hug. The actors doing this scene in the stage presentation show the proper discomfort and awkward hugging the scene requires, but without the power of a film close-up, it takes Norman’s line, “Look at this little fat girl, Ethel,” to give the scene its full impact. In the film scene the impact comes earlier, when in close-up we see Chelsea’s emotions so intimately that it seems we are guiltily eavesdropping, which is exactly what the camera is doing.

On the stage, an actress has to make sure the entire audience sees her response. Subtext nuances are not as discernible, especially for someone sitting several rows back in the theater. In a play, subtext, or the author’s hidden intention, comes from the text. On film, subtext becomes clear to the audience through the actors’ emotional experiences while relating to another actor. The stage actor has to look for the author’s intent by interpreting the emotional undercurrent, explicit or hidden, in the words. Eugene O’Neil experimented with conveying subtext to the theater audience in his play Strange Interlude by having his characters speak their true thoughts and feelings in asides to the audience. It is an interesting play, but its asides are not as effective and unobtrusive as the film close-up.

All acting in film takes place in close-up. In a wide shot, anyone can look believable taking a gun out of a drawer or fluffing up the sofa cushions. You earn your money in close-up, where the camera sees your emotions. You can’t hide anything because the camera sees everything—fear, happiness, anxiety, lack of confidence, nervousness, whatever is going on inside you. On film you cannot “act” in love, you have to be in love. Sanford Meisner said that your greatest source of creativity as an actor is concentration of attention outside yourself. The way to get in touch with this creative source is to concentrate on the other actor. The camera will pick it up.

Some very good actors in the theater play parts that don’t reveal themselves, whereas in films, some actors who may not be as great have some quality that gets revealed.

-Paul Mazursky

Continue…to be Second Part…………………………………….