You Can Act on Camera Read online

  The technique I’m suggesting is to expose yourself to a particular odor/taste/sensation prior to your first moment that is consistent with how you want to feel: sweet and warm for being kindly disposed, sour or cold for repelled or frightened, bitter and foul for alienated or disgusted, and so forth. Exposure to these vivid stimuli can be used in preparation to create pre-set, Pavlovian responses. If there’s a circumstance that occurs during the scene where you’d like a vivid response, run the scene in your imagination (or rehearsal if you have an indulgent partner) and then, when you get to that moment where the given event occurs, bite into a warm brownie, sip some pure lime juice or take a sniff from a jar of something particularly awful. Use whatever makes sense for the reaction you want in the scene. Instruct someone to pour ice water down your back at the appearance of the vampire.

  YOUR KILLER INSTINCT

  For an actor, for any artist who must perform on command, the talent required for being effective during times of expectation is primary. The very aspect of something that is planned meeting the unpredictable in a charged atmosphere makes it what it is. The particular genius for this is what I call “Killer Instinct,” and there are individuals who excel at nothing so much as their ability to get more focused under stress and allow their deep talent for effectiveness to come through. In sports these people are called “money players.”

  Boxing coach Cuss D’Amato said, “Everybody’s got a plan ‘til they get hit in the mouth.” And all the preparation—the choices, the hours you’ve rehearsed, the lines, the blocking, the emotional preparation, the rhythms and the beats and the nuances you have in mind—doesn’t mean squat if you can’t make it come off on the day.

  Those with Killer Instinct may have less fear because their basic biology produces less fear, or it may be because they relate to the task as less frightening, whether out of a deep faith in their own competence or because they just don’t see a lot of downside to failure. It’s possible, on the other hand, that someone enjoys what might be thought of as a pure Killer Instinct and, while just as scared as anybody else, they’re able to isolate and lock down on what’s key without allowing for any second guessing. In this way, they use their fear to do good work, understanding it’s all on them to perform and no one is going to come to the rescue because they act like a needy mess.

  This talent is related to the basic survival mechanism in all living things and there are just certain individuals in whom it is more expressed and certain situations that tend to bring it out. You want to have acting be one of the things that brings it out of you. You must get clear about your relatedness to performing and engage the can-do spirit, a sacred commitment that the show must go on. In this way you can harness the same primal power utilized by other challenging professions, such as emergency care workers or members of the military’s special forces.

  This is what actors are using when they lose scary amounts of weight for a part or volunteer to do intense action sequences instead of requesting stunt doubles. Actors go on stage regardless of raging fevers with the audience never guessing they’re anything but fit. If people connect to a sense of mission and allow for no alternative, they can endure tremendous hardships without experiencing the discomforts nearly as distractingly fearful as when there’s an expectation of coziness.

  One of the most amazing statistics in sports is the number of long-distance running records held by people who come from one tribe in Kenya—the Kalenjin. The best explanation for this seems to be that, way beyond the physical aptitude these people have for running, they’re trained from a very early age to endure extreme pain. It’s done with both boys and girls in preparation for a torturous initiation ritual they undergo that is crucial to their resultant stature in life. Long-distance running is very painful and these Kenyans are conditioned to relate to pain differently.

  The best thing an actor can do to deal with the stresses that will undoubtedly arise when called to perform under challenging circumstances is to relate to these stresses as less abhorrent. Those stage nerves flooding you with dread are misrepresenting what’s going on and that sense of jumpy fragility is wrong when it tells you you’re out of your element. Our normal, civilized lives are so full of luxury that our gauge for discomfort gets very sensitized . . . some would say out of whack.

  Maybe you’ve had the experience of feeling a desperate need to go to the bathroom or felt an urgency to eat and then lost that feeling for some reason, even though your bladder was just as full or your stomach just as empty. You felt the impulses, you just didn’t have the same frantic urge to fix the situation. This demonstrates how your sensitivity to stimulation is relative. You can take greater command over these impulses if you know this about your internal mechanisms and counter them with the tremendous life force that comes from having a sense of purpose.

  A defining feature of life is that it is an organized thing adapting to the hardship of conditions that are working to make it disorganized. Facing unpredictable challenges is what you’re built for and executing under pressure is a natural phenomenon that all life is designed to do, not something outlandish. There’s nothing wrong with a little good discomfort.

  WANTING IT THE RIGHT WAY

  Employing your Killer Instinct as it relates to your passion to perform is tricky, because it’s not necessarily the one with the greatest desire who achieves the greatest access to this talent. There’s a paradox. While you do want to sustain an intense drive for making what you do great, at the same time it’s probably best if you don’t care that much about how great it is while you’re doing it. You will see performers with seemingly little investment in their work do better than those far more earnest because they have less at stake and carry themselves with an attractive looseness. This is the gift of flexibility and self-perpetuating confidence observable in established stars who, knowing they’ve got three more jobs lined up after this one, easily swagger up to their mark.

  An actor may want very, very much to do well because doing well means they might get more opportunities to act, get validation as an artist, and acquire more money and comfort, but the wanting of these things is not the final word on the matter. Your talent is, and ever will be, a wild creature that doesn’t bow down to those objectives, and it might just say, “to hell with all this desperate pressure,” and leave you on your own. Then, when you sense the absence of these rich elements, you might start to panic, generating more stress and fear, and go into a self-perpetuating cycle of insecurity.

  If you’re going to resolve difficulties and rise to your best on the day, you may have to face some thorny, psychological issues. It’s possible the impulse that brought you into acting will be the greatest obstacle to your acting. Maybe you’re acting so you can get some glory because someone from your past pushed you into the background, giving you the message it wasn’t safe to stand out. Maybe you want to express feelings you suppressed because you were taught those feelings, if revealed, would make you less loveable. Maybe you took on playing pretend to compensate for some lack in your life and you can’t help begrudging the necessity for this compensation, like an amputee hating their prosthetic leg and wanting to hurl it across the room.

  The idea of completely laying it all out there and actually doing your absolute best is frightening. If, for instance, you did allow yourself to fully apply your skills and imagination and the result was less than your ascent into legend with comparisons to Brando and Streep, you might be gravely disappointed. If you gave away all control over how you were going to be received and truly aspired to something big and were then snubbed by the crowd, you might imagine it worse than having purposefully orchestrated a failure. Walking away with the sense of being a loser may be crappy, but it is familiar. Everyone knows that feeling very well.

  You might prefer a lot of very unpleasant outcomes rather than knowing you rendered the best possible acting you could ever bring to bear and gave your best shot at getting the objective that brought you into acting, but, even so, were stil
l unable to fix the past. This would mean you would be forced to face the fact that nothing you could achieve through acting was ever going to improve your mom’s nurturing abilities, or keep your dad from walking out, or be able to expunge the family grief.

  BE WILLING TO SUCCEED

  Besides the fear of giving your best efforts and meeting with failure and disappointment, you might not do as well as you possibly could so you can avoid the results of success. If you became transported and really embodied strength or sexuality or vulnerability, you might have to take responsibility for owning such characteristics and that would mean change. This is what Abraham Maslow called the “Jonah Complex,” named for the biblical Jonah who resisted God’s command to take His message into the world.

  There’s been a lot of writing on the subject by great authors through the centuries, as well as a lot of recent literature using the paradigm of “abundance mentality,” so I won’t dwell on the point here. But it is, without question, something you should consider as it pertains to the larger perspective of your life and how it can create inhibitions on the day.

  The Jonah Complex can be identified by these fears:

  Fear of being prominent or having authority because it challenges your self image.

  Fear of the responsibility that comes with power.

  Fear that having an extraordinary life will be alienating to others.

  Fear of being seen as arrogant, self-centered, etc.

  Fear that entering new situations will create disorientation, reveal incompetence, and attract unwanted attention.

  Fear of the pain when success is inevitably taken from you.

  When acting on camera the environment is such that you probably won’t be receiving a great deal of open, positive reinforcement for your acting and you must guard against filling this vacuum with projections of your Jonah Complex, interpreting the lack of cheers for disapproval. Film crews operate with the understanding they are there to facilitate the capturing of your performance, not to function as an audience themselves. This context is firmly reinforced by the need for absolute silence while you’re acting. Therefore, you must, along with the fictional world you create, imagine those open-hearted, supportive souls for whom you’re acting.

  Even after “Cut!” is called, you have to accept that film crews aren’t necessarily composed of the most gregarious personalities who are given to open expressions of enthusiasm. The world of their jobs is where something either gets done or it doesn’t get done, and gradients of subjective value are rarely part of their work. No one pats the assistant cameraman on the back and says, “That was wonderful how you put on the correct lens.”

  With everyone properly associating great importance to your job as an artist, and with what is likely near total ignorance on their part about the actual process of acting itself, the crew you’re working with might appear standoffish as they try not to disturb whatever the hell it is you’re doing. They may not feel free to voice encouragement for your work for fear your response might be something like, “How dare you insult me by acting surprised I could do this well.” Or simply, “I don’t need your approval.”

  Regardless, you must not let anyone’s behavior in the environment undermine your confidence with thoughts you’re being arrogant or a “fancy pants,” and you certainly shouldn’t misinterpret their reserve for negative judgment. Of course everyone present wants you to do great and become a star because of a show they’ve worked on. Your success could only be a good thing for them.

  Marianne Williamson said, “Your playing small does not serve the world.” And, while your older sister may have given you that impression, it didn’t actually serve her either. Be willing to step out into no man’s land where new things—like big-time success—will challenge you and make you grow in new ways. Risk getting deep, getting wild, getting ugly, and getting what you want.

  CARE AND DON’T CARE

  Your best approach on the day will probably be to burn with a desire to do well and do everything possible to ensure that that happens, but when the time comes, at some point before you walk to the set, surrender it all up and don’t really care that much about the final results. Let the heavy stuff fall away, think less, worry less, and start believing today is your lucky day. As much as you hunger to be great, apply that to the strategy of not wanting it so much. Embrace the paradox.

  The basketball player Robert “Big Shot Rob” Horry was legendary for making hugely important clutch shots at the end of championship games. He would celebrate in exaltation with the rest of his team over the wins he created, but when asked his secret for possessing such icy calm during these incredibly intense moments, he responded by saying, “I have a very sick daughter so I think I have a pretty good sense of proportion about the game.” Since his retirement, Robert Horry’s daughter died from her genetic disorder at age seventeen. So, yeah, maybe keeping a good sense of proportion would help.

  An audience’s willingness to offer their time and open hearts to you is a huge gift, and you may experience this as a problem. If you received an extravagant gift from a stranger, you’d feel uneasy about it and either insist on giving it back or resent your inability to restore the balance. But, what if the giver wasn’t a stranger? In the book of Matthew it’s written that to get into heaven you must “become like a child.” I think an actor might be served in relating to the camera this way. Be a child. Vulnerable and innocent, truly, but, also like a child, know you require love and fully expect to get it. This can be your agreement with the audience.

  YOU’RE ALWAYS WHERE YOU SHOULD BE

  While there may be tremendous problems on the set with unforeseen, difficult, and agonizing adjustments, there’s another possibility, as well: Magic. From the earliest age of mankind it’s been known there’s a special connection between the real world and the one created through art. There are portals made available through means we don’t fully understand, but which are related to a reverence for a sense of occasion.

  What happens on the day is the crucible and the raison d’être for everything you’re supposed to be about as a performing artist. It isn’t about the talk and the getting ready and then, later, the celebrating and the talk. It is about doing it. Actually doing it. After all the adjustments and under all the pressure, it’s nevertheless your job to make it look easy and effortless and as if you’re totally in your element. As if there’s no place you’d rather be.

  Being wedded to that sensibility that there’s no place you’d rather be, you put yourself closer to the elemental, animal state we want in our performers. Animals know and live what we humans must be told by our wisest thinkers, such as Alexander Pope who stated at the end of his poem An Essay On Man, “Whatever is, is right.” In this way, animals carry themselves, as any fine actor does, with the quality that their whole lives have been leading them to this very moment.

  When you act, separate yourself from the rules we commonly live by in our civilized world. Meet your obligations to execute all the necessary technical requirements, but free yourself from all societal obligations and judgments. You must seek maximum effectiveness while still fully experiencing the emotions consistent with the magnitude of the imaginary circumstances. Dissociating and compartmentalizing (so rewarded in our culture) is a cheat that actors are not allowed. When you’re acting, leave yourself alone. Take a break from trying to fix everybody. Take off the mask, take off the chains (they’re probably not even there anymore), get something you can believe in and be a channel for it.

  It may take some private work, perhaps some form of therapy, to clear away the blockage that’s preventing you from sharing the full scope of your gifts. You should surround yourself with positive people. And, again, practice, practice, practice. Your talent wants to come out. Find some trustworthy guidance and acquire good acting techniques, then get in front of an audience, feel the pressure, feel the imaginative world beckoning and do your thing.

  A camera should be thought of as the perfect receiving and
sharing presence, always there, where and when it should be. There’s no point in pretending it isn’t catching everything, and everything it’s catching is what ought to be caught. You can dazzle like the biggest blaze in the universe or connect to the smallest next-to-nothing there is. It’s impossible to be too much or too little. It’s all fine.

  Everything is a version of Truth and yours is to work for a simpler, more clear version.

  THE INTERVIEWS

  Following are interviews with seasoned film professionals; some my oldest and dearest friends, including former students, others more recent relationships, and some I only know through mutual acquaintance. Done in either L.A. or New York, a few of these exchanges took place in restaurants, others in living rooms, and several on the phone (I spoke with Michael Rymer on a lengthy drive he had to a location in Australia). All gave their time upon being asked largely out of a love for the art and a desire to see it flourish.

  Although the interviewees have interesting and instructive careers, there’s little biographical information included. My aim is to cut to the heart of what specifically makes you excellent on camera, and, in addition to that excellence, what makes people want to work with you again. The advice here includes invaluable insider observations, and, while a wide range of perspectives is offered, there is a strong, common thread: the power of authenticity.