Don’t memorize your lines

For all you actors out there, how many of you as soon as you get a new part do the following: Take the script home, highlight your lines, and start repeating them over and over again to memorize them. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Maybe its a bad habit from our elementry school spelling bee days, but most of us believe that memorization is best achieved by repeating something over and over again. For simple things that we only have to remember for short periods of time, repetition is a perfectly useful tool. But for something as complex as lines of a script, it simply doesn’t surfice.

Back in college I took an acting class. My first assignment was a monologue, and I blew it royally. I barely remembered half of it, and I probably performed it that much worse. From there on out, we were assigned partners, and we were graded as a team. Of course, as the class progressed the scenes we were working on had to be progressively longer. I had to find a technique that would help me remember my lines, and at the same time help me perform them more natually.

The Technique
In a film, most scenes with dialogue are going to involve two or more people talking. Therefore, everytime you speak you are reacting to something that was said or done by someone else before you. This is the key to this technique.

First give a quick read through of your scene. Try to develop a picture of the scene in your mind of how the characters are speaking to one another, but don’t try to memorize anything at this point.
Now, start looking through the lines of the other characters. Look for the words or phrases that your characters are responding to. For example:

Jill
If you would have trained that stupid dog properly in the first place, this wouldn’t have happened.

Jack
You’re the one who left the gate open!

You have alot of options here depending on how the rest of the scene goes, but lets say this scene takes place just after Jack and Jill have found their dog bit someone. If you were Jack, you would probably want to highlight “trained that stupid dog”, because this is the phrase that triggers your line. Jill is trying to blame you, so you are blaming Jill in response.

Continue to do this with every scene where you have dialogue, and memorize the words you respond to, and just give a cursory reading of your lines. Mentally, or verbally repeat the response trigger three times, then your line like so:

trained that stupid dog
trained that stupid dog
trained that stupid dog
You’re the one that left the gate open!

This technique has huge two benefits. For one, it helps you remember your lines because it builds an assocation with the lines of the other characters in the scene. These lines will then be spoken to you while you perform the scene, and thus trigger your memory of your own lines.

A second great benefit is that it will help you act more naturually. When people are really speaking to one another, this is more akin to the way they really speak. When Jill says “If you would have trained that stupid dog…” you already know what you are going to say, you are just waiting for her to finish her sentence so you can talk. When real people speak to one another they don’t listen to every single word the other person says, nor do they ignore them completely and recite a preplanned speech. Its not about acting is about reacting.

Using this method has a subtle yet profound benefit. You will begin to react in a physiological way that is more like the real character would have reacted. You will listen to Jill as she speaks, but as soon as she speaks the trigger word, your expression and posture will shift from listening to waiting to speak.