Get rid of bad acting once and for all.

Nothing puts a nail in the coffin of independent film like bad acting. You can get away with bad camera work…people will call it ‘Cinema Verde’ (that’s latin for too shakey to see what the hell is going on). But your film absolutely cannot escape a slow agonizing death if it contains even a hint of bad acting.

But, hey…what can you do? You can’t afford to hire professional actors. The only people willing to be in your movie are your friends, and your crazy aunt Kathy. Ok, so maybe your shooting DV and you can afford to shoot alot more takes than the average film…but by the time your taking 15 takes for each shot tempers begin to flare. So now you have to settle. Stupid actors…what’s wrong with them?

Well, sorry buddy….you’re the problem. The fact is there bad acting is more often than not really bad direction in disguise.

Have you ever caught yourself saying things like this:

• In this scene, you get really angry and start throwing things around.
• Here your sad because your boyfriend is leaving to go to the war
• Here your trying to be sneaky and creep up on the guard

Can you catch the problems with these statements? Each and everyone of these statements is an example of bad direction. Unfortunately, sometimes statements like these yield good performances. I know you may think that is a good thing, but if sometimes it yields a good performance then, as a director, you’ll never learn that its bad technique. Instead you’ll think, “it worked last time….this guy must be a terrible actor”. Then later it will work again and you’ll think, “damn, finally a good actor”. Pretty soon you’ll feel at the mercy of some random and esoteric quality of acting ability. What is really happening is your getting random results because you’re giving poor guidance.

You’ll find yourself in a similar situation at every audition. Trying to find some magic quality that is going to work when you get on set. But once again…you’ll find everything to be random. What is going on?

Lets examine the above “bad direction” statements for clues.

In this scene, you get really angry and start throwing things around.
One of the worst thing you can ever do is tell an actor how to feel. When you tell someone to act angry, what you’ll end up with is someone who looks like they are trying to act angry. Their face will tighten up and they’ll try to act super mean. But is that how we really react to anger? We react all sorts of ways to anger…sometimes we yell, sometimes we say nothing. Sometimes we even cry. But if you tell someone to be angry, they will always act the same way….mean.

Lets say for example a man and his wife is having an arguement. The wife is talking extremely fast and he can’t get a word in. You want him to get angry at a specific point and throw his coffee mug across the room so she stops talking.

Pretty much everyone will throw the coffee mug perfectly. Its easy…its just an action…you throw a mug fast. The part that will really show up as bad acting is the part just before the throwing. As the wife rattles off a continuous stream of words, the male actor will act more and more angry, until finally he gets mad enough to throw a cup. And it will look completely stupid.

The reason it will look stupid is because he’s trying to look angry. Don’t think in terms of the actor, but think in terms of the character. The wife is going on and on, and her husband is trying to look angry at her….trying to make her see that he is angry. Does that make sense? It doesn’t….he isn’t trying to show her he is getting angry…its just happening naturally as a result of the situation. If he is trying to show her he is getting angry it almost gives the impression that he’s been planing to pretend to be angry even before the conversation started.

So how do we direct our actor the right way? Easy, you tell him what he is trying to do. The wife is rattling off so many words he can’t get a word in. Tell him: “You are trying to get her to listen, but she won’t let you get a word in. Keep trying to cut her off, and when she doesn’t stop, throw the cup so she shuts up.”

Notice that there are no feeling words in that statement….its only actions. After all they are called actors not feelers.

If you give an actor that sort of direction the scene will play out a bit more like this: The woman will begin talking, he’ll try and say something…almost timidly…not angry but she won’t stop. Getting a little more frustrated he’ll try to say something, but she’ll just get louder and more intense. Finally, he’ll get so frustrated he’ll throw the cup.

NEVER TELL YOUR ACTORS HOW TO FEEL

Here your sad because your boyfriend is leaving to go to the war
This one is along the same theme, but a bit tougher. Once again, you’re telling your actor how to feel. But wait, there is no real action in such a scene. Maybe a girl and her boyfriend are having their last meeting before he leaves for war….or possible its even a scene where she is just sitting at home thinking about the fact that he is leaving. But unlike the previous scene there isn’t really a specific action that you can tell her to do. So what do you say to your actress?

Tell her: Think about your boyfriend leaving, and that you may not ever see him again, but you’re trying not let anyone see how you feel. We humans rarely wear our true emotions on our sleeves, we’re always hiding our true thoughts and feelings. A girl whose boyfriend is going off to war is never trying to act sad (unless she really isn’t). Instead she tries to stay strong, and not let anyone see how worried she is. The beautiful thing is that when you tell someone to pretend they are not feeling a certain way, they come across as feeling exactly that way. Think about it…how many times has someone sad to you “Don’t laugh…” and of course the very next thing you do is laugh?

With some actors and actresses such a suggestion has a risk of creating what will seem (on set) to be a flat performance. If this is the case, shine a dim light in the actor’s eyes (try not to blind them). Just enough to where you can see the light in their eyes on camera. If it still seems flat…then keep it. The camera (and editing) does some pretty magical things. You’ll be surprised at how these “flat” performances really sizzle once you add a sound track and intercut it with other elements of the scene.

A short side note: You film history buffs may remember a little thing called the Kuleshov Experimen. Essentialy Kuleshov made a short film where he intercut the face of an actor, Ivan Mozzhukhin, with various other shots. Mozzhukhin had a completely blank expression, but when the shot of his face was intercut with a bowl of soup, audiences said he looked hungry. The same shot of his face and a baby girl in her crib, and audiences thought Mozzhukin was cheerfully watching the little girl. The same shot of Mozzhukin again, but this time with an older woman in a coffin, and audiences thought he was in solemn mourning over the death of this woman. Not only did these audiences think he was feeling these emotions…they even raved at his performance. Not bad considering all he did was ‘look down at the camera’

Here your trying to be sneaky and creep up on the guard
Ok…so this one doesn’t contain any feeling words…but its still not quite right. After all, you’re telling the actor to try to be sneaky. How do you do such a thing? Well, unfortunately, more often than not an actor’s usual attempt at being sneaky is only slightly more realistic than a kid trying to sneak up on a leprechaun to take his lucky charms.

The solution though is still the same…tell the actor what he is trying to do. Tell him: Don’t let the guard hear you or see you, and take them out.

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.

Make a cool ‘bad guy’ in one easy step.

In the world of cinema, its the bad guy that makes or breaks any movie. Think about it…most of the truly iconic characters in film usually the bad guys. The bad guy is the primary tool via which you show the character of your good guy. He is the motivator of the plot (after all, John Marshall, ex-marine, doesn’t have much reason to save his daughter if no one has kidnapped her yet right?). Hell, even in romantic comedies they usually have that really cool, rich, but total jerk of a guy that the girl is going to marry before she falls in love with our goofy lovable hero.

However, if you go down to your local video store and dig around in some of the back rows ( no no, I don’t mean the ones behind that red curtain). You’re sure to find some of the worst action movies ever made. Just look for a guy with a gun on the cover and an explosion. Or alterntively, a ninja. The one thing that all these movies have in common is they have the worst bad guys ever.

This is not a uniquely B-movie phenomenon. Even big budget blockbusters have some pretty terrible bad guys…and quite often the entire movie fails because of it. But what is this immutable quality that seperates the a top notch bad guy, from a total dud?

Think about those B-movies I mentioned…or alterntively, think about the bad guys in kids movies. What do these characters all have in common? They are all extremely mean, down and dirty, despicable characters….and that is the problem.

How many times have you seen this: The boss is talking giving some really bad speech…a speech which has no real purpose except to establish how big and bad he is, when in walks a lower level henchmen. Something has gone really bad and he tells the boss all about it. The boss shoots the henchmen and says some poorly written attempt at being witty like, “I thought I told you not to interupt me while I’m eating my cheerios”.

What makes these sorts of characters so terrible is that they are literally too bad. They know they are bad, and seem to be trying to prove it. They are so badass they shoot their henchmen he says he dented their car. Needless to say they will probably be a few henchmen short when the good guy comes after them.

This type of scene is called kicking the dog, because in old plays and operas in order for you to know who the villan was right off the bat, he would often walk in and kick his own dog.

Contrast this with some of the really amazingly well played evil characters. The best example, in my opinion, is Anythony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter. Hannibal lunatic that murders people and then eats him…and yet as you watch Silence of the Lambs, you start to like him. And even like our B-movie bad guys, he does do things intentionally to seem scary…but it comes across entirely differently. Instead, he doesn’t seem to be trying to prove that he is evil, but is instead having fun at causing a reaction in those who already believe he is evil.

But what really seperates Hannibal is that inherently he doesn’t see himself as evil. Hannibal sees himself as a cultured, intelligent, and dignified gentlemen who is prone to minor ‘indiscretions’ that the rest of society can’t seem to understand.

This brings us to our one easy step:

1. Tell him he isn’t the bad guy

If you are the director the very first thing you should tell your actor playing the crucial role of the bad guy is that he isn’t a bad guy. After all, no one…no matter how terrible…thinks that he is ultimately a bad person. Hitler didn’t see himself as a bad person, but rather thought himself to be the uniter of Germany and a leader at the forefront of a movement to create a better human race. In fact, the only person who really ever sees himself as a bad person is usually the hero…a person struggling with a huge mistake in their past, but ultimately they are a good person on the inside.

If you are an actor trying to build a character, the first thing you should do is justify his actions. Why do you steal that nuclear bomb and attempt to blow up Chicago? Maybe you believe that its a small sacrifice compared to the goal you are actually trying to achieve. Maybe you don’t really want to do it, but you don’t see any other way. If a justification isn’t clearly evident in the text, get with the director or writer and work something out. There has to be a reason for your actions…you have to be trying to acomplish something.

Consider a movie like John Q. In it Denzel Washington , takes an emergency room hostage because his son can’t get a heart transplant. In this story, Denzel is the hero, fighting against an inefficient system that is costing real people their lives. If the movie were told from the angle of one of the cops outside, Denzel is the villian…a man at his wits end went way too far to get his way.

This is how good characters are written, and how a role must be performed. Always remember, everyone…no matter how sick …considers themselves to be logical and right in their actions.