Tag: method acting

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Arthur Miller on Method Acting (The Lee Strasberg School of Mumblecore)

Arthur Miller on Lee Strasberg.

While filming “The River of No Return”, director Otto Preminger apparently grew quite exasperated with Marilyn Monroe because every time he gave her direction she would go to her private “coach”, Natasha Lytess, and take direction from her.  Lytess bizarrely coached Monroe to enunciate every syllable cleanly and counteracted Preminger’s desire for a more fluid, compelling performance.  Preminger should have fired Monroe on the spot but it was the nature of Hollywood then– and now– that big stars command deference, because audiences are stupid and choose their entertainment based on how much they care about the celebrity actors than the writer or director.  That’s why so many small-scale independent films are so much better than major Hollywood productions, especially the ones that feature older celebrities playing characters who should be ten, twenty, or even thirty years younger.

Lytess could never have written a screenplay if her life depended on it– she was a parasite, sucking the blood out of the real artists, and Monroe was a repugnant diva more obsessed with her own image and fame than with artistic achievement though she would frame her narcissism as “artistry”.

Anyway, this is an excellent dissection of the Strasberg school of acting:

The following was posted on Facebook 2024-07-09.

I think [Lee] Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion, evidently) a force which is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I mean that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. …But the Method is in the air: the actor is defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magnificent. I said to her, ‘I can’t hear you,’ and I kept on saying, ‘I can’t hear you.’ She finally got furious and said to me, in effect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not going to prostitute herself to the audience. That was the living end! It reminded me of Walter Hampden’s comment–because we had a similar problem in ‘The Crucible’ with some actors–he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the fingering is magnificent but there are no strings on the instrument. The problem is that the actor is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio, despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions; I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are only, so to speak, the libretto for the music–that the actor is the main force that the audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. They are told that the analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance whatever. This is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it, if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction. Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted ‘The Seagull.'”

Arthur Miller Interview with Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron
The Paris Review, 1966

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Method Umpires

Method-actors can be very annoying, especially to the other members of a movie crew, or even the other actors. You don’t matter, Laurence Olivier. You don’t matter sound-guy. You don’t matter director. I must commune with my inner-self, draw on my child-hood memories and experiences, and connect my personal emotional life to the artistic representation of this character’s inner life. Stand back and wait. I’ll let you know when I’m ready. You philistines really have no business deciding when I need to get in front of a camera.

Angel Hernandez had the opportunity to review High Definition footage of a double off the wall Wednesday, May 8th, in a game between Oakland and Cleveland. It was quickly evident to millions of viewers that the ball was not a double: it struck a pipe railing above the yellow stripe that demarcates the field of play, therefore it was a home run. Hernandez however, for reasons that no one has been able to explain, called it a double.

Hernandez is a method umpire. After the game, he prepared for his role as defender of the ineffable perfection of umpires by drawing upon his arrogant inner ego and connecting it with his artistic representation of immutable authority: I am the umpire. I am never wrong. When the media asked him about the call, he refused to allow anyone to record his answer. Then he refused to provide an answer. He was so deep into his role, that his other personality, that of a rational human being, had been completely submerged by the time the media had tucked away their microphones.

By the Way

David Ortiz, at 37, is hitting better than last year or the year before.

Honest– it’s the winter conditioning program. Really.

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The Black Swan

“Joan Crawford would have killed to play her. ” NY Times, on “Black Swan”.

And noted: “Dancers often spend more of their time in front of the mirror than before an audience”.

Okay– first of all I do want to say this: I think Natalie Portman is one of the most enlightened, smartest actresses working today. You may not want to see her as inspiration for your acting technique, but she is model of wisdom in every other respect. I’m not kidding– check out what she does and says in her non-Hollywood life. She’s very, very wise.

I’m going to add to that– Natalie Portman is at a priceless, searing stage of her life. She is smart enough to perceive the twisted effects of celebrity (the perverse obsession with her role in “Leon: The Professional” for example and the sexualization of her image as a boyish naïf from all of her movies), but not old enough yet to resign herself to it. She expects better. But she is pleasingly reflective and down to earth and astute and it will be sad when she stops commenting on it and it becomes a part of her permanent emotional armour and we will have lost something.

However…

The biggest problem with “Black Swan” is that director Darren Aronovsky and star Natalie Portman– who, by the way, is really a terrible actress– never really shows you the payoff: a talented dancer at work. They don’t know how. Watch fifteen minutes of Mike Leigh’s “Topsy Turvey”, or even “The Red Shoes”, and then try to tell me it’s not possible. It absolutely is. “The Black Swan”, in fact, makes the worst mistake a movie of this type can make: it wallows in the suffering without even hinting at the reward, and in this kind of narrative, the only satisfactory explanation for the suffering– aside from pure monotonous psychosis– is the glory of the reward.

Just one example: at one point the director threatens to take the role away from Nina because she hasn’t demonstrated sufficient passion (which, cringingly, is linked to the director’s sexual fantasies). We are left clueless about just how wrenching, in real life, a decision like that would be. We are left with the impression of a parent threatening to take dessert away from a child if she doesn’t do her homework. We are left with the impression that the director actually chose, as his star of this production, someone he clearly believes is incapable of performing it.

It’s not really like he realizes he made a mistake. It’s like this: the viewer realizes that the director could never really had a good reason for choosing her in the first place, and the story loses all sense of believability.

We are left with the impression that someone else could just step into the role, precisely the opposite of what the director thinks the audience will think as Natalie Portman crinkles her face unpleasantly and weeps to tell us instead how much she suffers for her art.

I’ve said it before– the rule about showing a believable drunken man is to produce a man trying (and failing) to stand straight– not someone trying to look like he is falling over. Natalie Portman, for 90 minutes, looks like she’s trying to fall apart.

Joan Crawford or Bette Davis could have played this.

Why was Leslie Manville from “Another Year” not nominated for a “Best Supporting Actress” Oscar?  Well, aside from the obvious– no powerful Hollywood machinery working on her behalf to get her the nomination– well… that’s about it.  That’s why she doesn’t get the nomination.  That’s why so many mediocre actors and actresses do get nominated.

So when Natalie Portman gets all tearful in a few weeks, convinced that her peers really chose her for this award, for her acting, for her dedication, for her unremarkable impersonation of a ballet dancer in a few select shots….   think about that last shot of Leslie Manville in “Another Year” realizing that whatever it is Tom and Geri have…. she doesn’t.

That is, simply, truly great acting– not the showy pseudo-method business that wins you Oscars.

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Method John Adams

I am presently enjoying the mini-series “John Adams” from HBO. Paul Giamatti plays Mr. Adams, and Laura Linney his wife, Abigail. It’s a superb series– I recommend it.

It’s marred, in my mind, by only one thing: Paul Giamatti’s bizarre performance.

Once upon time, actors learned techniques, for voice and gesture, intonation and rhythm, and how to evoke character. This worked very well on the stage, where a large number of people had to not only see you, but hear you. In the movies, however, the excessive embrace of technique sometimes led to ridiculous results–look at “Dr. Zhivago”, for example. The “drama”– especially during scenes that were supposed to be extremely emotional– is, by today’s standards, stiff and constrained. Clearly, the actors are applying technique, not instinct, to their performance. Watch Marlene Dietrich in “Witness for the Prosecution”. It’s hard to believe this performance got past the director and into the final cut. They make the formal gestures, but you can see that there is no intensity or spontaneity in their faces– as there would be in real life. It’s like those stage kisses still often used– the illusion is temporarily shattered.

Along came “the method”, popularized by Lee Strasburg at the Actor’s Studio in New York in the 1930’s, and, later . Strasberg, in turn, picked up the idea from Konstantin Stanislavski, the great Russian actor. In the words of wiki: In Stanislavski’s ‘system’ the actor analyzes deeply the motivations and emotions of the character in order to personify him or her with psychological realism and emotional authenticity. Using the Method, an actor recalls emotions or reactions from his or her own life and uses them to identify with the character being portrayed.

Now, I personally can’t remember which is “sense” memory and which is “emotional” memory and what the Meisner technique is, but suffice to say they are all variations on the idea that one should mumble one’s lines so that nobody in the audience can understand what you say and, therefore, will conclude that you are incredibly deep.

This is not all bad. Some of the most compelling performances of the past 30 years have come from method actors. And some of the worst.

The problem is this: Marlon Brando was a method actor. Marlon Brando used the method to arrive at a character, in the movie “On the Waterfront”, who happened to be inarticulate and shy. Brando mumbled. Brando received widespread acclaim and a new era of realism was heralded in. Therefore, great acting consists of mumbling.

So we have Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and– worst of all of them– Ryan Gosling. All mumbling and whispering and looking painfully introverted as they do their best imitation of what they think made Brando successful: mumbling. It’s as if an athlete came to the conclusion that the way to train for a race was to practice ascending the podium. [2011-03: Just saw Ryan Gosling in “Blue Valentine”. No actor of his generation is less fun to watch than he is. I’m not saying he can’t act– it just isn’t fun to watch.]

Even when your character is in a large room full of people to whom he is trying to speak: mumble softly. Even when the character you are speaking to is talking normally because otherwise you couldn’t hear him. Mumble anyway– he’ll know what you said because he has a script.

So we have the spectacle of Paul Giamatti– who is not a bad actor, by the way– whispering to his fellow revolutionaries– and being close-miked in order to be audible. You can actually hear them change over to different miking when he speaks. Why? What has possessed the man to such ridiculous lengths? To make his character more “real” he makes him utterly implausible and, at times, ridiculous. It hurts every scene he’s in… except, when he and his wife are in bed together– the only time his vocal mannerisms make sense.

There are obvious reasons for an actor’s preference for “the Method”, especially for actors who are more talented– at least, more ambitious– than average: the method relies on the actor ransacking his own memories and emotions to evoke the character’s actions and expressions. When an actor takes his “art” seriously, it helps to be able to explain that he or she has tapped into some incredibly deep emotional experiences in order to portray the character required. He’s deep; I’m deep; we’re all deep. You like me? You really like me?

I actually don’t mind the method, when sensibly applied. If you watch enough Leslie Howard and Richard Burton, you might start longing for “the Method”.

But you don’t see Phillip Seymour Hoffman whispering when his character is speaking to a large gathering. The Method has its limits.

The Diminished Ego of Dustin Hoffman

“Dustin [Hoffman] told me that if the director wants you to do something, and it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it. Do what you want. It was nice to hear it from a vet.” Canadian actress Liane Balaban kindly informing directors everywhere just who will make the final decisions on the set.

Hoffman, whose own career has steadily descended into sustained mediocrity (quick: tell me the last really great film he was in), hasn’t created a memorable character since… well, “Tootsie”. And even that was implausible– they insisted on an actor completely physically unsuited for a transgender role because the actor was famous. The same goes for Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire”.

Is Dustin Hoffman still a good actor? I don’t think so. Watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman for a comparison. You can believe, at times, that Phillip S. Hoffman is the character he is playing. It’s very hard to see Dustin Hoffman without thinking right away, “that’s an actor in the twilight of his career”.