19 The Face in the Mirror

One day, in a music shop in Chester, I bumped into a group of young actors from the soap, Hollyoaks. They were all new recruits, playing the latest intake of students to the community college. Their storylines had only just started to play and so they were virtually unknowns. We all left together and I followed them up the steps and out the door. Eager to examine their new purchases they were not immediately aware of a bunch of youths coming towards them. To an onlooker there would not have been much to distinguish the two groups: they were both about the same age and similarly dressed. Until, that is, one of the on-coming party recognised the actors and let out a shriek. His companions were bewildered until he explained to them who the bunch of actors ahead of them were. And then, they all went wide-eyed, slack

jawed, weak at the knees. The actors, at first, were quite startled, not yet used to this kind of reaction, and then, taking cues from each other,  drew themselves, up, became bright-eyed, self-assured, glowing with charisma.

As I watched, as startled by this as any of the participants, what struck me was the way that the vitality of the fans seemed to be drawn from them by the presence of the tyro stars, who seemed now to have grown in stature. It was like watching Dracula suck blood from his willing victims. In fact, it occurred to me that the kids had fallen into the same kind of light trance they would be in if watching flickering images on a screen, while the young actors had turned into just the kind of larger-than-life characters they might be watching. They had put on the mantle of celebrity before my eyes.

Anyone who has been around the famous for any length of time knows that star quality is not just something  you have or have not, like the lines in the palm of your hand. Rather, it is something that can be worked, honed, perfected, and then switched on and off like the flick of a light switch. Celebrities are never quite the same when they are ON, as when they are OFF. Sometimes, in private, suppressed negative qualities can be unleashed, as in the lurid tales of gossip columns, but, more often, it is not that the celebrities become so very different; just that they are less definitely themselves. They fret, they dither, complain about nothing much, become crotchety and vague. Like Woody Allen’s brilliant conceit in Deconstructing Harry, their image goes soft.

An out-of-focus Robin Williams in Woody Allen's
Deconstructing Harry

The concept of self-image was popularised in the 60s by the plastic surgeon, Maxwell Maltz, who discovered that, sometimes, after carrying out significant cosmetic surgery on his clients they complained that they were just as ugly as they had been before. Even when shown before and after pictures they seemed reluctant to admit that there had been any significant change. Maltz concluded that the problem was not in the surgery, but in their sub-conscious self-image.(20) More often nowadays this is referred to as self-concept as it is the key to the kind of person we think we are. It is on this level that the inspired actor works. And it is on this level that stars are born. Some become stars from being good actors. And some become good actors from being stars.

One of the very few psychologists who has studied this inner sense of identity in terms of the sensory images with which an actor works is the Dutch NLP practitioner, Lucas Derks. He found that our core self-feeling, or “kinaesthetic self’, was at the centre of the constructed mental space in which internal relationships are formed.

“Normally, someone’s self-image accompanies the feeling of self like a satellite  — a cloud of imagery hanging in front of the person.”(9)

Arranged around this is a social panorama of internalised images of others ranked in importance in that person’s world. In social interaction someone whose self-image is weak, fractured, or nebulous, is liable to have it temporarily displaced by another; perhaps a domineering lover, or a feared authority figure, or, as in the case with the young fans, the media-reinforced image of a soap star. In such situations the subjects partially loses touch with themselves and fall into a light trance of adulation, as the central position of their self-image is usurped by the internalised image of the celebrities, who seem to draw power from them.

Terence Stamp in Deadly Recruits

The charismatic actor is one who has an immediate and firm grasp of who he is and how he sees himself. Self-awareness, then, is the very opposite of self-consciousness. The self-conscious person wants to lose himself but cannot; the self-aware person is fully at one with himself in the moment. Self-awareness is synonymous with “presence”.  And, we might say that a burnished self-image acts as an amplifier to that presence. Of all the actors I worked with this was true of none more than Terence Stamp. Stamp, as he liked to be called — following the public school practice of using surnames — generally had a reserved and thoughtful manner but would instantly get everyone’s attention in any room that he happened to enter.

The son of a tug boat stoker from Plaistow, in the East End of London, Stamp won a scholarship to Webber Douglas Academy where he mastered perfect RP (Received Pronunciation). It seems that from there he began a study of aristocrats, not just of the theatre, but in London society and then across Europe. In time he became an aficionado of manners, tailoring, wine, art, women. By the time I met him, Terence Stamp was a connoisseur of a lot of things, but, above all, he was a connoisseur of being Terence Stamp. On location with me in Oxford, he went off looking for a particular make of traditional shoe polish. Only to Terence Stamp would it matter to have exactly the right sort of polish to clean his shoes.

From the anecdotes he told then and writings since, it has become clear that Terence Stamp made a life-long study of famously charismatic individuals, such as Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, and Bill Clinton.

“My admiration is for those who turn themselves into an electromagnet and see what it attracts.”(33)

But, I feel quite sure that charisma is not something Stamp learnt on the hoof, but dates from even before he had thought of becoming an actor, from his early experiences of growing up, In a recent book of autobiographical fragments he describes incidents from his childhood, which we might describe as blissing out; incidents that arose from intense sensations, such as the smell of a grocer’s shop or the feel of a snowflake landing on his cheek.

“I have a tendency to increase sensation, which is so ingrained that I am no longer aware of it.”(33)

He simply had to be brought to a realisation of the significance of this. While he was working in Rome he was introduced by Fellini to the Indian sage, Krishnamurti. 

"There was a refinement in his being I hadn't encountered before. I went for a walk with him the next day. After a while he took my arm and stopped and said 'Look at that tree'. I looked at it. It wasn't even a beautiful tree. I smiled, he smiled, and we walked on. Then he stopped and said 'Look at that cloud'. I looked up and saw a cloud. That was my first encounter with him. He put the sound on for me. I was made to understand that before thought, I was!”(33)

Later, after the 60s had taken their toll on his health, and he was adrift with little work, he took himself off to Indian in pursuit of health and wisdom. There is a certain irony in the fact that one of the gurus he attended there did little more than repeat, in various forms, the one question: “Who are you?” That, no doubt, was something that Stamp had been asking himself for most of his life. Over tea at the Taj Hotel in Mumbai, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, made his one elaboration:

Terence Stamp as General Zod in Superman

“The I Am is not it. But paying attention to it will allow a blossoming. You can’t see the eye without a mirror, because it looks. Same with the I Am …” (33)

The meaning is surely clear: by paying attention to your perceived identity, to the image in the mirror, maybe you will come to experience with greater clarity the here-and-now, within you and without.

References

9. Derks, Lucas, Social Panoramas: changing the unconscious landscape with NLP and psychotherapy, (trans Susan Hiller Smith), Crown House, 

20. Maltz, Maxwell, Psycho-cybernetics: a new way to get more living out of life, Prentice-Hall, New York, 1960

33. Stamp, Terence, Rare Stamps: Reflections on Living, Breathing and Acting, Escargot Books Online, 2012

8. No Telling

Before we started work on Deadly Recruits Terence Stamp told me that, as far as he was concerned, the director made the film and his job as actor was to offer up the material from which I, as director, could construct my vision. However, in practice, I soon discovered that there were definite boundaries to the things that he thought would be right for him to do, or to wear, or to say, and, on occasion, these could come as a surprise. One day he called me over on set, pointed to some lines in the script and said, “Rog, I don’t want to say this.” Normally, I would have been sympathetic, but I knew that these lines had been added at the request of the producer to cover a gaping hole in the plot. I explained this to Terry. He was silent for a minute and then said, “Get someone-else to say them will you?” and walked away. From this I learnt that you do not ask a star to carry exposition. But, why should any actor?

Denise Stephenson, Leslie Grantham in 

Winners & Losers

A few years later, while shooting Winners & Losers, there was an incident that hit closer to home because the objection was to lines that I had written. These lines were not simple exposition: the objection was that they contained the title of the piece, though not out of context in the present scene. Leslie Grantham and Denise Stephenson were in agreement that the line “clanged”. I did not know what they meant; I thought the line was pretty smart and the scene would be poorer without it. I told them I would like it to be kept in and walked away.  But, after a few paces, I suddenly got  what they meant. Any repeat of the title would obtrude as an ironic comment to which the characters in the scene were not party. I went back and told them to cut it.

Exposition is a failure of writing just as the actor indicating the director’s big idea is a failure of the direction. It is not the actor’s job to tell the story. But, neither is it the actor’s job to directly express the director’s ideas. This is just another level of exposition. The actor must start from his visceral response to the scene, not from imposed ideas. Recently, Sam Mendes put forward his 25 Rules for Directors, #7 of which reads: 

“If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence. Road to Perdition was about my childhood. Skyfall was about middle-age and mortality. Sometimes it’s small things. Maybe it’s just a simple idea. What if we do the whole thing in the nightclub, for example. But it’s not enough just to admire a script, you have to have a way in that is yours, and yours alone.” (22)

Certainly, I can agree with this; the director’s vision is the centre pole on which everything  else depends — sometimes a big idea, sometimes little ideas. But, with regard to actors what I would emphasise is that little word “secret”. Just as the actors should be allowed their secret keys to the character they will inhabit, so the director needs to keep the ideas for his movie to himself. The directors idea is really only a perspective from which the actor’s work is seen; the two cannot be collapsed into the same space.

Needy screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage)

 consults script guru Robert McKee (played by Brian Cox) in 

Spike Jones’s movie,  Adaptation

There is one more temptation to indulge in telling that has crept in since the rise of the script gurus in the eighties. Some actors now ask questions about “character arcs” and “turning points”. Does an actor really need to know this? Or is it just another ploy to side-step the heavy lifting of embodying a living, breathing, human being? It is only in retrospect that “turning points” and “character arcs” can be known. Acting coach, Howard Guskin, takes a radical stance on this: he states explicitly that all storytelling, including character development, is the province of the writer and director, and not the actor.

“… it is best not to think about the story. Just go with the flow. Otherwise your effort to make sense of the story will show, and your acting will become repetitive, predictable, and melodramatic. Even when you know exactly where the story is going, you must never play the story. .”(14)

Howard Guskin

He goes on to point out that in episodic television the ending is invariably not even set when the series begins so an actor cannot rely on foreknowledge of the outcome. But this is too the good; in life we also do not know the way things will turn out. What has frequently been the cause of frustration for classically trained actors, he reframes as a benefit. Of course, in film-making, where the actor has to cope with scenes being shot completely out of order, he must have a grasp of where his work fits into the whole, just has he must retain an awareness of his movement relative to the set and the shot. But, being familiar with the course and knowing how to proceed is not the same as giving added meaning to certain dramatic moments.

Actors sometimes get carried away with the romantic notion that they are part of the great tradition of storytellers who would recite their tales in the flickering light of the camp fire; but on screen an actor’s job is not to tell stories, but to embody characters and any mixing of the two ends up in confusion. The actor’s performance is, of course, borne along on the narrative flow but any attempt at indicating what is to be understood implies an audience and opens up a division between character and situation. Timothy Spall refers to actors as “depicters”(29), but whether pictorial or verbal any knowing address to an audience is an irksome distraction from the actor’s immediate presence on screen. The actor’s first responsibility must always be to the truth of the moment and not the meaning.

References

14. Guskin, Harold, How To Stop Acting, Methuen, London, 2004

22. Marcus, Bennett: Sam Mendes’s 25 Rules for Directors, Vanity Fair, 11.3.2014

29. Potter, Sally,  Naked Cinema: Working with Actors, Faber and Faber, London, 2014