24 Bad Behaviour (Part2)

Bad behaviour on set most often erupts, not when things are going well, but at the worst moments when the director and production staff are least able to cope with it. Many times, when faced with imminent disaster, when the schedule is bearing down and just about everything that could go wrong has done just that, I would come across an actor beaming all over his face, who would ask me something like, “ Everything going to your liking?” Once or twice I thought that they were being sardonic, but then I realised that they were solely concerned with their own performance and were blinkered to everything else. Often they had prepared for weeks, if not months, for their moment before the camera and if they did not think that they were going to get their due share of time and attention, that is when trouble would erupt. So, when the crew are pulling together in a desperate effort to get the show in the can that is just when actors start to get difficult and raise problems that had never occurred before. It is then that they start cracking jokes, fooling around, corpsing. If everyone-else is getting up tight, they, for sure, will be hanging loose.

It is always the director who, come what may, must take responsibility for completing the schedule, but it would be wrong to think that the actors’ spite is primarily aimed in his direction. In fact, quite the opposite: it is often deliberately hidden from the director and it is the production manager, the first assistant and the lesser members of the crew who get the brunt of their ire. Of course, sooner or later reports work their way back; these I have often found hard to believe — at least, at first. However, on some occasions I have unintentionally witnessed more than enough to convince me.

For some stars it seems that no inflated salary, pampering, or roster of perks is sufficient to quell their disgruntlement. Michael Caine is one of the few actors to have spoken out about this:

“During the filming of The Magus, I had a confrontation not so much with Anthony Quinn as with Quinn's kowtowers. Every day we'd get a bulletin from one of his minions: "Tony's in a great mood today"; or "Watch out, Tony's in a terrible mood today." One day I said: "Has he ever asked what mood I'm in?" The minion said, "Why should he?”(5)

I once found myself, similarly, on a production held to ransom by the leading actor. Everyday messages would go out as to his mood. These were never given direct to me but I usually found out about them from  my assistants. On one of his black days I was following our star at a distance across a narrow boardwalk which had been erected across a boggy field from base camp to the actual location. The previous day I had seen him giving court during lunch-break to a whole bunch of stagehands, extras and the like, all laughing uproariously at his jokes. Today, one of them coming from the opposite direction greeted him with a beaming smile, to which in reply he hissed, “Get out of my way,” and ploughed straight on forcing him off the boardwalk into the mud. I stopped to help him back on but our star did not so much as afford him a glance back.

Often the actors who are the worse behaved are those who bear a grudge that they have been passed by or accorded less star status than they think they deserve. One such middle-aged actor with whom I was working on a TV series was called to the set for a short two-handed scene with a frail old man who had been one of those recurring faces in British films stretching way back. I positioned him opposite the only window, and our “star” to one side of it. The basic lighting had been set with, naturally, the key light streaming in through the window. Immediately, our principal looked round at the rig, pointed to where the guest actor was standing and announced that was where he wanted to  be. The old man immediately gave way, saying that he would be more than happy to swap sides with him — which made it all the more embarrassing, not just for me, but for everyone on set who knew exactly what was going on. Why did this over-paid and pampered actor find it necessary to behave in such a rude and unprofessional manner? It was unnecessary and utterly inappropriate.

It has sometimes been suggested that acting is fundamentally an undignified way to earn a living and that is why actors become so obsessed with status, quibbling about minor perks and imagined sleights. But this is not just a case of being difficult with those in power. War can break out among the cast if one actor feels that another is getting more attention, or more time, than they deserve. Particularly if they feel that actor is not of their calibre, or not giving them the respect that is their due. Again, Michael Caine has spoken out about this:

“The sort of dirty tricks such actors employ are fairly transparent, really. As in theatre, there is the Upstager: he keeps moving backward a few steps so that the other actors have to turn their backs to the camera to relate to him. Then there's the Scene-Stealer: he's the chap who will put in a little move of the hands or turn of the head during your tense moment and steal focus. The Staller does a slightly more subtle manoeuvre: he slows down the tempo that was set at rehearsal, extends pauses, talks more hesitantly and generally prolongs the time that the camera is on him, thereby hogging the scene.”(5) 

These ploys, however, are nothing compared to some of the ones that have been employed on my sets. Perhaps the worse was by an actress during a semi-nude love scene with an actor whom, for whatever reason, she loathed. At the end of every take she would turn away from the camera and mimic vomiting over the side of the bed. In another pairing it was the actor who was out to nobble the actress. During an intense emotional scene, when the camera was focused on her, he would stare at her mouth, her ear, her nose, and then, at the height of her impassioned outpouring, roll his eyes to heaven. After the “cut”, when confronted by the furious actress, he looked around to the crew with an astonished expression of hurt innocence, and then patted her on the shoulder and in a paternal voice reassured her that if she just relaxed and had confidence in herself he was sure her performance would turn out fine.

There have been occasions, when the ego-hyping and self-consolation of particular actors has gone from being a laugh, to what, in any other context, would be considered criminal behaviour. At the end of a shoot custom-made costume jewellery or period ornaments have gone missing, or whole boxes of expensive cosmetics disappeared from the makeup trailer. Sometimes these things are not even done surreptitiously, but carried off in a quite blatant manner. I walked onto one set in process of being dismantled to find the prop boys huddled in a state of some concern. When I questioned them they nervously told me that the star had just walked in with his driver, picked up all the parts of an audio system, piled them into the drivers arms, and then told him to go and put them in the boot of his car. They were worried that they would be held responsible for the loss and wondered if, perhaps, the producer had given the star permission to take it away. Of course, he had not; but he had no problem believing the prop boys’ story and so they were not held to blame. Why would such well-paid and privileged individuals indulge in this petty thievery? One can only assume that they have a monstrous sense of entitlement. Or else need to prove something to themselves.

Needless to say, not all actors behave in this way or anything remotely similar. They could not afford to risk their name even if they had the inclination. Nevertheless, it seems that there is a climate around the profession that fosters an amused admiration, rather than a shocked condemnation, for those who can and do get away with it. Charles Marowitz has made an eloquent apology for this devil-may-care attitude.

“The actor uses his ego as unavoidably as the boxer uses his fists, and the hazards in each profession are equally as great. To an actor, ego is not only the tool of his trade but the prop of his life. Outside the ring, the boxer can stuff his fists into his pockets to keep them out of harm's way, but an actor's ego is always exposed, the constant object of blissful inflations and remorseful deflations.“ (24)

I don’t buy this. Inflated egos are not a requirement of great acting any more than city traders require reckless bravura — though, perhaps, both come as the consequence of the intense stresses of the occupation. In all these errant cases it is fantasy and not reality that calls the shots.

There is an old actors’ joke, which, in one form or another, goes something like this:

“An actor walks into a pub just after closing time and orders a large scotch. The barman promptly tells him that they are closed. Hearing this the actor draws himself up to his full height and asks the barman, “Do you know who I am?” He stares back at the actor for a moment and then turns to call to his co-worker — “‘Ere, Joe. We got a bloke here who doesn’t know who he is!”

One night, in the company of actors, I was amused to hear that prized leading question used in all seriousness. We had been filming for some time in the middle of nowhere and everyone had grown bored with the country hotel in which we were holed up. One day one of the cast discovered that in less than an hour’s drive away there was a starred restaurant. He took it on himself to organise an expedition and asked me if I would like to join them. I decided to take an evening off and go along.

Naturally, as this was a group of actors without the usual staff to chivvy them along, we were late getting away — very late. Our convoy of cars finally drove off down a maze of country lanes and were soon lost in the darkness. In those days before the sat-nav it was a case of reading maps and road signs by torchlight: an ambitious project that filled me with gloom. However, after a number of minor disputes and retracing our route several times, we finally arrived. But, as we all trooped in the headwaiter tapped his wristwatch and shrugged: the kitchen had closed. 

After a dumb-struck moment of disbelief, one of our number took the initiative and stepped forward. He was an actor who had played supporting characters in a number of popular TV series, so was a bit of a face, but not someone I would describe as a star. Looking the waiter straight in the eye he pronounced the magic phrase — “Do you know who I am?” The waiter starred back at him a complete blank. So, the actor, scratching his cheek with a fingertip began to murmur a long list of show titles. Suddenly the waiter made a quite apology and darted away. A few moments later he returned with the proprietor in tow.

The restauranteur earnestly scanned our faces and registered a blank; he did not recognise any of us either. But then an extraordinary thing happened. He suddenly jumped out of his stupor, shooed the waiter away as if he had committed a profound error, and began a deferential stream of apologies, amidst shouted orders that our table be prepared immediately. It was not a case of being overawed by fame, because I’m sure he did not have a clue who any of us were; rather it was a case of being overawed by the very idea of fame, the very possibility that famous people had come to his restaurant and not been recognised.

As we walked through to the island of tables covered in white cloths that had been assembled for us, our spirits bubbled up. For sure, the whole group got a kick out of this scam. The old trope had actually done the trick. Here we were and all eyes were on us; the whole place was now abuzz with who we might be. That night it became clear to me that everyone loves to indulge in the mythology of stardom but the ones who love it most of all are the stars and would-be stars themselves.

References

5. Caine, Michael, Acting In Film: an actor’s take on movie making, Applause Theatre Books, New York, 1997

24. Marowitz, Charles, The Method as Means: an acting survey, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1961

15 The Eyes Have It

As a twenty-five year old director, still finding my feet in the world of drama, I cast the veteran actor, John Welsh, for a cameo role of a man who had seen more than he was willing to tell. I thought I had detected a reticent quality in him, perhaps not common among actors. However, in rehearsal I found that was not coming across

John Welsh

the way that I had hoped. I suggested to him that he should play the scene without looking directly at the other actor in the scene. John looked at me wide-eyed and asked why on earth would he not look at the person to whom he was speaking. I tried to explain that a shy person is often quite fearful of looking another directly in the eye, or meeting the look of another. He shook his head as if he thought that I was quite mad, and then suggested that, as the scene took place in a conservatory, he could be preoccupied with repotting a plant.

I had given John a direction in the negative mode — not to do something. He had translated this into the positive mode by inventing the business of fiddling with plant pots. He had inserted an action in place of an avoidance. I settled for this even though I felt that it was missing the point. Many years later I saw just what I had been looking for repeated week after week on BBC 

television’s The Fast Show, in the Ted & Ralph sketches,

brilliantly played by Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson.

Charlie Higson, Paul Whitehouse as 
Ted and Ralph in The Fast Show

In these Ted rarely looks Ralph in the eye because he does not want to face up to the truth of what he secretly knows that he would find there. This is perhaps something that could only really come across on screen and in close-up.

Musing on my failure to get this idea across to John Welsh I came to realise that the direction I had given him cut across a long theatrical tradition. One of the primary ways that the stage director can focus audience attention is by having the actor look at the person whom he is addressing and other actors on the stage to follow the conversation with their eyes until it is their turn to speak. We accept this convention without thinking but in reality the play of looks and glances is much richer and more diverse. Though acting for film and TV, supported by camerawork and editing, tends to follow the stage convention, on screen the eyes — set free — may well carry more meaning than the words. 

Peter Egan in The Prince Regent

I again stumbled on the problem of getting actors not to eyeball each other when working on the BBC series, The Prince Regent, though this time it was for quite opposite reasons. Peter Egan, who played the Prince, was an actor I did not get on well with at all well, and early in rehearsals he objected to the way I had positioned him for a long self-referential speech. I had wanted him to turn away from his auditors and step to where I could close in on him in the foreground with his listener behind. He called this “middle-distance acting” which, he declared, he found false; so I asked him to demonstrate how he thought it should be done.

Peter took a step back and played the speech mainly looking down-right, with quick looks up to his interlocutor at the end of lines. The delivery was natural enough but what he had done without thinking was take up the stock position of the opened-out two-shot — just what I had set out to avoid. This is a position which originally came from stage convention, where two actors in dialogue, instead of facing up, would stand at ninety degrees to each other so that the audience could see their faces. Later it was adopted in film, and especially television, to allow two cameras to simultaneously shoot over-shoulder shots of the two actors without getting in each other’s picture. It was a setup which I referred to as the “cocktail party stance”, because the only people who ever stood this way in real life were guests at a cocktail party who were more interested in looking round the room than the person to whom they were speaking.

one of the many double closeups
 in Ingmar Bergman's Persona

But there was also a question of inference and meaning. To look away from someone is an act of high status because it implies that you do not care one way or the other about their opinion. The way that Peter had played the scene was more akin to a fellow making an embarrassed confession to his mate in the pub. Further, by constantly glancing to his listener for confirmation he was negating the possibility of an ironic commentary on his proposals through the unhampered facial expression of his listener, which would be unseen by him, but registered throughout by the camera holding the two actors in a double close-up.

It is an interesting discovery to make that when we are not looking at the person with whom we are speaking our eyes betray more of what is going on in our mind than when we do. This is known in Neuro-linguistic Programming as the Eye-accessing Cues”. Once you have become aware of these movements they are so obvious that it is astonishing that they were

NLP Eye Accessing Cues

not formally recognised until the nineteen seventies. Some of the more obvious cues were, of course, instinctively known to actors; such as the flirtatious look held a beat too long followed by the lowering eyes down right to access feelings. Or, the guilty sideways look right when an alibi is broken. the point is that if an actor is experiencing his role, and not just going through the motions, when he is not looking directly at the person he is addressing his eyes are by no means dead, but just the opposite.

In a masterclass for BBC Television, that was much-talked about by actors, and was later published as a book, Michael Caine said:

The eyes of the psychopath — 

Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter

 in Silence of the Lambs

“Blinking makes your character seem weak. Try it yourself: say the same line twice, first blinking and then not blinking. I practiced not blinking to excess when I first made this discovery, went around not blinking all the time and probably disconcerted a lot of people. But by not blinking you will appear strong on screen. Remember: on film that eye can be eight feet across.”(5)

However, as I think Michael began to realise, this unblinking stare is the look of the psychopath. 

Cecile Paoli

In everyday conversation our direct looks are very, very, brief. Anything longer has immediate implications. I discovered this for myself when editing a conversation between Anthony Forest and Cecile Paoli for Bergerac. In the scene Anthony Forest’s character harbours an ulterior motive which he disguises behind flirtatious banter; while Cecile’s character is charmed by him but uncertain as to what his intentions really are. A key segment had been shot in separate closeups and I soon discovered that altering the length of an exchange of looks by just one frame (1/24 of a second) on either side of the cut could completely change the implication of the scene, from a brush-off to a promise, from naive acceptance to deep suspicion.

Later on in his masterclass Michael Caine takes a different tack and talks about rationing your looks:

“One of the finest practitioners of this technique is Marion Brando. He denies the camera his eyes. Half the time he's looking down or away. Then suddenly he looks up, and you are absolutely fascinated by his eyes. (5)

I would like to suggest that it was not so much that Brando was hiding his eyes but that the camera had been set up on the assumption that he would be looking at the person to whom he was speaking, but, in fact, for much of his performance he was engaged in internal processing. It was this that gave his performances such lingering fascination.

References

5. Caine, Michael, Acting In Film: an actor’s take on movie making, Applause Theatre Books, New York, 1997