17 On Casting

The most spectacular entrance to a casting session that I ever witnessed was that of a good-looking young man just out of drama school. He burst through the door and came boldly forward, his hand outstretched, a winning smile on his face. But, before he reached us, the casting director asked if he would close the door behind him. His head turned back but his body continued on its forward trajectory — with a resulting spectacular pratfall. He rolled over on the carpet, scrambled to his feet, and looked around as if, for a moment, he did not know where he was. Then he started forward again, his hand outstretched towards me, but just before it met mine, he remembered the door, turned and ran back. As he turned back to face us once more, we all collapsed with laughter. If he could have repeated this on demand, and if we were casting a slapstick comedy, he would certainly have got the part; but I doubted he could, we weren’t, and I don’t remember his name.

Casting sessions are for the actor a test of character, cool, and charisma. They can be seen as a ritual of humiliation and disappointment or they can be seen as an invitation full of promise.  So much hangs on a twist of fate, or a quirk of mis-recognition. Some actors get upset that all their training and hard-won experience can be sidelined by a few minutes superficial chit-chat; but this is to misunderstand the purpose of these sessions. An actor’s technical skills and professional competence must be investigated separately — by watching DVDs, going to live performances, or seeking out recommendations. In some cases there may even be formal auditions or screen tests organised, but that comes later. The initial casting session is about the personality and presence of the actor himself.

One session that stands out in my mind was when I interviewed June Brown, who would, sooner after, go on to world renown as Dot Cotton in East Enders. She burst through the door, dressed to the nines, and carrying a clutch of glossy bags from fashion stores. By-passing the chair in front of the desk she plumped down on a sofa, kicked off her very high-heeled shoes, and curled up with her legs beneath her. As she lit up a cigarette she explained that she had been out shopping with her daughter, having a last fling, because she had seen the writing on the wall and knew her glamour days were over; from now on it was all going to be someone’s aunt or granny or the old spinster next door. I had to tell her that I was not casting any glamorous role. “I know, Darling,” she said and swung

her feet down to face me; “Tell me about it.” And, as I described
the character of a working class woman whose mentally retarded

June Brown in Rules of Justice

son and been falsely convicted of murder, I could see gentle waves of empathy flickering over her face. That she had shown me a flighty side that still hankered after a bit of fun made it all the more poignant. I knew then that she would be terrific in the role.

There are some directors — so I have been told — who go in for bizarre questions or provocative personal enquiries, or off-the-wall improvisations, but, more usually the meetings simply take the form of a job interview. However, it would be a mistake to put too much store by this, because there is rarely a specific competence that is being assessed, and, often, no very clear-cut criteria for the vacancy. Even the one-line description sent out to agents can often appear to be contradicted by the range of actors invited to interview. Many might conclude that the director does not know what he wants, and to a degree this may be true, because, while one might have an image in mind, invariably one sets out in the hope of a marvellous surprise and the original parameters can be overthrown in an instant. Casting is all part of the process of finding out what the piece is really going to be about.

Charles Marowitz outside The Openspace Theatre
Tottenham Court Road, London

I have rather flippantly described a casting session as being more like speed dating than a job interview; Charles Marowitz has given a more precise analogy.

“If auditions are a dilemma for the actor, imagine the situation from a director's standpoint. He is looking at the actor as if through a stereopticon slide--focusing his image of the role and his image of the performer to see if they can blend into one. He has his expectations, his preconceptions. He cannot be objective.”(23)

Nevertheless, the actor should never try to second guess the director. it can be annoying to sense that an actor is putting on a performance, adopting an accent or manner that does not quite fit, in an attempt to present himself as what he imagines the director wants. This can descend to an insulting level when an actor comes dressed for the part. I have had one young man appear in a pristine white suit in the middle of winter; another in a heavy roll neck sweater in the height of summer. Once I rashly told agents that I would hold an open casting for teenage punks. An extraordinary looking assortment of youth filed in wearing bin-liners and clothes held together with safety-pins, tripping over their bondage trousers, and drooling over rings hooked on their lips. As I was talking to one aspirant an electric blue rivulet wound its way out of his quiff and started coursing down his forehead. It reminded me of the blue candle wax dripping onto a plate of cold-cuts in Roger Corman’s

Mask of the Red Death. I was soon to discover that these kids were turning up early with large bags and then trouping into the toilets to change and put on makeup before coming in to see me. Full marks for effort, but as far as far as I was concerned, it was all just a smoke screen.

At a casting session one hopes to meet the actor, himself or herself, and not a projection of what they think you want, or their interpretation of the character. Frequently one just wants to tell young actors to be themselves; but, of course, that would be begging the question.  Mel Churcher has remarked:

“Over the years ... I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon. The interview that happens suddenly so you haven’t time to prepare, the one you're not bothered about, the one where you fall over or your zip breaks - these are the ones you get. Also the times when a steely resolve takes away your nerves and you think, “Right this one is mine.' Whereas the interviews where you try really hard to please and to give them what you think they want, those are often not successful.”(7)

To try too hard is the wrong approach; but to not try at all is even worse. The trick is not to be “outcome dependent”; or, in other words, don’t act as if your life depended on it! And, on the other hand, don’t act as if you are above it all and couldn’t give a shit!  What is required is that state of openness and equanimity that the Chinese call Wu Wei - of being at one with the Tao. 

A more down to earth guideline for the actor, and one that is easier to grasp, is simply to match status — to begin on the equal terms that is the basis of any creative relationship. That is, not to be obsequious to those to those with the power to hire, but not to try to lord it over them either. On occasion some actors may try to give the impression that the part is beneath them, some who try to turn the tables and act as if they are interviewing the director. And, then, there are those who consider themselves to be stars, and demand to be treated as such; who turn up in Saville Row suits and the like, and act as if they have just popped in for a friendly chat as they happened to be passing by.

Miranda Richardson

One young actress who knew just how to handle herself from the start, was Miranda Richardson. She came in to meet me neatly groomed, wearing a svelte trouser-suit. Though, at that time, she had done next to nothing, she already looked like a star, without being at all showy or contrived. I immediately liked her. She was very alive but very much under control. As we chatted I noticed a chunky white plastic watch on her wrist. She pressed it and a little robot figure sprang apart holding the watch face. As she set it on the desk she gave me a sideways look, as if inducting me into some esoteric cult. At that moment I knew she would be perfect for the role I was casting. Unfortunately, I discovered that she had already been put on hold by Mike Newell for the lead part in his movie, Dance with a Stranger;  and as soon as he heard of my interest he firmed up his offer.

Aware of the near-impossibility of foreign actors passing as English, I always tried to avoid the reverse situation. When a part called for another language I did my best to cast a native speaker. A script for Bulman presented me with a number of scenes where Russian characters spoke together. Though this was a prime time show, I insisted that these should be done in Russian with subtitles. In the days before the collapse of the Soviet Union Russian actors were hard to find in the UK. The Czech actor, George Pravda, was an excellent character actor, who had already appeared in the series as a KGB operative with divided loyalties. Previously he had only played in English but he was a fluent Russian speaker. And, as the KGB interrogator I was able to cast Alexei Jawdokimov who had previously played a tiny part for me in The Enigma Files. He was actually part of a Cossack dance troupe but proved himself a useful actor and went on to many subsequent roles. For the lead part of a woman assassin, however, I ran into problems. One day the casting director came up to me with a movie still of a very striking young woman emerging from a pool, her hair plastered to her head. She was Katia Tchenko; of Russian origin but living in Paris. I immediately said that I had to see her.

Katia Tchenko in Sins of Omission (Bulman)

On the day due for our meeting, her flight was delayed and, while we waited, several desperate phone calls were put through to our room, asking if she had yet arrived, and insisting that the moment she did we were to give her a message to ring a certain executive club. When Katia finally arrived, dressed the way all Parisian actresses dress for interview — in high heels, high fashion and sparkling with jewels — we duly passed her the message. She exhaled in exasperation and with a backhand flip and a shake of her head hissed in French, Russian, and, then English, NO. Was it French arrogance or Russian dogmatism? I did not know, but, I knew that it would work for the part. Further she had that distinct, but hard to pin-down, Russian look. 

After the preliminaries she was handed the pages of script which had been translated into Russian, while I spread open my dual language version; but after a few moments rifling through the pages she looked up aghast — What is this? I can’t read this! For my benefit the Russian had been rendered phonetically with the Latin alphabet. Foolishly, we had not comprehended that, for someone speaking French everyday, to then work out the English phonetic transcription and from that guess the Russian word that should be written in Cyrillic script was too much to expect of anyone. She put the pages aside and spoke to us for a few moments in Russian, but, unfortunately there was no-one there who could understand a word she said. Of course, it did not matter a jot that I had not heard her read — she had already demonstrated that she was right for the part.

Readings are like photos  — aids to the director’s imagination and memory. It is perhaps better to read straight off the page than to present an idiosyncratic self-directed interpretation. A reading alone will rarely determine whether an actor is hired or not, but it offers a chance for the director to get a feeling for the actor’s sensibility. Therefore, any personal connections the actor may have with the text, or the subject matter, even if only metaphorical, will be of considerable interest. On the other hand, generalised intellectual discussion is a trap that can lead both actor and director astray. On one occasion I became so engrossed in an argument that I allowed the session to run way over the allotted time-slot with other hopefuls left waiting outside the door. Later I learnt from the actress’s agent that she had left convinced that she had the part and was shattered when I turned her down. She was bright, but intellectual acumen is never proof of an actor’s rightness for the role in question.

An actor can rarely argue their way into a part unless an argumentative quality is just what the role requires. Generally a more subtle approach is needed. The casting interview is normally only ten to fifteen minutes long, and in that time the actor has the task of presenting him/herself as someone who could uniquely fulfil all the requirements of the role on offer. So, the best preparation is simply to imagine oneself in it — what follows from there is then wide open. The crippling problem that often arises for actors is that they become intent on controlling the impression they make which kills all spontaneity. 

In the classic book Impro, Keith Johnstone, calls anything unexpected that occurs to disrupt a routine an offer, which the players in that situation can either accept, or block. 

“I tell my actors never to think up an offer, but instead to assume that one has already been made. Grouch Marx understood this: a contestant at his quiz game froze so he took the man’s pulse and said, “Either this man’s dead or my watch has stopped.”(16)

For June the offer was the couch, for Miranda it was my interest in her watch, for Katia it was an unwanted message and a script she could not read.

A casting session can soon become a routine that repeats over and over. It is up to the actor to bring it to life.

References

7. Churcher, Mel, Acting For Film: truth 24 times a second, Virgin Books, London, 2003

16. Johnstone, Keith, Impro: improvisation and the theatre, Eyre Methuen, London, 1981

23, Marowitz, Charles, Directing The Action: acting and directing in the contemporary theatre, Applause Books, New York, 1991

16 Looking For Results

I only worked with Kate Nelligan for one long day. I had been asked by The Southbank Show to re-stage and film an extract from the David Hare play, Plenty, which had been a big hit at The National Theatre some years before. For this I was given the two stars of the original cast, Kate Nelligan and Stephen Moore. As they had performed the play to great acclaim over a lengthy run, and Kate’s performance had even been nominated for an Olivier Award, I assumed that they would both be very set in the way they wanted to do the scenes for me. I could not have been more wrong. It was a joy to discover that they were both wide open to direction and more than ready to hear what I had to say.

As the day wore on, Kate, in particular, I found quite fascinating as, over and over, she proved to be one of those rare actors who always surprise. She could play directions quite precisely yet the effect would be beyond anything that I had anticipated. Her behavioural language was so rich and nuanced that, whatever I asked her to do, she could quickly and easily make it appear fresh and original and uniquely her own.

Kate Nelligan, Stephen Moore in Plenty

By the time we wrapped, I was determined to work with Kate again, and told her so, but, such are the vagaries of the industry that, before an opportunity arose, she had left to work in New York, and from there returned to her native Canada. Prior to that, however, I had a scene reported to me from a BBC rehearsal room that made me laugh. Kate was working with a director known to be “actor centred”; after a series of gushing comments, I was told, she suddenly turned on him and snapped — “I know it’s bloody marvellous but is it RIGHT?”

A basic question and surely one any director should be able to answer without hesitation. Yet, in some quarters the idea has grown up that it is better for the director not to have any clear idea of where he wants to go — which is labelled directing for results. Instead, his role should be just to facilitate the actors’ process. Foremost among the theorists of this approach is Judith Weston, who, in her book The Film Director’s Intuition, gives the following advice:

“An alternate response to the actor's hypothetical "You mean you want it angry?" might be to ask, "What do you think? Do you think she's still trying to reason with him? Or has she had enough of his shenanigans and is ready to give him hell?" Here I turned the responsibility for her emotional life over to her - I have also translated her result-oriented formulation into verbs.”(39)

When I was first starting out in TV drama I tried this “Socratic Questioning” technique. The first couple of times the cast indulged me, before one of the old timers gave me a beady look and said, “Why don’t you tell us what you think first and then we’ll tell you what we think.” On reflection it seemed a perfectly reasonable request, and that was the method I adopted from then on. Further, in the above quote, as Weston herself proudly points out, she skews round a question about feeling to one about “actioning”. Although she addresses herself specifically to the film director, this is a technique more applicable to theatre than screen acting where the internal response invariably carries more weight than the exterior attack that prompts it.

Kate Nelligan in Plenty

Many actors are, of course, highly intelligent with a wide range of knowledge, and even those with little formal education, have more often than not spent a good part of their lives studying drama and scripts of all kinds. Of course, as a rule, they readily grasp what is intended by the writer and also that much is open to interpretation. It is the director’s role to provide that and then judge the actor’s results against this criteria. It is the actor’s role to be guardian of his own process in achieving that end. 

Mark Rydell, former actor and movie director (nominated for an Oscar for On Golden Pond) put it like this:

“I learned from an interview with a conductor I saw on television in Chicago. Guy interviewing him said, “I know this will sound stupid, but what does a conductor do? It looks like he’s waving a stick. They’re all playing the music, what does he do?” And the elderly conductor said, “I tell them how it’s going to go. That’s my job” ... And I never forgot that. Really what a director does is tell them all how it’s going to go.”(36)

Imagine the conductor of a symphony orchestra who told his musicians to just pick up their instruments, start playing, and see what happens ... Or started engaging in convoluted questioning as to how each player felt. Actors must be challenged: what they do by instinct is, by no means, the final word. To achieve this end they cannot stand back and judge themselves. They must shift from the dissociated, objective view of the piece as a whole, to the subjective view through their character’s eyes. It is the director who must remain on the outside as witness of what they do, a spur to greater achievement, and guardian of the result.

Only the director can know if what the actor offers up is right, because this is his job. The actor, Simon Abkarian, has summed it up to a tee:

“As an actor you invent things because of the vision of the director. No vision, no invention.” (29)

References:

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

36. Travis, Mark W., The Film Director’s Bag of Tricks: get what you want from writers and actors, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City CA, 2011

39. Weston, Judith, The Film Director’s Intuition: script analysis and rehearsal techniques, Michael Wiese Productions, Studio City CA, 2003

14 Intent On The Present

I was shooting a Word War ll romantic comedy called Waiting for Dublin, and Andrew Keagan, had been flown in from California to play an American fighter pilot. Previously I had wrangled time to go through the script line-by-line with the principal cast and make any changes and adjustments that might be necessary. I had told the producers that this would save valuable time when it came to the shoot. I soon discovered, however, that Andrew considered these changes not to be definitive but just possible alternatives to be tried out when the time came. Some of his other alternatives he had shared with the rest of the cast, some he had not. Now he was changing the lines so often that it was not just the other members of the cast who were getting confused; he was confusing himself.

I was reminded of my early days at Granada when, in the bar of Manchester’s Film Exchange, I met an American girl who intrigued me. She had a zany, off-the-wall, manner reminiscent of Diane Keaton’s portrayal of Annie Hall in the film of that name. I soon discovered that she was a visiting actress who had  done a lot of work off-Broadway in New York and was very much a party to the “underground” theatre scene. Now she had scored a part in a play that was being produced at the studios. On the day of the recording I decided to drop by and watch from the control box. She was playing a young American, not so different from her real life self. and all seemed to going fine until, in the middle of her dialogue, she turned, walked across the set, and yanked open the door of a refrigerator. The interior was unlit and empty but for a few cardboard boxes. Suddenly there were shouts of CUT, and groans of exasperation. Immediately, the prop boys jumped up to protest to the floor manager — “We didn’t know she was going to do that. That wasn’t rehearsed.” The floor manager quietened them down before turning to ask the actress, “Why did you do that?” Mouth agape, eyes wide, she spread her hands in affronted innocence — “I was just trying to bring some life to this pile of shit!”

Coming out of the Beat movement of the 50s and the introduction of zen to the West there seemed to arise in America a mad desire to throw the preconceived to the winds and find spontaneity in the moment. At that time The Method approach to acting, taught by Lee Strasberg at The Actors’ Studio of New York held sway in that world. Among its alumni were Marlon Brando, James Dean, Paul Newman, Al Pacino and a galaxy of others. But now a number of Strasberg’s closest associates, notably Stella Adler and Sandford Meisner, broke away to develop their own system. Central to Strasberg’s Method was the practice of connecting to a character by drawing on personal emotions and memories, known as affective memory. Meisner believed this approach made actors focus too much on themselves and their past. He described acting as "...living truthfully under imaginary circumstances”, and encouraged actors to free themselves to react spontaneously by fully immersing themselves "in the moment”.(25)

Another who had similar differences with Strasberg was the actor and director, John Cassavetes. As a student, I had sat mesmerised through Cassavetes’ breakthrough first film, Shadows, which ended with a caption reading, THE FILM YOU HAVE JUST SEEN WAS AN IMPROVISATION. We now know that this was only partially true, but it was a key factor that rapidly lead improvisation to became the buzz word of the moment. The light-weight equipment that made this approach to film possible, had been developed during the war, but it was not until the late fifties, after refinements made by, Robert Drew, Richard Leacock and other pioneers of Direct Cinema that the new aesthetic possibilities were realised. Their breakthrough documentaries, such as Primary, were a revelation because, while they were centred around crisis situations which would have been the stuff of drama, the raw way that they were presented made all current acting look contrived and old-fashioned. It was that same confrontational, unvarnished, human reality, but under imaginary circumstances, that Cassavetes set out to recreate in the movies.

Whilst producing a collage of brilliant fragments, the first version of Shadows, did not amount to a satisfactory whole. For the second shoot, which produced over a quarter of the final running time of 81 minutes, Cassavetes resorted to a fully written script.(6) This revised version achieved world-wide success, including three BAFTA nominations, and so, for his follow up film, Faces, he started out with a draft script of 250 pages. However, during the course of the shoot, Cassavetes began accepting the “offers” made by his cast, modifying the movie as he went along, in order to incorporate diversions, intuitive mistakes, sudden impulses, unforeseen directions, etc. With the inevitable continuous reshooting of earlier material that this approach necessitated, the result was that the shoot, which Cassavetes largely financed himself by mortgaging his own house, went on for seven months. As he put it himself: “Faces became more than a film: it became a way of life ...” (37)

Clearly, this was not a viable way to go on making movies, but it enabled Cassavetes to discover how to script movies as if they were improvised. And, despite the fact that all his films from then on were pre-written, the idea of his films being improvised stuck. The surface effects of improvisation have been summed up, repetition, interruption, and hesitation,  but Cassavetes took it far beyond that. Firstly, he removed all setting up of scenes, (even though he had resorted to this in some of the written portions of Shadows), and then he removed all other forms of, what I have called, telling, but that he called editorialising. He then assembled his scenes, not in logical progression, moving from one dramatic idea to the next, but rather from emotional impulse to impulse that shifted, with sudden changes of tone and pace — through, what I call,  the feeling context — rather than pursuing any clear and simple line of motivation.

The cast of Trinity Tales : 

Francis Mathews, Paul Copley, Susan Littler, Colin Farell, 

John Stratton, Bill Maynard, Gaye Brown

One of my first forays into the BBC was to direct Alan Plater’s Trinity Tales at Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham. Under David Rose’s stewardship, this outpost had become a hotbed of innovation, with drama commissions that would never have been approved by the London hierarchy. My show was certainly bright and original, with songs, jokes, plays within plays, pastiche and a quite raucous style of narration. But, I soon discovered that there was a parallel, but quite different form of experimental drama in production at the studios.

One day I was sat in the canteen reading scripts when I became aware of a dispute going on at the next table between a props department representative and some production staff. Apparently the director had demanded that a store cupboard be filled with every conceivable piece of household cleaning equipment. For a moment I wondered whether the kookie actress from Off-Broadway had resurfaced, but then I realised that this cornucopia of practical props was demanded, not just for recording, but for the whole of rehearsals. According to the union rules this meant that props operatives would have to be standing by for the whole of rehearsal period which seemed to be extended well beyond the norm. And, what is more, it was not clear whether any of this equipment would ever be used because there was no proper script — they were just improvising.

The director causing the stir was Mike Leigh, who had come from the theatre workshop movement and, via an independent film, was now attempting to extend this way of working into the tightly scheduled, union-controlled world of TV. To actually shoot in a free-wheeling manner would, at that time, have been out of the question, but Mike’s use of improvisation was restricted to devising the drama during the rehearsal period. The actors were encouraged to base their characters on a real person that they knew, which resulted in a range of characters not often seen on screen. It also lead to a deep identification between actor and role. However, in my opinion, the process of then transcribing these explorations into a fixed script, inevitably lead to a theatricalisation of the end product. 

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Brenda Blethyn in Mike Leigh’s 

Secrets and Lies

Mike Leigh’s biggest early success, Abigail’s Party, was, in fact, derived from a theatre production and relied heavily on Alison Steadman’s wicked mimicry of a garrulous social climber. By extending his work into television and film he was able, on occasion, to focus on less articulate characters, as he had in his breakthrough film, Bleak Moments, but rules for composing the drama, which he laid down, limited narrative surprises, and restricted the final form the work could take. The most successful of his later works, Secrets and Lies, relies on the essentially theatrical ingredients of trauma, confrontation and confessional monologues. There is nothing of the febrile present moment uncertainty that Cassavetes set out to capture, or the fleeting images of time that belong exclusively to the cinema.

The focus on the present moment in American acting had largely come about in reaction to what they called, The English Style of Acting, which was about the polished delivery of a text. Meisner likened the text to a canoe afloat on a raging river. The river was emotion, which was what concerned him first and foremost. “Punctuation is emotional, not grammatical,”(25) are words with which he once summed it up. I would certainly agree that the emotional pulse of the actor is more important than marks on a page, but there are things that have to be said. Emotion may be a propulsive force carrying the text forward or it may be a counter force against it being spoken, but an actor cannot give himself to embodying that emotion if he is messing with the words. By striving for spontaneity he locks himself out of the present moment and is no longer all there.

It is ironic that Sandford Meisner is best known for The Repetition Exercise in which two actors repeat to each other the same observation, over and over, until there is a  felt impulse to change it. The point is not that the line is being repeated but that each time it should be said as if for the first time, in response to circumstances. Unfortunately, this has resulted in some young American actors wanting to do the very opposite and never say the same words twice. Often this can result in a mumbled mush of unnecessary grace words — all those ums and ahs and well okays — jarring substitutions and clumsy circumlocutions. It was amusing then to come across the following quote from Julie Christie:

“I can get distracted by the other actor doing something ...  They might be coming up with their own word for something in the script, but if it doesn't make sense and it doesn't carry things through it is distracting. If they keep saying the wrong word that can subconsciously affect your attention.” (29)

Acting truthfully means getting out of your own way and allowing imaginary circumstances to become real in the same way that an hypnotic suggestion can become real for the one in a trance. This is a level of belief beyond the rational mind, beyond words. 

References

6. Carney, Ray, Shadows: BFI Film Classics, BFI Publishing, London, 2001

25. Meisner, Sanford & Longwell, Dennis, Sanford Meisner On Acting, Random House, New York, 1987

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

37. Ventura, Michael, Cassavetes Directs: John Cassavetes and the Making of Love Streams, Kamera Books, Harpenden 2007

13 The Superstar and the Pro

I was in talks with Channel 4 to direct a Bollywood co-production which would be shot largely in Mumbai. I was, of course, thrilled by the prospect, but the six-part mini-series hit a major problem before it had begun. The whole story revolved around a young Glaswegian cop of Indian origin who was taken along as an assistant by an English detective inspector on a trip to trace a drugs trail back to its source in India. At a late stage, the producers started to wonder who could play this part and, after an extensive search, discovered that there was no-one; no actor of the right age and ethnic origin who could also deliver the impossibly difficult Glasgow accent. Their only hope was a soul singer, named Shan Khan. Shan Kahn with Deepak Tijori in Bombay Blue Shan had trained in Glasgow as an actor but had since played only one small part in a BBC local drama. The producers asked me if I would meet him and decide whether I thought he would be capable of carrying the series. They told me that if the  answer was positive they would finance a crash course for me, working with a small crew, to take him through the basics of acting on camera before I went out to set up in Mumbai. I had on a number of occasions been struck by how unprepared for professional work young actors were when they came out of drama school. Even such simple things as waiting after the clapper board for the director’s action before beginning. Certainly, I felt there were many things that I could teach in a week. When I met Shan I found him bright, sensitive, and one-hunded-per-cent eager to commit. In fact, he seemed like a natural for the part, and so we shook hands and I went back to devise the syllabus for what, with a touch of irony, I would call The Superstar Screen-acting Academy. syllabus of The Superstar Screen-acting Academy We hired a rehearsal room for a week. Paul Gavin, the series director of photography, was free and eager to get in on the action; he brought camera, lights and a few of his regular crew. I decided that we would work long mornings, as is quite usual in TV rehearsals, and that everything would be recorded. At the end of each session Shan would be given the tapes to review at home as well as prepare for the next day’s work. We started off going through the basics that every professional picks up over the years, but, at least at that time, no-one seemed to teach — hitting marks, finding the light, working with camera movements, the eye-line flash, eye-lines to one eye, eye-lines within the matt-box, and so on. It was important that from day one Shan would be able to walk out onto the set and act as if he knew exactly what to expect and what needed to be done. As the week progressed we got on to more advanced topics. I was eager to give Shan the benefit of the long days and nights I had spent in the cutting rooms. There are extremely few actors who ever get a grasp of the process and importance of editing because to drop into a cutting room for a few minutes, or even a few hours, will teach you nothing much. It is only by sitting through the long, and often tedious, process of an edit that you will come to understand the reasons why one take is chosen over another, why a cut is made at one point rather than another, and all the problems that arise when assembling and shaping an actor’s performance. So we ran through explosive starts, the difference between cues and impulse points, how to give edit points and become pivotal to a scene by head-turn, change of eye-line, and so on. We did some present sense awareness exercises which lead the way into working on an interior stream of consciousness, which I called, Dreaming on Camera. To bring the Superstar Academy to a close I came to making more direct links with music; rhythm, pace, counterpoint, tone and underlying emotion. The next time I saw Shan was in Mumbai where he was treated by the Bollywood crew with the deference accorded a star. I do not know whether there had ever before been a whole drama series, a relatively expensive international coproduction to boot, revolving around a novice actor who had hardly ever appeared on screen before; but, if there had, I did not know of it. Shan not only had to be on set almost every day, but to perform as equal along side the veteran English actor, Donald Sumpter, a number of Bollywood film stars, and, the highest earning actor in Indian TV, Shekhar Suman.  Shan Kahn with Shekhar Suman in Bombay Blue Inevitably, Shekhar would arrive, before his call time, asleep in the back of his car, having come direct from another shoot. His assistant would then come and collect his pages for the day and check any special requirements for makeup and wardrobe. At a precise interval before Shekhar was due on set, he would be woken and handed the pages. At that point he would know nothing at all of what he was scheduled to do that day, and, quite possibly, not even where he was. When I first heard of this routine I was furious, but the truth was that he gave me nothing about which I could complain. By the time Shekhar appeared on set he would be line perfect, and have a sure grasp of exactly what the scene was about. He listened attentively, took direction without argument, always hit his marks, found the lens ... In short, he acted with a professionalism that would put most British and American actors to shame. As for Shan? He coped magnificently, despite disparaging remarks from some other members of the cast when they discovered that he had done nothing much before. He had graduated from The Superstar Academy with honours, and I was satisfied that in a week I had given him a fair grounding in how to approach the work and behave on set. What I had not prepared him for was the relentless schedules, the jarring start-stop rhythm, the self-regarding bitchiness, the curious loneliness of the actor’s life. [Shan is now making his way as a screenwriter and director and recently saw the release of his first film, Honour.]

12 The Actor's ID

“I remember Nic Cage saying to me, when I was in Face/Off with him, 'You know, I mean Alessandro, who do you wanna be man? I mean like, you know, who are you? What's your deal?'  And I was like, 'I don't know what you're talking about, I have no idea, I don't know what I wanna be, I just wanna play a lot of different characters.' And he was like, 'Well, you better figure it out,' and you know I never really did. Some great actors have strong personalities that come through in all of their roles. There's some part of them that you can see in every one of their performances, even though, technically, there's all of this mastery that obscures it.”(29)

Alessandro Nivola

From a glance at his filmography it would appear that Nicholas Cage has played a very wide range of parts — from the ruthless assassin of Face/Off, to the terminal alcoholic of Leaving Las Vegas, to the wild romantic of Moonlighting, to the needy screenwriter of Adaptation, to the drug addled cop of Bad Lieutenant (Port of Call New Orleans), to the investment banker turned hen-pecked husband of The Family Man, and so on and so on. Yet paradoxically there is a very clear image of Nicholas Cage’s personality that comes through, a personality that we all feel that we know. 

The public tend to think of casting as an audition where various actors come in and take a test to see who does best. When it comes to casting for the screen, however, the process is much more like speed dating. It is not a honed performance that you are looking for, but just the opposite. You are trying to get a feel for the actor’s own personality and how it might mesh with the role. It is not even a considered interpretation that you hope for so much as an honesty and openness to how the character may evolve. You may start out with an ideal image in mind, but you are really just waiting for someone to come along with whom you can fall in love — in that role. You are looking for someone who can fire your imagination. 

“It always starts with me. Whatever character I'm playing is me. It's a version of me. Who would I be or what would I sound like if I were this person?“ (29)

Steve Buscemi

Don Henderson in Strangers

An actor who is prepared to invest himself in a role will always trump the skills of a great impersonator. What is required for the screen is more the channelling of feeling than anything that can be admired as a performance. It is the truth of the actor himself, exposed to the imaginary happenstance of the story, that enthrals us

Don Henderson was an actor of limited range, but one who always brought his own character to the part. One day he proudly told me that he held the world record for having played the same character — that of George Bulman — in a single play and then through three completely different TV series, The XYY Man, Strangers, and Bulman, each one having run through several consecutive seasons. Although officially credited to the writer, Kenneth Royce, Don, in effect invented this character to the degree that it became impossible to imagine any other actor playing the part. Over the course of 65 hours of television Bulman gradually became Don’s mirror image. 

Originally intended to have been a bent copper, he came to stand for the very opposite, becoming disillusioned with moral corruption in the police force and retiring to run his own private detective agency as a sideline to repairing clocks. 

Originally, the character was meant to be a pretentious autodidact who spouted garbled quotations much to everyone-else’e merriment; in Don’s hands this become transformed into gnomic epithets delivered with a knowing smile that recalled the mystical utterances of Caine in the TV series Kung Fu.

Originally the character was said to be scruffy, which was unremarkable, except that Don, who was just so in real life — (It was said that he married his second wife, Shirley Stelfox, in a pair of jeans.) — used it as a licence to carefully assemble such telling items of wardrobe as Hush Puppies, a “Will Power” T-shirt bearing a portrait of Shakespeare, Edwardian gold-rimmed half-specs, and a pair of woolly gloves. 

In an episode of Strangers, which I directed, he came up with one of his most memorable scene-stealers — eating a fried-egg sandwich whilst wearing those grimy gloves. Then there was the invention of punctuating plot-laden dialogue by drawing on a nasal inhaler. 

On an episode of Bulman, which I also directed, he came in one day, pleased as punch, because he had come across a supermarket plastic bag with a graphic of The Keystone Cops on the side. From that moment on, Bulman carried the bag (or one similar) in lieu of a briefcase everywhere he went. (It was meant to have his case notes inside; in reality, it normally carried Don’s script.) 

Don’s performance came so much from left field that it was impossible to take a critical stance towards it. You either bought it or you did not. Some viewers just “didn’t get it”, but for others it held a special place in their lives. Anyone who drove through Manchester in a car with Don, as on occasion I did, could have little doubt that he was a star. Everywhere people would wave, and shout out. Of course, it was never the stories from his series, that the punters remembered, but one or other of Don’s little quirks. 

directing Boy Who Won The Pools with 

Michael Waterman, Don Henderson, Gillian Martell

Though Don rarely appeared in comedy as such, I always thought of him as an actor in the tradition of the great silent stars of comedy, like Harold Lloyd. For one of my own rare forays into comedy, The Boy Who Won The Pools, I invited him to play a supporting role. During the shooting of a scene, between Don and Derek Deadman, I ruined a take — for the only time in my life — by bursting out laughing. To get through the whole scene I had to bite hard on my hand. It was only later, at the edit, that I discovered the truth of that old adage of veterans: “If it’s hilarious on set it’s sure to die a death on screen”. 

Don’s character, needed to rub up against a bit of violence and skulduggery for his humanity to shine through. That is why his detective series worked. Shortly before his death he bought the rights to the character of Bulman, and — who knows? — if granted more time, that redoubtable character may well have shown up on TV in yet another series.

References

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

11 No Place To Hide

“… many actors are shy but acting gives them a way of hiding in plain sight” (13) Caroline Goyder Following close on the heels of est came The Mastery, where I got my own taste of acting, and a taste of my own medicine. The Mastery in its present day iteration is called The Mastery of Self Expression, but back then it was simply called The Mastery. The workshop had come out of The Actors’ Institute of New York, however, it was not designed to be primarily for actors, but for everyone. Some of the acolytes from the est training told me that, as I was a drama director, this was something that I simply could not pass up. And then they let drop that it culminated in the delivery of a two minute monologue before the entire group of, maybe, over a hundred. What? This was definitely outside my comfort zone, but, they were soon proved right. Despite the heavy fee, this was a challenge I could not turn down.  At first I found it hard to comprehend that they would treat professional actors and civilians from other walks of life, in exactly the same way. But  that is exactly what they did, and I quickly came to see that this was the genius of the system. The problems experienced by actors are at base no different from those we all experience in trying to connect and communicate in the course of our everyday lives. We are all human and, perhaps, to some extent, we are all actors. Slowly and painfully The Mastery brought to the fore the paradox that we all desperately want to be seen and we are all desperately scared of the prospect.  The founder, Dan Fauci, on his website expresses it this way: “The Mastery is not about acting technique — you still have to learn your craft. But it's about a quality of presence — the ability to risk being authentically who you are in the presence of an audience. It's about taking that fear, putting a bridle on it and riding it — using the permission of a good relationship with yourself in the presence of others.” We gathered in a large old church owned by Lynn Redgrave. There were secretaries and housewives, businessmen and academics, journalists, musicians, a radio DJ, and, of course, self-help junkies, and many actors and would-be actors. In this workshop there was nowhere to hide. Giving information about ourselves was treated as an exercise in personal communication. You were no more allowed to hide behind your own personality quirks and limitations than the actor was allowed to hide behind his characterisation in performance. An authentic presence was all; but being just the way you are is not quite the same as being authentic. My father was a war hero with military control over any expression of anger or depression — and I grew up along the same lines. Whereas the centre-piece of the est training had been The Fear Process, the centrepiece of The Mastery was The Anger Process. In this one half of the participants were lined up behind the other and roughly matched for weight and build. Those behind were given the task of restraining those in front by their belt or with a rope while they kept up a continual assault of air punches and kicks. The trainers and assistants would then come along and bellow the most cutting and crude personal insults at each and everyone of us in turn. No half-measures were allowed. After a few minutes it was as if Bedlam had been let loose, and this went on and on and on, until, one by one, we all collapsed in exhaustion. (Some months later, standing on a street corner, I discovered that I had been badly let down by an acquaintance and, to my own surprise, became justifiably angry. As I stormed away I could not help smiling to myself — The Anger Process had worked.) The Mastery set out to take our habitual acts apart and find the real person beneath. It looked at us as a whole, not just the parts that we wished to be seen. All our excuses, our justifications, our rackets were stripped away. There were no get-out clauses. One slightly plump, middle-aged actress used to playing mumsie roles was assigned the task for the following day to come dressed in the most sexy and provocative garb she could muster and then flirt with any and every male whom she found attractive. Boy, did she have fun! Conversely, a very self-demeaning young man full of false humility was given the task of emphasising those very qualities and acting as everyone-else’s lackey.  Finally the moment came for me to put myself on the line, go out onto the stage alone and deliver my monologue. With considerable fascination I had watched quite a number of the other participants go on stage before me and gradually be coaxed to come alive, to drop their act, to take on their natural charisma. Over and over again they were brought to deliver their piece directly to the audience, as if to one person, to one person after another, and to actually look and see the effect that their words and their emotion had, rather than just being blinded by fear. No-one at this stage cared about the interpretation of the piece, only the communication.  When I was called up my legs were shaking so much I could hardly stand — or that is how it seemed to me. Later, when I discovered that no-one had noticed this, I was genuinely surprised. To smile and be charming in tense situations came naturally to me, but I was soon stripped of all that. To be direct and passionate and not hide behind smooth talk and irony was my task. After the two minute solo had been worked over and presented by me for a second time, the audience were each tasked to write a review. Those hundred-odd bits of paper I would keep wrapped up in a drawer for many years to come. I had told everyone that I had no desire to be an actor, but, it was clear from the written comments that many had just not believed me. I was urged to take my courage in my hands and “Go for it!” I could tell that for them nothing could better success as an actor; but I had crossed the burning coals of my fire-walk, and had no intention of ever doing it again.

Reference: 13. Goyder, Caroline, The Star Qualities: how to sparkle with confidence in all aspects of your life, Sidgwick & Jackson, London 2009

10 The Fear Barrier

Riding the Intercity to Granada’s Manchester studios I found myself sat opposite a restless man who seemed eager to talk. It turned out that he was a club entertainer who was on his way to, what he said, would be his last gig. He was not an old man; perhaps in his early forties. He told me that he had started out in showbiz while he was still in his teens and, while he had never achieved the success that he had hoped for, he had, not only been able to support himself, but also raise a family on the proceeds. I asked him why he now wanted to give it up. He told me that from the start he had suffered nerves before going on but had assumed that as he got more experienced it would fade away. Instead it had got gradually worse. Now he could never go on without being sick into a bucket several times. The horror of it all had just become too much for him. His tale made me realise that stage-fright is not just a passing flutter of the heart, but a very real adversary. In the est training there had been a notorious stage that all had to pass through, called The Fear Process; I believe that it was actually called something else by the organisers but those who had gone through it always referred to it as The Fear Process. This simply required participants to stand in a line on a stage facing the audience — and do nothing. They were not allowed to smile, frown make comments or attitudinise in any way; they simply had to stand. If they did anything else they were immediately shouted down. It was astonishing how difficult this proved; some started shaking all over, others hysterically protesting, others hyperventilating, some simply burst into tears. After a while several assistants came and stood directly in front of each participant in turn, staring straight into their eyes until they were able to calmly look back. There were a number of professional actors in my training, some well-known, and I was interested to find that, contrary to what one might have expected, they were affected as much as anyone-else. It appeared that all their experience of going on stage counted for nothing when they were stripped of a character behind which to hide. It seems that in all of us there is a deep-rooted conflict between the desire to be seen and the fear of exposure to the other’s gaze. No doubt the life-affirming exhilaration that many actors feel after a successful performance comes from having overcome this natural resistance, having passed through the curtain of fear and returned unscathed. For most the thrill outweighs the terror, but the balance can, sometimes unexpectedly, tip the other way. This is what happened to a young actress with whom I worked named Elizabeth Cassidy. While the business rejects many hopefuls outright, and gradually wears others down with time, it is comparatively rare for an actor who is young and successful, with a future ahead, to voluntarily give it all up.  Elizabeth Cassidy in Gangsters After leaving drama school Elizabeth Cassidy quickly gained a string of TV credits, most notably a starring role, first in the TV film, Gangsters, directed by Philip Saville, and then in the two series of the same name which followed. It was as director on the last of these that I met Liz. Firstly, I noticed that she became very twitchy when time was taken lining up shots of her. Then I discovered that she was frequently missing from publicity shots because she would make excuses not to turn up. So there are very few shots of her, other than screen shots to be found. Despite her good looks, Liz hated to be photographed when she was not immersed in a role. A year or so later I worked with her again on an episode of Crown Court. She was talking then about giving it up the business, that the constant stress and uncertainty had become too much for her, but, as she said it with a laugh, I did not take her too seriously. Actors frequently talk of giving it up but rarely do. It was only much later that I discovered this show was the last title to appear on her IMDb credit list. I did, however, work with Liz once after that, five years later, when she came in as an assistant casting director on my play, The Personal Touch. For the general public it can come as a surprise to learn that actors are more often than not rather shy people. It seems counter-intuitive that they should choose to expose their inner being on stage and screen for a living but I see this as proof of the strength of their drive to be seen and heard. They have learnt to pass from an oppressive introverted world of self-regard into an extroverted state of bathing in the attention of others. Sometimes one can see an immediate positive effect of this release from the tensions of ordinary life. The slouch-shouldered, mumbling actor suddenly takes on real presence; his posture, his voice, his look, everything changes. This is something more fundamental than just acting a role; it is a transformation of the whole instrument that makes the successful acting of a role possible.  When I first met the actor Kenneth Colley, I was alarmed to discover that he had a shallow cough that seemed to uncontrollably interrupt his conversation every few minutes. I soon established that this was a chronic nervous condition and not a passing infection. However, he assured me that as soon as he started to act it would disappear. And, sure enough, as if by magic, it did. However, with Derrick O’Connor, another actor on the same show, an habitual hand gesture, that I had hardly noticed in ordinary conversation, proved more obdurate when it came to his performance. First I just asked him to eliminate it, but this did not work; so I suggested that he hold his hands behind his back. This was fine for a bit but then, suddenly, one hand would jump free and fly up in front of his face. Derrick himself seemed surprised at it’s recalcitrance. In the end, for the purpose of rehearsal, I resorted to tying his hands together. Eric Morris calls these habitual quirks, ticks and mannerisms dependencies. (41) Sometimes they can be cultivated into signature behaviours by which we come to know the actor, but they are still defences and distractions that interrupt the flow of real experience. And sometimes these set into insurmountable blocks that stand in the way of the actor fulfilling his obligations to the part. It came as quite a shock to me to discover that Greta Scacchi in her twenties, lithe and fit, could not, or would not, dance to beat music. She could play a deeply sensual love scene, appear completely nude, but she could not do a passable disco dance. What was it that held her back? One could only conjecture that it was something from way back in her childhood or adolescence. A director on set never has time to deal with these things and can only find ways of working around them. Shooting a nightclub scene for Bergerac all I could do was get Greta to fake it by doing turns in front of the camera while others danced around her. An equally surprising but more insurmountable problem was encountered when working with Iain Cuthbertson on Sutherland’s Law. Iain was the star of the series, an imposing leading actor, with a long list of stage and TV credits and his own popular following. In the script I had there was a simple, but rather touching scene with Edith MacArthur, his life partner. It was an anniversary scene which, was not overly sentimental, but called for a simple expression of tenderness. In rehearsals I sensed that Iain was trying to work his way around this scene, indicating what was to happen but never portraying it. When pressed he brushed asides my concern and asked me to trust him. This is the very worse thing a director can be asked to do. Firstly, it is hard to say that you do not trust an experienced artiste of talent and repute. But, secondly, if you do you are left with nothing to work with. Of course no-one expects full-blown passion in a rehearsal, but a director needs enough to be able to sense what the performance will be. In this case I soon realised that Iain had hit a block. The scene required an emotion that he was not able to give. Where a gentle embrace was called for, all that Iain could muster was a chummy clap on the back that one fella might give another after a night out. There are many fears contained in the fear of exposure that is commonly called stage fright: the fear of embarrassment, the fear of inadequacy, the fear of intimacy, the fear of losing control, the fear that everything we want to keep hidden will come tumbling out. A particular character, a particular drama may allow the actor to break through the confines of his habitual self but a stubborn residue inevitably remains — the fear that the act we maintain in real life will crumble and we will be seen for what we are.  References: 41. Morris, Eric, Freeing the Actor: an actor’s desk reference, Ermor Enterprises, Los Angeles, 2011