David Thomson, Steve Wasserman: On Acting (BABF 2015)
Summary
TLDRIn a conversation between writer David Thompson and his friend, publisher and former literary agent Steve Wasserman, the two discuss the art and craft of acting. They delve into why humans are fascinated by actors, the interplay between a performer's real self and their character, and actors' insecurities. They trace acting's evolution, argue it reveals truth about human nature, and debate whether actors are born or made. The discussion encompasses acting's power, the role of luck, what constitutes great acting, and more, while emphasizing that the audience is essential for the actor's work to have meaning.
Takeaways
- 😀 Acting fascinates us because actors are pretending to be someone else, allowing us to watch both the character and the real person
- 😮 Actors have an urge to pretend and try to present an idealized version of themselves, just as we all do in everyday life
- 🤔 Many great actors are not happy people - their insecurity and unhappiness drives their talent
- 👀 Film and photography changed our relationship with acting by making actors recognizable celebrities
- 😠 The acting profession is filled with rejection and unemployment even for dedicated actors
- 🎭 Acting requires skill in modulation and adjustment to become different people for different audiences
- 🎬 Movies today rarely have the creative freedom that allowed superb 1970s films like Taxi Driver
- 🎤 Great acting often requires doing very little - just being powerfully present
- 🍀 Luck plays a huge role in acting success - getting the right part at the right time
- 🎓 While acting education exists, life experience is the most important teacher for actors
Q & A
What does David Thompson believe is at the core of why people are fascinated by actors?
-He believes people are fascinated by actors because they are pretending to be someone else. We are watching both the character they are playing and the real person we think we know.
How does David Thompson explain why people have an urge to pretend or try to be someone else?
-He believes it's because in life, we are always trying to present the best version of ourselves to other people. We adjust how we act depending on who we are interacting with.
What point does David Thompson make about why acting can be difficult for some actors?
-He explains that the unhappiness or nervous energy that makes someone a great actor can also make them unhappy in their personal lives. Some actors struggle with the fact that what drives their great performances causes them pain.
How did film change people's relationship with acting, according to David Thompson?
-He explains that early film stars like Charlie Chaplin were seen as larger than life on the big screen. This let people identify with and fantasize about being actors themselves more than ever before.
What does David see as one of the hardest tests of great acting?
-He believes one of the greatest tests is having nothing to do but still being utterly compelling. Simply sitting still on stage and being impossible to ignore showcases truly masterful acting.
What point does Steve make about how acting has impacted history?
-He discusses how John Wilkes Booth leaping onto the stage to assassinate Lincoln shows in an extreme way how acting can dramatically shape events. Booth made the theater of history much larger.
What does David say helps explain Robert De Niro's decline in later roles?
-He speculates that as De Niro became more interested in business and money, he started taking projects he wouldn't have earlier in his career. His attitude became duller as he likely became disillusioned.
What does David highlight as a key element of great acting?
-He emphasizes a refined sensitivity that lets an actor translate the urge to pretend into believable speech and movement. An inner emotional intelligence guides the performance.
What role does David think luck plays in acting success?
-He believes luck is crucial, as getting the right part at the right time with the right co-stars and director can make all the difference. Missed chances shape careers significantly.
How does David think people could benefit from acting exercises?
-He suggests bringing strangers together, having them create fictional situations, cast roles, and think through acting choices. This creative collaboration would provide life insights.
Outlines
🎭 Introductions and context on acting
The host introduces the guest David Thompson, a writer and critic he has known professionally and personally for years. They discuss David's new book on acting, the genesis of which stems from both men's lifelong interest in and experiences with theater and acting. The host makes a self-deprecating joke about their close relationship.
😄 Why we are fascinated by acting
David explains that acting fascinates people because it involves pretending to be someone else. We simultaneously see the character and the real person when we watch actors. Over time, we understand what pretending has meant to an actor in their life and career.
🏆 Film and the Oscars changed acting
Film enabled the widespread visibility of actors in new ways. The host sees the sword in the Oscar statue as representing acting's ability to break through emotional barriers within us. David discusses how the Oscars represent the film industry's desire for respectability, though the award was not taken seriously initially.
🎓 Acting requires passion and pain
The host recalls a formative theatrical experience in his youth. He relates this to John Wilkes Booth assassinating Lincoln after leaping onto the Ford's Theatre stage, arguing acting has real-world power. David notes acting is rooted in a universal human impulse to pretend to be better versions of ourselves.
👀 Film and TV changed acting reality
David explains how film allowed audiences to see actors writ large for the first time. This encouraged stronger audience identification and blurred the line between fantasy and reality. The host notes that average screen time has increased drastically, altering our relationship with reality.
⏱️ Tension between acting success and personal happiness
The host asks if acting's reliance on pretense and affect curdles into a kind of self-contempt for actors over time. David notes many great actors have been unhappy, as acting often attracts insecure people. Young aspiring actors rarely understand how difficult and unstable acting is as a career path.
🤔 Defining great acting
When asked to define great acting, David identifies sensitivity, translation of pretending into speech and movement, and silent presence as key. Luck, relationships, choice of material and coaches are also essential elements for actors to achieve greatness.
😌 Acting will endure amid Hollywood decline
When asked if he worries about acting's future given the decline of Hollywood films, David says the impulse to act will remain. He notes that television has become the locus of innovative acting and writing talent.
🧑🎓 Acting: born or made?
Asked if great acting is innate or learned, David says it's some of both. He notes that while formal training has some role, life experience seems crucial. Some non-actors like Joseph Welch evidence sudden great acting talent when a part calls for it.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡acting
💡audience
💡dissembling
💡method acting
💡passion
💡power
💡reality
💡rejection
💡sincerity
💡unhappiness
Highlights
Actors are fascinated by because they are pretending to be someone else. We watch both the character and the real person.
Good actors have an incredibly refined sensitivity that can translate the urge to pretend into speech and action.
Acting requires luck - the right co-stars, director, timing. Most acting careers depend on a few lucky breakout parts.
Great acting is having nothing to do but being inescapable in the process. Simply looking at someone with care.
Most actors are surrounded by desperation and insecurity, which drives their urge to pretend to be someone else.
The movies changed acting by making actors shine with light so bright that our fantasies came alive.
Many great TV actors have left movies behind due to the decline in mainstream films and rise of quality TV.
Actors go where the good work is, so they'll stay in TV as long as it offers better writing and roles.
The urge to act will last despite Hollywood's decline. Great new acting emerges in shows like Breaking Bad.
We all pretend to be better versions of ourselves. Actors professionally live out this fantasy we all share.
The Oscars were invented so Hollywood could pretend to be serious and say "Respect us!"
Most actors think they're failures despite fame and praise. Insecurity drives them.
Acting blurs reality. We now spend over 11 hours a day staring at screens, far from reality.
John Wilkes Booth assassinating Lincoln proves acting matters. He strode onto history's stage.
The best acting class would be meeting strangers, making up situations, and improvising roles.
Transcripts
i'll keep the introductions short
to my left is david thompson a critic
uh and writer i admired for many years
before
it became my privilege to meet him and
uh
i have worn many hats with david so in
the interest of transparency
let me confess that in addition i'm glad
to say
of being friends i published some of his
writing when he
wrote for me on occasion when i edited
the los angeles times
book review later i became
david's literary agent in which capacity
i still function
although i wear another hat when three
years ago
i decided to embrace the nearly
scandinavian health care offered by yale
university
press and became an editor at large for
them in which
capacity i asked david to
write the book which is uh the occasion
for this
talk which uh it's my duty as his
publisher his
agent and his friend to hold up he is
also
my uncle yeah
so the the the charm well you'll be the
judge
of this conversation uh is that it's
uh an incestuous one between two people
who have
each in their own way been interested in
acting
which is perhaps another way of saying
that we have each of us in our own way
try to lead our lives and become a
protagonist in our own
unfolding drama and it had occurred to
me to ask david to write
a kind of extended essay on acting
since he has been
i think it not too extreme to say
obsessed with the subject
nearly all his adult life and maybe even
earlier than that
written about many movies as you know
written and seen many dramas
and the idea that we would do so at the
inaugural bay area
book festival in the town in which
i grew up made the whole affair
very personal and i just want to sort of
tip of the hat
to um i saw many uh wonderful
productions
in this town from the work of the magic
theater to the san francisco
mime troupe to an indelible
performance by the living theater at the
berkeley community theater
in february of 1969
paradise now and frankenstein and
the many ways in which acting and actors
have been important for me personally as
i
suppose in each in their each in your
own way they have been
for you um forms the kind of bedrock
on which we might have a conversation
about a
art form a craft a way of being in the
world which is
as paradoxical and as necessary as
i think anything is so
i'm put in mind of a perhaps apocryphal
story that i heard many years ago in los
angeles
jack lemmon once asked george burns
what was the single greatest attribute
that one needed to be
a successful actor and burns never at a
loss for words
instantly replied sincerity and if you
can fake that kid
you got it made which was perhaps about
as good a definition of acting as i
think i've ever heard so i wanted to
turn it over for a moment to david
and ask him a very simple question
what is it about acting that
seems to mesmerize us and over the
course of time
what's changed obviously acting from
thespis to
to johnny depp has a long and
distinguished tradition although by some
measures
disreputable the catholic church for
most of its history refused to
allow actors to be buried with rights
without first renouncing the sin
of their entire profession
so tell us if you would how you think of
acting and what has drawn you to the
subject
and indeed why you think it matters so
very much
well i think it's rooted
in our psyche um
i think we are fascinated by actors
because they are pretending to be
someone else
i think almost when we watch actors we
are watching
two people we are watching the character
they're playing and we're watching the
real person we think we know
as a professional career and
the interplay between those two
i think is a large part of the pleasure
so when you
when you follow an actor or an actress
over decades
you know when you see meryl streep today
you remember meryl streep in let's say
the deer hunter
where she's a very different kind of
person
but you see over the years just what
pretending
has meant to her which is interesting
because meryl streep really has
the reputation a lot of the affect
of a very sincere serious
down-to-earth honest person
and you know compared with a lot of our
leading actors i think she deserves that
and i've only
heard good things about her as a person
so why is she obsessed with pretending
to be other people
i think this is a really core impulse
in acting and i think it's a core
impulse in what we
get out of them because
and i don't know how far back this goes
because
we can get on to this but film changed
our sense of acting
but i think it's because we all of us
in life are always
pretending to be a slightly
better version of ourselves that we
would like
to have presented to people so when you
meet someone
for the first time
so to speak physically but inside your
head
you straighten up you comb your hair
you you smile you you be as sort of
as open and accessible as you can you
present yourself
in a way that says look i might be your
friend
i might be your lover i might live with
you for 60 years
and in the course of 60 years you will
probably have to pretend to be several
other people
just to make time pass pleasantly and
easily
but very briefly i think it's because
we are pretenders now that can easily be
interpreted as saying well we're all
insincere
we're all liars and i think those
principles deserve more attention than
they often get
but i don't think it's an unwholesome
unhealthy thing
i think the urge to pretend to try to be
someone else
a better version of ourselves i think
it's
absolutely widespread and any people who
are
in human company are involved with that
i think
and you know if you have a large family
situation
you may sit back sometimes and say i
realize
that i'm not quite the same person
to my children as i am to my parents
or my wife or friends and i think we do
this all the time
it's a fantastic process of
modulation and adjustment that goes on
without any conscious
process where we've just become slightly
different
because we know that person wants a
out of us and that person wants b out of
us
it's very complicated and we do it as we
do so many things
because of a brain that is just so
incredibly skillful
yeah do you think
that you observe in your book that
the oscar the academy award statuette
that is given
um and i don't think very many people
tumbled to this or
focus on it is a figure that is bearing
a sword
yes why
um i'm not literally sure
of that it's a very strange figure
because
in the original oscar the sword is
actually sort of pinning
pieces of film to the ground which i
don't think
is what they meant us to interpret it by
but it's a sort of noble classical
figure it's a sort of arnold
schwarzenegger figure
before his time and um
everything about the oscars is so
bizarre
i mean it it it could only have been
invented and of course oscar
is really a way for the film business to
pretend
we're serious we do good work
you know respect us for god's sake
respect us the oscars were invented
for those purposes right i sometimes
think in a
somewhat highfalutin way that it's the
unacknowledged
uh admission that the sword
acts for the actor as kafka is said to
have
regarded a book as the as the axe that
would break up the frozen sea within us
yes and that the art of dissembling the
act of
pretending the act of conscious
deception
itself done well reveals truths
about our daily lives that we otherwise
would not see
or admit to ourselves you should have
been there in 1927 when they first saw
the oscar statuette
you would have been laughed out of the
room
i mean this is the kind of comment that
one can only get get away with in
berkeley
you know and i i want to be loyal to my
yes my roots constituency yes yeah do
you think it's a tension for actors
uh in particular when uh they uh become
the best of them are so gifted at
dissembling and
faking authenticity that in their own
lives the most
many of them are intelligent of them uh
begin to
experience it as a as a kind of curse i
think of louise brooks
who would give up acting and become
famous really for
a refusal to engage in a kind of
dishonest practices because she found it
intolerable
i think many actors
probably most of the really good actors
know that feeling
um late in life
when he was really a wrecked person in
most ways brando taught
a class in los angeles called lying for
a living and and the title was
given to this series with a real degree
of self-contempt
um brando i think fell out of love with
acting quite early
on uh on the other hand someone like
john gielgood
was acting into his early 90s and loved
every moment of it
you know and i think he was very lucky
for that
i do think a lot of actors sense
the problem that comes home to them and
you would have to say
that a lot of actors this is a big
generalization so
forgive that part of it but a lot of
actors are not happy people
and i think some of them know that the
unhappiness
is the nervous energy that inspires what
they do and they've had they've had very
difficult
lives none more so
than the lives of a huge majority of
actors
who never even get a job the acting
profession so-called is filled with
people
who have never given up the hope that
one day they would get a breakthrough
and they will get a big part and they
prepare for parts they go to auditions
where they are
humiliated really treated badly and
they stick at it and they are old
impoverished without
pension almost certainly maybe without
social security because they've never
really earned from it
um we should remember that
every actor is born unemployed
and they never escape that fear
that they're going to be unemployed
that's why a lot of actors
make bad decisions about what parts they
will do
because they're terrified of not
being able to play and pretend to be
someone else
or as robert de niro put it most
recently two weeks ago
when he delivered the commencement
address at the graduating
class of nyu's tisch school of the arts
after thanking the assembled faculty and
congratulating the 2015
graduating class he said now you're
which brought down the house and by that
he went on to to say
you know unlike your your fellow
students who graduated the school of
accounting they will have jobs uh unlike
the people who are graduating ny school
of law
and then he stopped and said well enough
about them they're lawyers
but you you made a choice you made a
choice to follow your passions
uh it's going to be a lot of
unemployment it's going to be rejection
and then he said but you knew that going
in and oh that's
questionable i don't know how far
18 year olds really know that the
passion
is intense and it should be it has to be
i mean there are many walks of life like
being a sportsman
where it's the passion at first that
carries you into it and you don't quite
see what will happen when you're 34.
and i think
it's a very frightening situation to
have
a young person come to you and say do
you think i should be an actor
that's happened to me a few times in
life and i've always said
you have to take responsibility for that
decision
i'm sure your parents are hoping that
you will not be
an actor don't put your daughter on the
stage because this is where things look
like anything
and they're right it's a terrible line
of work to get into
and incidentally that was the most
coherent thing i've ever
heard robert de niro say
he is a notoriously bad
interview and and you know he's done
some great great work
not a not a lot of it recently i think
but once upon a time
really great work but if you ask him um
why and how and what the answers are
terrible but yeah but in that he
probably has a lot in common with
i mean again at the risk of generalizing
uh terribly
um it's not uncommon in artists of many
walks of life
dancers ballet dancers opera singers
painters uh even i dare say maybe even a
lot of
writers uh cannot when asked are
actually articulate
what it is they do i know and of course
we're in a culture that that
that insists on asking those questions
so
when madison bongano almost
single-handedly won the world series
there was aaron andrews i think it was
her say how did it feel madison
you know he's simply not made to tell
you
how it feels you were watching how did
it feel for you
you know right and in that sense
i often uh think that um actors along
with other
uh artists uh so the best of them so
uh wonderfully inhabit or exemplify
traits that we wish often on our
we wish on our best day we could inhabit
but of course
their their lines are written for them
by others
they have the gift of a kind of
emotional intelligence to inhabit
a role without perhaps uh overthinking
it
and uh revealing it in a way that isn't
given to us but what we share with them
in line what with what you're saying is
what uh
uh thoreau once uh called uh
about most people leading lives of quiet
desperation yeah
yeah and you know actors get enormous
praise
and people will stop them on the street
in restaurants and say oh i just love
your work it's meant so much to me
and it's very difficult to respond
freshly to that
all the time and a lot of actors hate to
be recognized and
accosted by strangers and for good
reason because there are strangers out
there
who do not have the best intentions
toward actors you know
um in the age of celebrity actors have
suffered because they
they are treated often like famous
people which
they are but it's not what they set out
to do and you make the observation in
your book
that this is as it were a recent
development
that if you and has everything to do
with the invention of photography and
yeah and moving pictures yeah i mean you
know
we assume that acting has always been
there
and it probably has i i invent a scene
for the book of a caveman coming home
after having a battle with a lion and
he's torn to pieces by the land but
he killed the lion and he's thinking as
he goes back
what am i going to tell the people at
home in the cave
why i'm in this state so he begins to
work out a story
which may not be exactly what happened
you know
and maybe it was two lions he killed by
the time he gets back and and
we all of us we we build up what we have
done and and um
we don't have writers we are our own
writer which is a big burden
and actors often get to a point
where they think they don't need the
writer it's a very interesting situation
where an actor who has
really sunk and soaked himself into a
part over a long period
he knows what he has to say by heart and
he begins to think
well if i was this character
i think i'd say something else there and
the whole process of improvisation
and taking off from the script the text
is amazing but you know once upon a time
hardly anyone saw
actors you go back to the 19th century
we know of famous actors
from the 19th century hardly anyone saw
them
and that's why movie changed everything
because not only did everyone see
charlie chaplin and mary pickford and so
on
but they saw them bigger than the side
of a house
they saw them so beautiful so dazzling
so shining with light that the process
of fantasy
was let loose in a very big way and
people started to identify with actors
and they
they thought they were actors too so
it it's encouraged this whole thing in
an extraordinary way and of course
you know i mean uh
i had a student at dartmouth a long time
ago
1970s who was a television fiend
and i asked him how much television a
day
do you watch and he said oh it's seldom
more than seven hours a day
which shocked me terribly at the time i
just recently
asked my son who is 25 he's a writer
he works for a publisher you know him
i said try to estimate how many hours a
day
you spend looking at a screen and he
worked it out
and it was 11 and a half
and that's probably close to the truth
for more of us we are living through
screens and if you think that is the
same as reality
you're wrong and and a big part of this
book and about
really everything i try to do about
acting is about
the way our deal with reality
has altered immeasurably because of the
movies
yeah um
i was uh shift the conversation a little
bit
on the ways in which the boundary
between
the well as it were the mirror that's
held up to us by these screens
yeah and how we look at them and how the
boundary between the world that we
live in and the permeable world that we
enter virtually has elided or blurred
the boundary
between the way we we all of us
act in our own lives and the way in
which those acts
are projected back to us by the stories
that are concocted and
shown to us many years ago
i was in a production at the florence
shrimly little theater
just down the street on allston way it
was a berkeley high school production
of pearly victorious the year was 1968.
uh the first act i had a small
role in the part in the in the play and
it required in the first act that
after i said a few lines that i sat on a
stool
and other people had their lines while i
just simply sat there of course
i was still had to be in character i was
still present
and i have to confess that perhaps the
epiphany that
came to me during this sequence was made
in some measure possible by the
ingestion
some hours earlier in the day of the
hallucinogenic drug
which is do i have any of my children in
the audience anyway
and there came to be a moment when i sat
on the stage
and i looked out at the audience and i
realized
that i was the most powerful person in
the room
and um and it was actually a frightening
but also very
thrilling uh moment when i realized that
i could with a single act
uh destroy or alter the entire history
of the evening for everybody in the room
all i had to do was get up and say
this play is a piece of and jump
off the proscenium
and stride out the hall well whatever
might happen
afterward it would be never forgotten it
would be quite a moment
i thought of that this morning because
we are
this year this month like a couple
months ago is the 150th anniversary of
the assassination of abraham lincoln
by a man who was the inferior actor
whose brother was the most famous actor
of his day john edwin booth
and his brother edmund was something of
a failure as an actor but who
nonetheless
leaps on the balcony of ford's theater
assassinates the president um and
forever upstages his brother
and jumps down onto the stage and jumps
down onto the stage
so if you ask the question does acting
matter
you bet it does i mean there's a guy who
just strode onto the stage of history
and made the theater very much larger
than no one remembers the play
that lincoln was no right well
i mean you're absolutely right and and
um the power
that an actor feels i think i think
sometimes teachers have it you know you
you may occasionally feel you have a
class in the palm of your hand
and you pause to just to sort of let
that sink in
and what you say next is going to be
remarkable
you see what i mean about the way we
present ourselves
and and i think the power is
very much a part of it because
actors are always amazed when you talk
to them as if they were great and famous
and successes very few actors think
their successes
there is a sort of stereotype of the
vain actor
rather like the character in the play
20th century and the film
um acting his head up all the time
showing off and just brow beating other
people
i've never met an actor
and talk to them at any length without
discovering
the desperate insecurity
and i think another part of why they do
it
and why we do what we do is because for
a moment
we may have a feeling an illusion of
power
over the chaos of life and that's a
heady thing that that's
that's an hallucinogenic and
you don't go to prison for it
i'm sure you don't go to prison anymore
but i know
it's 12 33 time passes all too quickly
when the play is really something you
want to
listen to i do want to invite some
questions from the audience
as well so let me do so now i will
repeat the question
unless you're capable of standing up and
and
speak the speech yeah but don't but no
speeches
just the question um so yes young men
there
could everyone hear the question he says
i'm sure you get some blow back uh on on
on your your opinions what's your
opinion of daniel day-lewis
is that fair enough um well the book has
been reviewed
by a very distinguished actor simon
callow and it was a friendly review
i i i don't think i've heard yet of
other actors
saying anything about it and and i think
i think actors are very cautious when
they're talked about in this
this kind of way um i think daniel day
lewis
is one of the really remarkable actors
of our time
i tell a story in the book he did hamlet
at the national theater
oh in the late 80s i think and
he was not the figure he is today but he
did hamlet at the national theater which
was a
a real test because they
you have an audience who know the play
inside out
and in the course of the play he was a
method actor still is
he began to see and hamlet
something that resembled him which was
the loss of a father
day lewis father who was a famous writer
died about 15 years earlier
but he got into that more
and more and other people in the
production could see
that this was making life very difficult
for him
and you know you play a real part you're
walking a tightrope
with sharks in the sea it's it's a
dangerous thing
you're playing with your own self and
one night uh
day lewis started sobbing on stage
and he walked off the un you know the
most
unspeakable thing that an actor can do
just terminate the performance and get
off
and there was a delay of about 15
minutes
and then jeremy northam his understudy
came on
and delivered a superb performance day
lewis
has never been back on stage since
but i think he's a remarkable figure
yeah
um yes
you mentioned um when you were talking
about robert de niro
that previously he'd done some great
acting and
recently not so much i'm interested
what makes great acting tell us more
about what you think worked well
as you say earlier in deniro's career
and what didn't work
so well later in it um
well i think that there was a period of
time
the 70s began in the late 60s but
through the 70s
when de niro in
movie after movie delivered
people that we
immediately recognized
like travis bickle but whom we'd not
really
seen in a film before i think he
enlarged our sense of what
people could be and
i think one way or another he kept the
company
of challenging directors and and he just
did
a run of things and
i think
gradually into the eighties not to say
there weren't some good
pieces of work later but gradually
he became interested
in business became a restaurateur
became a figure in tribeca
really i think got very interested
in money and why should he not be
we most of us are and we live in a
society that is
obsessed with it so why should an artist
not be very interested
in money but i do think over a
long period of time you can see him
getting into
films that once upon a time i don't
think he would have done
and i think his attitude to it has
become
duller a little blunter and i think a
lot of actors of that age
are disillusioned and in part it's
because
it's virtually impossible to make a film
like taxi driver
anymore you know it's amazing that that
was
done and a whole lot of films in that
time were done it was a great time
and and i don't think you can do it now
and doesn't seem
likely to come back what makes a great
actor
well it's clearly
some specially refined
sensitivity that can translate the urge
to pretend
into speech
and maybe most important of all doing
nothing steve talked about his great
performance
many years ago where he was just sitting
a supreme test and not speaking
a supreme test of great acting
is um having
nothing to do and being inescapable
in the process of
wonderful american film called rio bravo
was made in the late 1950s
and john wayne was cast in it and he
said to the director
um well i've read the script howard and
you know
it'll be a great film i think but dean
martin he's got the part
he's the guy trying to recover from
being an alcoholic
what do i do all the time he's got the
shakes and everything and hawke said
you just stand there and look at him
like someone who cares for him
and wayne is one of our most underrated
actors
for good reason he did a lot of other
things that we don't
like or a proof of he was a fantastic
screen actor
and if you look at rio bravo and you
could look at it tonight with a prophet
he just looks at dean martin as if he
cares
you can't beat that in acting you know
you can't beat it in life
how many awkward situations have you
managed to get through in life because
you've just
turned to someone and looked at them
and said i care i don't even said it but
they see it
and i think that's a very important
important thing of acting
i think you also have to say knowing the
right people
being in a situation that de niro was in
in new york in
75 where the people with great ideas for
films come to you
so that's important i think
it's terribly important to have
the right advice actors are surrounded
with entourages and we sort of make fun
of them
and a lot of them are opportunists just
taking advantage of the actor
but a lot of them give golden advice
suggestions
so that's another thing i think luck
is horribly important often when you
take on a film if you're an actor
or a play you're told well
your co-stars will be a b and c
and it will open there on that date
so-and-so will direct it sounds
wonderful sounds like a project made in
heaven
by the time you get there the actors
playing with you are x
y and z someone else is directing it
it's not in the theater you were told
about
it's just not a good place to be with it
and luck plays
a real part in it and um
i think that the people who are
unemployed
live with the dream that oh
if only they could have got sophie's
choice
they'd have knocked it out of the park
you know
well probably probably
almost anyone could have done sophie's
choice and reduced us to tears
and it's the luck of a part that comes
along
and in most acting careers there are
parts that made all the difference
and it often comes down to luck
that you got the part so all of those
things
come into play uh we've got a lot of
questions and
and my name is running out yes ma'am um
are you concerned about the future of
acting given
how terrible hollywood is
i i've given out worrying about
hollywood
i think the impulse to act is going to
last quite a while yet
and i generally agree with your
assessment of hollywood films but i
would say
uh some of the great acting of recent
years
has been brian cranston as walter white
uh gandolfini sterling soprano
claire danes is carrie mathison and and
you know hordes
of others and i think i think there's a
real connection
between the terrible decline in the
american mainstream
movie and the way that we we are
enjoying
a kind of television that may be as good
as television has ever
managed i think in other words the
people with ideas
people like david chase vince gilligan
and
the writers and the actors have gone
into television
which is not often as lucrative
for them but you know actors generally
will go where the good
work is so
i think a lot of people are staying home
watching box sets
rather than go out to movies however
i would have to say that i went to see
uh
mad max this week because i'm a tom
hardy
fan but charlize theron owns the film
and is amazing you know so you could be
surprised
uh yes back there yes sir
are actors born or made
well you could say that about doctors
you could say it about
anybody really i i mean i think it's a
bit of both
um i think the interesting thing about
acting
is that history has taught us that
the educational processes that grow up
for actors which were
very popular in britain teaching you how
to stand on stage and
fence and you know slide down the
banister all that kind of stuff
i'm not sure how useful they are i think
that i think that most
artists rather than go to art school
probably need to get out in life and to
a pretty uncomfortable
version of life because i think they'll
learn more
but i think that probably
any actor
knows that
what happened in the earliest days are
very important i saw a
documentary about ingrid bergman this
week and
the film says some pains to say that
ingrid was shaped by
losing both her parents early and by the
influence they had on her and and the
way in which that
focused her sense of herself in other
words she was a little unhappy as a
child
well anyone here was not unhappy as a
child
but we're not all great actors so you
know
there is something unique in the genes
but um
you never know you never know joseph
welsh
do you all know who joseph welsh was he
was the lawyer
who really pinned mccarthy in
54 i think on television and
he was a lawyer trained as a lawyer
and he spoke well as a lawyer but if you
look at the clip of film
with vole's him and mccarthy there's no
question
he acted better in that scene and not
long after those hearings otto preminger
cast him
as the judge in anatomy of a murder
he'd never dreamed of acting and i think
it's the case that there are people out
there
probably people in here who have never
acted but if the right part came along
might be extraordinary
of course very very very famously uh
desicca and brasson
yes uh were were devoted uh or very
much and and and made a central part of
their filmmaking that's right
and hate testing the non-act hated to
use them again once they've been used
yeah
yeah uh yes sir um
have you ever thought of acting yourself
and any suggestions you might have for
the rest of us
who uh
yeah what should we take an acting class
and could we learn something
and i'm afraid this will have to be the
last question uh
because they have another uh class
coming in
and david will sign some books in the
lobby if you care to
purchase one
i think the ideal cost
on acting would be to gather
a group of people at random
to bring them together let them
meet each other and know each other and
come up with a situation to be discussed
among the group
to cast it but maybe then to cast it in
different ways
and to play with it and begin to think
of well what should the character say
what should the action be
you would make the play from scratch
without any intention of
performing it but i think that that
process
might be an educational process about
life in general
that you would never forget
i think that if i were to do a class
like that that's how i would do it
it is incidentally very close to the way
mike lee makes his films
i have never acted uh professionally
but i am a constant and devoted am a
director
the one thing i think we should leave
you with is that
acting requires spectators
it requires an audience and the act
of acting is not complete just as the
act of writing
is not complete without readers so think
of yourselves as co-collaborators
in the process of why acting matters if
it matters at all
it matters to every one of us and may i
say
i have a vested interest in it of course
but
in every sentence that david has written
in this little book and in his other
books as well you will find
a necessary oxygen thank you very much
for your attention
you
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