Professor David Peimer
Konstantin Stanislavski, Part 2: Creative Techniques Used by Actors and Directors
Professor David Peimer | Konstantin Stanislavski, Part 2 Creative Techniques Used by Actors and Directors | 07.09.24
Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.
- So what I’m going to do today is develop on last Saturday where I was looking at Stanislavski himself and some of the main ideas that he introduced with the Moscow Art Theatre. And in the period, primarily, from the end of the 19th century up to when he died just before the Second World War. So in those 30, 40 years, what he achieved, what he and his colleagues achieved, his books he wrote, and, in a sense, really the, if you like, the grandfather of all acting training, acting rehearsal, in, certainly in the Western world, and the influence has stretched way beyond as well to parts of Africa, parts of Asia, and elsewhere. And what I’m going to do today is take some of these ideas and look at who came after. Some of the main characters who came after Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Uta Hagen, Sanford Meisner, et cetera. And look at some of their main ideas who were completely influenced by the pioneer Stanislavski and what they did with his ideas and how they revolutionised actor training, actor rehearsals, and directors directing certainly from New York and London and then spreading all the way through the West.
That’s what I’m going to focus on today is the first 50 years, if you like, leading up to the Second World War. And then the main individuals afterwards of Strasberg and Stella Adler and the others that I mentioned. Because the ideas that they, in a sense, absorbed and crystallised from him and put into practise, which resulted in some remarkable screen acting for film and theatre acting as well. And of course, gone into TV and other forms of screen media. So it all originate, he really is the Freud, the founder of acting theory for the 20th, 21st century, Stanislavski. Not only studied everywhere at all, you know, acting schools and universities, colleges, and so on, but the main person to consolidate and crystallise these ideas. I said last week, also, that he, he wrote in the Socratic method, and that’s really important. So he always wrote as if it was a dialogue, dramatic dialogue between teacher and pupil. So in that Socratic dialogue, he was trying to make it much more active, interactive, and the sort of question answer or question answer and then challenging question again. Discovery to try and keep an open-minded quality that the Socratic method of pedagogy really nurtures.
I think something profoundly lost in many approaches to tertiary and high school education these days. But he was determined to stick to that ancient form of inquiry and research because, for him, it was an ongoing, ever-changing approach to pedagogy and education and learning. He truly did not want it to be static. And he himself changed radically as he ditched certain ideas and pushed certain other ideas as he was constantly discovering. So I see him as an individual who was not excessively patriotic to the ideas that he began with, but was constantly evolving and changing. And that’s quite something for an individual who sets themselves up or becomes known as a pioneer in their field. The other interesting thing is how Jewish people, in New York in particular, took up his ideas remarkably. Strasberg, Adler and the Jewish, I suppose, immigrant or, at least, second generation of children, of young children of immigrants and how they took it up and it became so known globally. And it’s not only because they taught his ideas well or that, if you like, his ideas in [indistinct] worked.
Something in the zeitgeist was calling for a much more in-depth, rigorous approach to acting influenced, of course, by Freud and others. And the whole psychological wave, massive wave of influence, in Western culture. So a, a desire for something like acting, which had never really been investigated like this before, never really researched, taken as a serious art, a serious pedagogy, or a serious science for that matter, as Stanislavski wanted to make it. And others. It was always seen as, you know, it’s intuition, it’s instinct, it’s a creative gift you’re born with, like composing or playing music or singing. You could just do it. Sure, you can hone the craft a little bit here and there, but you know, you, you, you’re kind of just born with that gift or not. Whereas these guys said, “No, of course there is talent and that gift has to be there. But from there, a huge amount can be learnt, discovered, and honed in terms of a craft and an art.” And I think it’s very much part of the reaching the height of the enlightenment at the end of the 19th, earlier 20th century, to try and believe in a new rational, a new enlightened, a new scientific, a rigorous approach to all areas of human endeavour.
Stanislavski absolutely a part of that overall Western zeitgeist. And living through the extraordinary years of pre-Russian Revolution, post 1917, and post-Revolution in Russia as well. And being so lauded by Lenin and then Stalin later. Given awards and prizes, you know, all the rest of it, et cetera, et cetera. Obviously he stayed away from politics and he kept saying, “I’m just investigating the art of acting and directing and staging theatre itself.” And, of course, the choice of plays in the Moscow Theatre. Okay? So it’s the influence of Stanislavski followed by these individuals that I’m going to look at today, who. Most of them are Jewish, which I do think is an important factor and an influencing factor. The outsider idea and the hunger for knowledge and learning and searching, you know, given the family trajectories that these individuals came from. And then I’m going to show some clips from, for me, some of the great, great movies of our times and to show how these actors are working to implement some of these techniques and ideas that they’ve learnt in the post-Stanislavski era.
But I want to start with something very, very different and probably surprising. And everybody, I’m sure. will recognise this amazing little scene.
[Clip plays]
Hey, boss. Wait! Don’t touch it, don’t, don’t boss. Oh, you had me scared. You know, three managers before you died from eating poisoned food.
This food doesn’t look any more poisoned than any other hotel food. Gimme that.
Oh no boss. Look, you got to have somebody to test the food. What you need is a guinea pig.
You eat the guinea pig, I’ll stick to this. Give me my steak.
I don’t mean a real guinea pig. I mean a human guinea pig.
I don’t want to eat any kind of a guinea pig. I want my meal.
Nah, there’s a human guinea pig.
He looks like a pig, but it doesn’t look human. That food doesn’t seem to be poisoned.
Yeah, you can’t tell. It hasn’t reached his stomach yet.
That’s the Seal of Good Housekeeping. Hey, what is this, a steak race? Now see here you guys, give me back my lunch.
Oh no, you make a mistake.
That’s my steak and I want it. Come on.
Hey, Rusty, you want to give him a little something?
No thanks, they give me heartburn.
Well, I just wanted to take a little shot. That’s all.
Hey, you cheap crook, that bottle’s empty.
That’s dry champagne.
Oh no, you don’t. You want to get poisoned?
Well, I’m not sure that I’d mind anymore.
Who’s he talking to?
Salt Lake City.
I see. Couldn’t spare just a little sip of that, eh? Well, if the coffee doesn’t keep him awake, the cup and saucer will.
[Clip ends]
- Okay, so I wanted to just show this because in the interest of being open-minded, obviously the Marx brothers never, never really learnt acting at any school or university or anywhere else. And yet are remarkable not only in the writing, in the improvising, the ad lib, but in the acting. When you look at the acting and what they’re doing with their bodies, with Groucho, Harpo, Chico, you know, what they’re doing with their bodies, what they’re doing with the quick interactions, the quick one-liners, and at the same time, so physical with all the food and the eating, et cetera. You know, it’s, one has to, I think, always keep an open mind that there is something, just a creative genius and gift. Whether it’s in acting or, I would suggest, I would argue, in any field, you know. How much did Einstein really study at, at universities, et cetera?
So it’s, you know, together with looking at all of this today, I feel to be, to be to, to have the integrity of honesty one has to acknowledge that they’ve always been brilliant actors, brilliant writers and directors, brilliant scientists, who’ve never studied for a day or two, you know, may have, may have learnt through working with their families or being kids on stage, wherever. And, you know, writers as well to never forget that flip side of it in addition. And just this one short little clip from the Marx brothers, in a way it captures almost everything that we’re going to talk about today. But later, I’m going to show clips, in a little while, from some of, some of the remarkable scenes in acting in films which have used the techniques we’re going to talk about. Okay? So the first guide is Mr. Lee Strasberg. And Strasberg is probably the greatest influence of all. And it’s fascinating to me because none of these characters, necessarily, were going to become so influential and were going to become such good acting teachers, for that matter. There was no guarantee that Stanislavski’s ideas would go any further than his own theatre in Moscow. No guarantee of any of all this. So there’s an, there’s a sense of experiment, and try, and open mind, and hunger to research and discover things with more rigour and depth, in particular the art and craft of acting and directing.
And it’s still debatable today, you know. Do you need to study? Don’t you need to study? But I do believe talent is one thing, but it can really be honed, nurtured, and if you like, almost chiselled or, or crystallised as you can take nuance and push it further and really help a person develop mentally as much as techniques and talent of acting. So Strasberg was born as, his first name was Israel Strasberg. Polish-born acting teacher. He founded, he founds the Group Theatre in 1931. 1951, he founded the Actors Studio with some others, which became known as the most prestigious acting school in the States. Strasberg is regarded as the father, if you like, of method acting in America. And method acting we spoke about last week, the ideas of emotional memory, of the “magic if”, of imagination, emotional memory. The example I gave of the cat, you know, where you remember emotions from one’s past life and then you use that to incorporate that into the emotion a character is experiencing in a scene. So it might have been, it might have been falling in love, falling out of love. It might have been the, the tragic injury or death of a very close person.
Or it might have been a rejection of, of a school. It might have been, you know, a success, an achievement. It might be something of ambition achieved. Whatever it is, you go back into your past and have that emotional memory and then you transfer that emotion into the character, into the scene for the play or film that you’re rehearsing. That technique is known as emotional memory, coming directly from Stanislavsky. The other main idea was the idea of the “magic if”, which Stanislavsky developed later in life, of, which is much more the imagination used to produce the emotional effect in the scene. So the example would be, so if I’m acting “Macbeth” and I have to kill Banquo’s children, King Duncan, and the others. If I was Macbeth, how would I act? If I was Macbeth and my name is Brando, Pacino, or whoever, how would I act Macbeth? So, and, Stanislavski and called it the “magic if”, which really mobilises the imagination to, how to engage with a character in a scene. And it’s not trying to remember the emotions of one’s past and childhood and other things, traumatic or banal, whatever the memory, emotional memories, it’s to mobilise the imagination.
So if I, David, am acting the lecturer, the professor, and talking to a screen right now with everybody, how would I, et cetera. So, you know, if I’m Macbeth, if I am Hamlet, what are the situations, the circumstances in the scene? That I’m a, I’m a general, I want to become king. I’m driven by vaulting ambition, and my name is General Macbeth and I’ve got to kill the king and a couple of other generals, Banquo and so on. But then I’ll become the king. So if I had such ambition, and driven to it, that I could kill these people with the egging on of my wife, hey, I’m going to do it. Then if I was that, how would I do it? And that’s Stanislavski taught, wrote about as the, the, the utilisation of imagination, the “magic if” technique. Which is very different to the emotional memory technique with the cat example I gave last week. So, and these are the two main techniques. And then he spoke about the idea of the given circumstances. What are the given circumstances of a scene? I’m Macbeth, so I am a general in the army. There’s the king, he’s come to stay in my castle, but in order for me to become it, I’ve got to kill him. And I’ve got the chance tonight, you know. And here comes my wife, she says, “Come on, let’s do it. Don’t be so full of the milk of human kindness. Come on buddy, get on with it. Let’s do it. Here’s a knife, a dagger, up you go, kill the guy. Nobody will know it’s you.”
And that’s it. So those are the given circumstances of the scene or scenes leading up to the murder itself. So if I was in those circumstances, how would I as a general in the army, do it? And that’s the “magic if” together with the technique of given circumstances that Strasberg took from Stanislavski. The two main ideas, given circumstances of a scene, the “magic if” versus the emotional memory. Strasberg then chose to focus much more on emotional memory. And he would spend hours and hours with the student actors in exercises which were to stimulate the production of emotional memories from the past. Whether, like I said last week, a cat jumping down and scratching a person on the arm and then hurling the, the cat against the wall. The impulse to kill is in that moment. Or so ambitious I’m determined, I’ve got to achieve, you know, the best grade in, in the class. I’ve, I’ve, I’ve got to get the job. I can’t bear the thought of anybody else getting it. I’ve got to make my first million before I’m 28. Whatever. Absolutely single-minded, driven with ambition. And he would say, “Look at the emotional memory from the past.” What they’ve recently been showing here in England is Boris Johnson and images of him when he was eight years old and he had to win the race, running, and you know, he’s running against his sister and his brother, and, you know, but he’s got to win it.
He’s got to win it no matter what. And they show the little three little kids running, they’ve been showing it a lot on TV here. You know, it’s, and he talking about, “I’m going to be king of the world when I’m older”, et cetera. So these are emotional memories which Strasberg would work with and then get the actor to try and rediscover it for the character in the scene. That’s basically, that the core of method acting for Strasberg was the emotional memory approach. Then Strasberg also took from Stanislavski the idea of improvisation. And I’m going to show an amazing piece from De Niro in “Taxi Driver”, which is entirely improvised. And how, improvisation would not only keep the moment alive in acting, because it’s all improvised, but it’s improvised with the given circumstances of the scene, the given facts of the scene, where we could put the dialogue or the, the speech aside, create our own words, but we’ve got the general through line of what the scene is meant to be about. Improvise, improvise, improvise, which is hugely popular everywhere in the world, coming from Stanislavski and popularised through method acting and Strasberg.
And then of course the idea of, you know, like in “Raging Bull”, De Niro goes out and learns boxing and he puts on weight and tries to become Rocky Marciano, yeah, et cetera, et cetera. So it’s where you go out and you live the role for six weeks or five weeks, or two, three months, whatever it is you try and live it. I’m going to show Adrien Brody, you know, do what he did with his weight and his body. You try and live something that appropriates or is similar to the character in the scene through, if you don’t, can’t find it in emotional memory or in your imagination, you try and live it for a while and then bring it into the scene or the character. All of these techniques, what became known as method acting today. And I guess the last point is the emphasis on the physical. And, you know, it is absolutely in the physical memory, the memory of the muscles. And Brando, for me, is the best of all. I showed last week that scene with him in “Streetcar”. He’s using his mouth all the time, chewing, moving, moving, moving, and his body, his arms, his shoulders, his chest. But it’s the mouth movement that is so riveting, that makes us watch, because he’s doing something physical and he never stops.
We see the same with “The Godfather”. It’s so subtle what he’s doing physically all the time, but it’s riveting with such a, in such a subtle way. So it’s what we call “physicalize the emotion in the scene”. And these are often conscious choices or discovered through improvisation by the actors, working with the director. Some of the great actors that Strasberg worked with. Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman, Ellen Burstyn, Pacino, De Niro, Geraldine Page, Eli Wallach, and so on, all came through studying with Strasberg. James Dean wrote, and he died at 24, you know, an the extraordinary amount he achieved by the age of 24. He died, you know, he died before, before “Giant”. They’d finished shooting it, but not some final scenes with, with, with his speech. And he wrote to The Actors Studio, “It was the greatest school of theatre. The best thing that could happen to an actor.” Tennessee Williams wrote, “They act from the inside out. They communicate emotions they really feel. They give you a sense of real life.” Tennessee Williams, they communicate, act emotions they really feel, so they’re not pretending, they’re really feeling. That’s a huge shift in, in understanding notions of acting from the 19th century and before. They’re are genuinely feeling it in that moment. It’s not faked or put on.
And that’s the massive thing that Strasberg focused on through this technique of emotional memory. And to act on the inside out. And there was this old phrase in acting, “To act on the inside out or the outside in”. In other words, as Laurence Olivier wanted to go from the outside in, from the body to the emotion, get the body moving right, and that will get the right emotion. And what Strasberg and Stanislavski focused on was the other way around, inside out. Find the emotional truth first and that will then be expressed physically in the body. Kazan wrote, interestingly, Elia Kazan the great director as we all know, that, “Strasberg had a, the aura of a prophet, a magician, a witch doctor, a psychoanalyst, and a feared father in his Jewish home. He was the force that held the members of the theatre group together. He was a force of nature.” Whether Strasberg is being a bit melodramatic, I mean, Kazan is being a bit melodramatic here, quite possibly, but it shows the esteem in which these young actors and directors, they were very young at the time, late teens, early twenties, the esteem they held this guy in and the fact that they went on to achieve what they did is testament.
So who was this guy? Strasberg was born as I said, Israel Strasberg in a small town in what was then part of Austria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the Ukraine, a town called Budzanov. Forgive my translation, my pronunciation. Obviously Jewish parents, Baruch and Ida Strasberg, but the son of Baruch Strasberg. Father emigrates to New York and the family remained in their small home village with an uncle who was a rabbi. So the exact trajectory coming through, and I know that everybody has spoken about, Judy and William and others, the the massive influence of the rabbinical Talmudic learning tradition in Jewish history. His father worked in the garment industry in New York. Gets enough money together, sends for the elder son, then the daughter. Finally gets enough money to bring over his wife and the two remaining sons. So the classic immigrant story of the Jewish father, young, young family, leaves the small village in Ukraine, gets to New York, manages to get the the family out, earning a few bucks working as, on the factory floor in the garment industry.
Between 1909 and the early 1920s, the family lived on the Lower East Side and the young Strasberg is a voracious reader, very close to his older brother, Zalmon. His older brother dies in 1918. Spanish flu pandemic. This traumatised the young Strasberg. They were so close, these brothers. He, this traumatised him so much that he dropped out of high school. A relative introduced him to the theatre. In particular, Yiddish-language theatre, which was very prominent in New York. Gives him a small part in a Yiddish-language production. 1923, Stanislavski brings the Moscow Art Theatre to America. Strasberg goes to watch them perform and watch them rehearse. He’s never seen an ensemble so committed, so dedicated to each other. And he writes, “That the actors seem to surrender their egos to the the brilliance of the work.” The work came first, the ego second. Something quite rare in acting at the time in theatre, and today as well. He saw that actors, whether they were playing small, small parts or the leads, that they had the same commitment and intensity on stage. Every actor also seemed to, in his words, “Project some kind of unspoken inner life for the character.”
And it it struck him as a whole new approach to acting that he wanted to do, or wanted to be part of. He studies with two of the main, the big, two of the main students of Stanislavski at the American Laboratory Theatre. And works particularly on this idea of emotional memory and other aspects. Forms the Group Theatre that I mentioned. Stanislavski writes his book “An Actor Prepares”. I spoke about it. And in 19, later in the late 40’s, starts The Actors Studio. Strasberg writes, “At the studio, we do not sit around and feed the ego. People are shocked how severe we are with each other. We cannot ever let the ego win over the group. The group must come first.” It’s called the group. Admission to The Actors Studio was by audition. Usually, over a thousand actors would audition. but, by, at this stage they’d built up such a reputation, each year they took maybe five or six, maybe seven, out of a thousand. Sidney Poitier, Karl Malden, Gene Wilder, Dennis Hopper, Sally Field, all were part in the very early days. Jack Nicholson auditioned six times. Dustin Hoffman also auditioned six times to get in. Harvey Keitel auditioned 11 times. Extraordinary.
It shows the absolute commitment when all these, and they were all very young at the time, late teens, early twenties. They, they weren’t names at all. But they recognised something that they could really gain and learn. Pacino wrote, “The Actors Studio meant everything to me. Strasberg hasn’t been given the credit he deserves. Brando in particular didn’t give Lee the credit he deserved. It made me a real actor. The idea is you learn to use everything that has happened in your emotional life and you learn to use it to create the character you are working on. You learn how to dig into your unconscious and make it conscious and make use of every experience you’ve ever had.” He doesn’t talk about every experience you can imagine you will have or might have, but every experience you’ve had. So we can ask, how do you play a king, a queen, a general, a murderer, the victim of murderers? You know, all of that. If you haven’t done, if you haven’t been that? You’ve got to find something in the emotional memory which can trigger that, which can then relate to the character.
By contrast to Pacino, Brando wrote, “Strasberg would’ve claimed credit for the sun and the moon if he believed he could get away with claiming credit. He wanted to be an acting oracle and a guru. And I don’t respond well to gurus. People worshipped him. I never knew why. I sometimes went to The Actors Studio on a Saturday morning because Elia Kazan was teaching and there were usually a lot of good looking girls there. Strasberg never taught me acting, Stella Adler did. She was my real teacher. She was brilliant. And then later, Elia Kazan.” Complete opposite to Pacino. Brando, Pacino, approach between the two. Because Adler emphasised the “magic if”. Stella Adler, who I’ll talk about shortly, said, “Forget about emotional memory and digging into traumatic and past memories, focus on the ‘magic if’.” The imagination. If I was Macbeth and a general in the army, and if I had so much ambition that I was prepared to kill to become the leader and the King, how would I behave? She, she put aside, abandoned completely the emotional memory work and said, “I don’t want to go into all that trauma and all that stuff. I want to focus on imagination.”
And she split from Strasberg. And that’s what Brando sees as the huge difference in what he wanted compared to what Strasberg was offering. Which Pacino wanted, the emotional memory work. Jane Fonda wrote, this is Jane Fonda, “I went to The Actors Studio. I was so young. Lee told me I had talent. It was the first time anybody, except my father, but of course my father would, told me that I was good at anything, that I had talent. I couldn’t believe it. His belief in me was the turning point in my life.” Jane Fonda. Strasberg himself spoke about emotional memory, improvisation, the physical, all this kind of work. And he said that, “That is how you express the emotions demanded of the character.” ‘Cause, of course, that’s the challenge. How do you produce the emotion for the character that is believable for the audience? Strasberg then also wrote, “The stimuli to which we respond are real in life. The actor must respond to imaginary stimuli.” So he recognises it’s imagined. Again, Macbeth. Imagine I’m a general. Imagine I have such ambition to kill to become the king.
But once I’ve imagined, put aside imagination and now dig into emotional memory. Find when I’ve been so ambitious in my own life. Find when I’ve wanted something that I would kill for it, almost. And what it’s like to kill and then use the emotions in. So the imagination is merely the bridge to triggering an emotional memory, which can then help the character and the acting. This is very different to, and, and the important difference, which was summed up by the brilliant Japanese actor, Yoshi Oida, who acted much later with the remarkable British director, who, I’ve always loved his work incredibly, Peter Brook. Jewish as well. And Peter Brook for me, created some of the most remarkable productions from the 60’s all the way through. And, in fact, just sadly died, you know, just a couple of days ago. Peter Brook, remarkably innovative, brilliant director in so many ways. And Brook worked with the Japanese actor, Yoshi Oida, who wrote this amazing book called “An Actor Adrift”. Yoshi Oida studied zen approaches, kabuki, and many other of the traditional Japanese approaches to performance, which were radically different from all of the Stanislavski and post-Stanislavski ideas.
And Yoshi Oida talked about, “When I’m on stage, the only thing that matters, say I’m kneeling on a stage and I’m pointing up and I’m pointing up and I, pointing up at the moon. All that matters to me is that the audience believes I’m pointing at the moon. And how do I create that, that audience will believe I’m pointing at the moon. Because, of course, I’m just pointing at the stage ceiling, a theatre ceiling, a building ceiling on a, you know, there isn’t any moon. How do I create that? And all of my training and technique and acting is to make it believable that I’m pointing at the moon. But of course I’m just, you know, I’m kneeling on, on, on, on some wooden planks pointing at a ceiling in a building.” So Yoshi Oida pushes the whole idea of being believable on stage. And this is what a lot of these actors, and Strasberg, and the others took up. How to be believable? Not necessarily truthful as Meisner argued, but to be believable, believe myself, and then maybe the audience will believe.
So it’s not about imitating life, it’s about making the stage live. How? By being believable. And then the audience will believe me. Kazan also interestingly wrote this about Strasberg, “Strasberg had to, had to be uncompromising. He’d studied revolutions. He’d studied the Russian, French, and other revolutions from a, any political and artistic revolutions. He knew what was needed for a revolution. He was fired up by his mission.” Now that’s fascinating that you get this perspective, that he knew he wanted to create a whole revolutionary method and approach to Western acting or certainly in New York City. Okay, that is Mr. Strasberg. Moving on to Stella Adler. She is, she created the Stella Adler School of Acting. New York in 1949. Taught Brando, partly De Niro, Harvey Keitel, some of these others and so on.
The daughter of Sarah and Jacob Adler. And a, Jacob Adler her father. Was a half sister of Charles and Celia Adler, who were stars of the Yiddish Theatre in New York at the time. And they were part of what was known as the Jewish American Adler acting dynasty, which had its beginnings, its origins, in the Yiddish Theatre from the 19th, late 19th century through to the 1950s, in fact. She begins acting at the age of four. She’s part of the, part of her parents, it was called the Independent Yiddish Art Company. And she grew up acting alongside her parents from the age of four. 1922, she also goes to the Stanislavski Moscow Art Theatre production and rehearsals they do in New York. Same as Strasberg. 1925, she reads about his theories. 1931 with, with Meis, Sanford Meisner and Kazan she joins the Group Theatre of Strasberg. 1934 she goes to Paris, studies with Stanislavski, learning all the theories. And there she talks about, she discovers, Stanislavski saying to her in 1934, “Only use emotional memory as a last resort.”
He changed his mind from his early work in the early 1900’s. 1934, he’s saying to her, she’s studying with him in Paris. She’s the only one who studied with him. Actually studied with Stanislavski, of all of them. And saying, “Rather emphasise the imagination, stimulate the actor’s imagination rather than emotional memory.” The “magic if” versus emotional memory technique. And that’s the huge gulf between her and Strasberg. And Brando and a whole lot of others, Harvey Keitel, Martin Sheen, Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, they follow her and the others follow Strasberg. She said, “I don’t want to draw on the emotions I experienced in life. For example, when my mother died, to create a role that is maybe schizophrenic or whatever. If that’s acting, I don’t want to do it.” She writes it in, in one of her books. So, for her it’s about, imagine if I was this character in the given circumstances of the scene, what would I do? So, “50% of the actor’s job,” she writes, “is the internal imagination.” And that will trigger an emotional effect. Don’t work on the emotion, work on the imagination. If I am, then I am this, and 50% is external, which is a physical characterization, how to walk, how to stand, accent, voice, physical body and so on.
Anthony Hopkins employed some of this, but with a physical in “Silence of the Lambs”, where he talked about he was obsessed. How on earth do you play a serial killer who’s highly intelligent when there’ve been hundreds of, of Hollywood B, B-grade movies, serial killers endlessly, without becoming a complete stereotype cliche? How do you make something uniquely different of yet another serial killer in a movie? And he’s freaking out. He’s walking the streets of New York and London and elsewhere. And finally one day, Anthony Hopkins talks about walking in New York and he walked past the clock shop. You know, the big old big grandfather clocks, the smaller clocks, the watches. And just by instinct goes inside and he starts to hear the ticking of the clock. Tick, tick, tick, tick. You know that absolute mechanical, relentless metronome, ticking, ticking, ticking. And he starts to imagine, again, imagination is activated, not emotional memory. Imagine Hannibal Lecter is meant to be so intelligent. He’s always three or four steps ahead like a chess master. He’s thinking, thinking all the time. He’s driven by intelligence, by the intellect, by the mind.
And that as relentless as the ticking of the clock. His mind never stops thinking, he never resorts to emotion. And he realises that’s the key for the character. And he started to change the accent and started to change the voice to get that relentless tick, tick, tick, tick of the clicking of a clock. And if your watch his acting carefully in “Silence of the Lambs”, you can, the way of the eyes looking, the head, the body, everything is geared towards having that relentless ticking, ticking, tick that you feel, that we feel, the audience, that he’s three steps ahead intellectually, five steps ahead of any of us. And he got it from walking into a clock shop in Manhattan. So 50%, as Adler would say, from the outside in the physical, the voice, everything, and combined with the imagination. And that is how you will produce the emotion in the scene. Okay?
A radical difference to, to Strasberg’s emphasis. These two are for me the greatest examples of method acting and the teaching of method acting. I don’t think there’s any wrong or right, depends, sources for courses, whatever actors prefer or teachers prefer, you know, go for either one. Some actors prefer the one, some actors prefer the other. But it’s the essence of the approach. She married the critic and the director Harold Clurman, and she was one of the founders of the Group Theatre. And then her last marriage was a physicist and novelist, Mitchell Wilson. Then we go on to briefly here, a little bit Sanford Meisner. Meisner, also Jewish origins. And born in Brooklyn, the oldest child of Hermann and Bertha Meisner, Jewish immigrants who have come from Hungary to New York City. Now, interestingly, when he is very young, Meisner, his health was, was a bit bit dicey and the family took a trip to the Catskills. While there, his brother Jacob contracted bovine tuberculosis from drinking unpasteurized milk. And he died.
According to Meisner, his parents blamed him. And he became very isolated and withdrawn. As he wrote, “It was the dominant emotional influence in my life from which I never escaped.” He wanted to be a pianist, but his father pulled him out during the Great Depression, out of music school at Julliard, and he had to help with the family business in the New York Garment District. So, and his main idea, taking from all the others, part of, using some of the other ideas I’ve mentioned from Stanislavski, Adler, and ah, and Strasberg, is, his main idea was to be, to be, to live truthfully under imaginary given circumstances. So again, the imaginary given circumstances that Stanislavski spoke about, Adler, and et cetera. But his whole approach was to be truthful in that moment. Not believable, but truthful in that moment. Truthful to what you, a human being who happened to be an actor on the stage feels in that second. And all the techniques in the work are around that for, for Meisner.
He taught James Caan, Steve McQueen, Robert Duvall, Gregory Peck, Diane Keaton, Jeff Goldblum, David Mamet, and many others. Okay, so these are some of the main practitioners who come from this, this Jewish and remarkable background who’ve taken Stanislavski all the way forward. And now these, also, the last one is Uta Hagen. German immigrant from, obviously from Germany, into New York. She has her own ideas, but that, basically these main ideas I’ve covered are, are part of Uta Hagen as well. Here she is in a scene with Paul Robeson. And because of acting with Paul Robeson in “Othello” in 1943, she was blacklisted. Very hard to get parts in, certainly in films, for many, many years. And difficult on the stage and turn to acting. She’s the last of the four main, if you like, inheritors of the Stanislavski trajectory. Okay?
I want to show this as one of the great scenes for me of all time. This amazing scene we all know. And watch what Schindler is doing in everything that I’ve mentioned here. 'Cuz we can’t imagine how, how would we act this role?
[Clip plays]
- Oh please, let’s go. Let’s go please. Come on.
[Clip ends]
- I’m going to hold it there. We know how the scene progresses where the little girl in the red dress goes under the bed. Aside from the, you know, the extreme and, and extraordinary emotions produced, and, for me, the brilliance of Spielberg’s directing, we experienced the whole scene through Schindler’s eyes. This is the turning point scene in the movie where it’s, just looking at it from an acting point of view here, where he’s got to con, he’s been, you know, he’s making money, he’s a businessman, he’s always seen Jews as these stereotype untermensch, et cetera, et cetera. Suddenly, and out he’s riding with his wife on his horse, you know, the, the image of power, the image of, of privilege and PR, and prestige in the society. He’s got the little German, the little Nazi insignia on the little broach, you know, on, on his jacket. How, what is he trying to do? What’s? To go back, what is the character’s want? What’s the character’s intention? To go back to Stanislavski’s question.
Because this is the scene where he changes. This is the turning point where Schindler goes from, from being a passive recipient of privilege, just cause he happens to be born Aryan, to developing a conscience, to shame, to guilt, to astonishment, surprise, bewilderment, shock, horror. Conscience is pricked to beginning a certain change. And he acts it so subtly and so nuanced, it’s so subtle the eyes hardly blink. You know, he’s on the horse as well all the time. So we’ve got to get that feeling on the horse, but the horse can never dominate what he’s watching and the reception of that, the intention, the character, you know, how would we act it? Would we imagine, if we were Schindler in the scene, how would we do it? Do we do it emotional memory, try and find emotion from our past? Bring it in, of such horror and trauma and shock that has changed us? What do we choose to use and then how do we make it physical through our bodies? Or do we just go on instinct and forget about these techniques of Strasberg, Adler, Stanislavski, whoever? The intention is that, and he, he, could just, you know, get on the horse and just ride away. Forget about it.
But the intention is to watch and see what is really going on. You know, the intention could, my intention as the character could be, I’m so shocked that it’s causing such a physical reaction, I can’t ever be the same after. That would be the characters want, the character’s intention in the scene. And the second big question the actor will ask, “What’s my obstacle to achieving my intention?” Or the obstacle is that I’m, you know, I’m a very wealthy businessman just because I belong to the Nazi party. I’m Aryan, I’m Christian, yeah, all the rest, et cetera. So don’t do anything. Overcome that obstacle, I start to change. All these questions come in, in that scene and he does it with such minimalist acting through the face, the eyes. But he, I don’t, for me, he doesn’t overplay the shock and the horror, the bewilderment, the surprise. It’s so underplayed. And it’s not only an English understatement way of acting, it’s a highly intelligent understanding of how to maximise the effect on the audience.
Okay, this is another scene totally different from, as we all know, Scorsese’s very early film “Taxi Driver” with a very young De Niro. I want to show the first part of the, the, the scene where he transforming himself from a nerd-ish, loser taxi driver in New York City, age of 23 and one. into becoming, what I suppose we could say, the extreme right wing or whatever of today, you know, a gun-toting young extremist. It’s the transformation scene which happens, and the techniques of emotional memory here together with the technique of improvisation of Strasberg.
[Clip plays]
June 29th, I got to get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on, it’ll be 50 push-ups each morning, 50 pull-ups. There’ll be no more pills. There will be no more bad food. No more destroyers of my body. From now on, it’ll be total organisation. Every muscle must be tight.
[Actress] Wow. Look at the size of that. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh it looks so good. It’s getting harder and harder and it’s throbbing now.
The idea had been growing in my brain for some time. True force. All the king’s men cannot put it back together again.
And just to move the scene on a little bit.
Yeah. Huh? Huh? Faster than you. Saw you coming, you fuck. Shit heel. I’m standing here. You make a move, you make a move. It’s your move. Hah? I’m trying you. You talking to me? You talking to me? You talking to me? Well, who the hell else are you talking…? You talking to me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Oh yeah? Huh? Okay. Huh?
[Clip ends]
- So it’s, what for me, this is, this is the transformation scene where, you know, he’s, he’s a young guy, he’s a taxi driver in New York. He can’t get the girls. He, he sees all the life. What he regards is the decadence, the seediness, the moral decay of America and New York City life. And he takes it on himself to pump himself up, masculine, macho, and he’s going to get all the guns, his body’s covered with guns and knives, and go out there and change and kill. So how do you, how does De Niro act this? You know, he’s young himself, he’s never killed, he’s never had a gun in his life, other things and so on, and take, he’d used. This is all, this is improvised. If you read the script, it’s just a short little description. De Niro improvises, the technique of improvisation from Strasberg and Stanislavsky is all inside here.
You know, they’re talking to you. Who are you talking to? Talking to me. You’re talking, you know, he’s looking at the mirror, and with the guns, there’s an excitement discovering a whole new macho masculine approach compared to how he perceives he’s been treated before. So it’s a major transition scene amazingly captured in an improvisation. But he knows the given circumstances of the scene are nerdy taxi driver transforms himself into believing he’s muscular, he’s strong, he can take on, like Rambo, the army, the world, anybody, kill them and win. And become a hero from, from a zero to a hero. All of that. It’s a brilliant improvised scene knowing the given circumstances of what he needs to achieve. So for me here, you know, in this short little piece, it’s an amazing combination of the techniques that he will have studied only, you know, very recently just before making this, this movie with Scorsese.
So these are just some examples and I will give some more. I think we’re just running out of time here, but I will give some more briefly next week from very different kinds of movies of how these techniques are used by these actors. You know, if you think of this scene here from “Amadeus”, and from the King, we all remember this, the King, Salieri. The King, Salieri, and Mozart coming in for the first time. It’s an amazing transformation scene where, where these techniques are also employed in a radically different way. And, of course, if we look at the same and. These are the transformational scenes in films that are, that I’ve been focusing on here. And, of course, this is the, you know, the great scene from “The Pianist” with Adrien Brody. And as we all know, Adrien Brody lost weight and he, he went the whole route with method acting to lose weight, to become semi-emaciated, to try and through if, if he couldn’t imagine or find emotional memory, then live it physically for quite a while, you know. All part of the greatness or the great approaches of method acting. Finally, as Hemingway said about writing, he said, “Imagine the dramatic sequence of events that produce the emotional effect on the reader. So write the dramatic sequence of events that will produce the emotional effect on the reader.”
That was Hemingway’s definition of, of writing. And, for me, all of these techniques are about, whether imaginary, or emotional memory, or whatever. They’re about techniques which can produce the emotional effect that the actor wants the audience to experience. And that, that notion of producing the emotion is so crucial. Bad acting is, for me, when actors try to act the emotion itself. I’m going to act scared, or pity, or compassion, or forgiveness, or love, or hate, or, or murder, or contempt. I’m going to act the emotion itself. That, for me, is a disaster. And it’s when you end up with ham, stereotyped, corny, acting. Boring on stage or in film. But when you act the intention, or you act the want, or you act if I was this in the scene, then it’s, and physical, it’s much more active, the emotion will result. You don’t have to act the emotion itself. And it’s, for me, one of the biggest differences when we are watching or acting in film and theatre between a really intelligent and good actor and a, and an average one. The average one will always go for the emotion itself. And it will, it will always feel like overacting 'cuz it leaves no space between the actor and the audience to feel anything. It’s all just given on a plate.
But if I’m acting to simply produce it, it will be produced anyway. It’s the thought, or the intention, or the physical act, or the imagine that produces the emotion. I don’t have to obsess about acting the emotion itself. That is, in essence, what Yoshi Oida also talks about in that book that I mentioned, the great Japanese actor with, with Peter Brook. And that way, I will be believable. And the audience, let the audience feel the emotion. Don’t, as the actor, obsess about trying to feel the emotion in the moment, it’s, you can’t do it, you’ll fake it. Okay, so thanks very much everybody. Let’s hold it there.
[Moderator] And do you have time for questions?
Yeah, sure.
Q&A and Comments
Q: Hi and Sarah, can you give a talk on Peter Brook? A: Yeah, that would be fantastic. He’s really, for me, he’s the most interesting and artistically interesting and intelligent director of, of the last 40, 50 years.
Sandra, the “magic if” is a tool for the circumstance of a single scene. The time is never applied to the entire circumstance of a drama. Absolutely right. That could be the overall circumstance of the play or the film. You know, what’s the overall situation and the overall objective or intention of my character in the, in the whole scene. The reason I use “Macbeth” is because “Macbeth” uses the phrase vaulting ambition. So Shakespeare gives the actor the key to acting the whole character. So the “magic if”, if I had such, such a powerful vaulting ambition, how would I do it? That’s the overall circumstance of the play or the, of “Macbeth.”
Q: Ron, does this technique of actually feeling the emotion of the character have a dangerous side? Might the actor lose control if the character is enraged? Might the actor become ill or depressed because of despair? A: Absolutely. This is why Stella Adler split from Strasberg. And that’s why Stanislavski, I think, also changed later in life to focus on imagination much more than the “magic if”, or rather than emotional memory. Stanislavski did say, you know, “If you can’t get it through 'magic if’ and imagination, then try emotional memory.” Yeah, you’ll try anything to get it. But it can become indulgent, and it can become possibly traumatic for a learning actor. You know, if I’ve got a, again, it can lead to, I think, the danger is it leads to acting the emotion itself as opposed to the thought that triggers the emotion. You know, act the thought. Act is, act the situation rather than trying to be the emotion.
Q: Romaine, did Adler and Strasberg encourage an unhealthy dependency in the actors? Or does the fault lie in the stars? A: That’s great. I, you know, the reason I showed the Marx brothers is, you know, they never read a, probably never read a word of all this or studied, you know, a day of any of all this. Does it lead to an unhealthy dependency? It can if one becomes too addicted. That’s why I wanted to show Strasberg versus Adler, Stanislavski changing ideas. You know, many, many ideas coming from the original of Stanislavski. In the broad umbrella called method acting or the contemporary approach in the West. Romaine, imagine, imagination’s always guided by emotion. Absolutely. But she was saying imagine first and then the emotion will be produced.
Monteith, about the emotional memory of the actor in the interpretation of a role. We now have actors in Britain from so many cultural, racial, ethnic backgrounds playing a particular role.
Q: Are they bringing a completely different interpretation? A: Yeah, that’s fantastic. It’s a great question, Monty, because there are so many traditions all over the world, not only in in England, I guess, but in many countries, through, in individuals coming from everywhere. I mean, Stanislavski was Russian coming to New York City. If he hadn’t made that trip, who knows? Would anything have ever happened if he hadn’t gone to New York or Paris or London? If he had never left Moscow or gone, you know, much further than, you know, parts of, of the old Russia then? So we don’t know. What I do know is that there, there is a feeling of, I think, a zeitgeist, a feeling of something is in the air that things will change in a certain direction that pushes acting in a certain way. And I think art and actors and directors and writers, you know, they follow these things. It used to be that the, the tradition, you know, to write as many words in a play, because, of course, there wasn’t competition from film, TV, internet, all the other mass media, radio. But as all of those changes happened, ironically, the change in theatre was to be absolutely minimalist with the number of words in a play and to not write long speeches and all the rest, just the tip of the iceberg, a phrase, and let everything else be subtext, you know?
So the act of playwriting has changed radically because, I think, partly of technology, but also because audiences are much more educated and because, I think, time and space are so much more compressed. We don’t have the time to listen to endless long speeches, unless they have the incredible language of Shakespeare, maybe. If you look at the ancient Greeks, fascinating, very, very few long speeches except some of the longer ones by the chorus. And there you’ve got a whole group singing or narrating the speech. So it’s different, you know, it’s a group energy that you’re getting. But you don’t get these end endless long speeches in the ancient Greek stuff because people haven’t got the interest to sit and listen for so long, you know, get on with it. And they’re listening to three, four players a day and getting drunk. So I think these changes keep shifting all the time as a society changes and of course levels of education and access to language. And changes in culture, which I love. I mean South Africa alone, you’ve got so many cultures, so many traditions, so many approaches, you know, and, and what you can study and get a richness from, from one country in, in terms of purely performance. ‘Cause of course you’ve got ancient storytelling in Africa, which is another whole approach to acting, you know, the very, going back thousands of years, you know how you tell a story, one person stands up and tells a story.
Richard, seems to me that the method acting came to prominence largely because of film rather than stage acting where closeups are large for exposing the inner self. Yeah, I think, in film you do have absolutely, as you say Richard, the closeup, the zoom in, so you can just focus and capture everything like in, in, in Schindler, just to look on the face while he is on the horse. I think absolutely. But it began, it began in theatre with Stanislavski and the Moscow Art Theatre. And there’s a, a big shift, you know, some people argue that it’s the link of the, the end of the enlightenment of, in the focus on individuality, on democracy, and human rights, and the rise of the individual’s inner life. So the individual becomes more of value, not just a number or just, you know, one of, of millions, billions in the mass of humanity. But the rise of democratic individualism, of Western capitalist individualism that leads to a valuing of inner life. And then how do you capture inner life on stage or film, together with, as you’re saying, the camera zooming in? But I also think it started in the stage first, and I, I think it’s linked to these other broader, you know, social historical factors.
Q: Roberta, Susan, did Luther Adler study with his sister? A: Great question. I’m not sure. I’d have to check.
Okay, sorry, I just jumped there. This whole of this here jumped. Okay, Barbara, thanks. Thanks.
Q: Okay, Martin, what was the actor playing Schindler? Was it the movie camera? Would there have been something to prompt his emotions? A: No, I think he’s trying to capture Liam Neeson, I think he’s trying to capture, you know, everything that I said, Schindler is a wealthy, let’s give the, give him circumstances. He’s a wealthy businessman. He belongs to the Nazi party. He’s an opportunist. He’s going to use it to make money. Doesn’t necessarily believe in the ideas of it, but it can make him a helluva lot of money fast. He, he doesn’t need a conscience. And that scene is about awakening his conscience to shock, horror, shame, and how shame works to awaken the conscience. So it, it could just close it down. He could look at it and say, well, you know, these are subhumans, who cares? But something is pricked inside him and the conscience, possibly through shame, or watching, or something else is awakened. How, how does he act it? 'Cause he’s got to show that change.
Gail, thanks so much and hope you’re well in Joburg. Ron, Joaquin Phoenix an example of method acting gone crazy. Yes, I think it is. I think he took, he, he takes it way too far where, you know, he tries to make every single, he doesn’t trust the imagination enough. I think that’s Joaquin Phoenix. He, he doesn’t trust. He’s too, he tries to be too much. I don’t know, like when he is Johnny Cash or something, he doesn’t trust his own imagination enough. Susan, thank you. Avron, thanks. David. Sorry, Rocky Graziano, not Marciano. Thank you, of course. Stuart, thank you.
Q: Bev, could the technique be used preparing soldiers for armed combat and corporate coaching? A: Yes. A lot of people go into these coaching, come from studying acting, let’s be honest. A lot of people become, what are they, life coaches now, and coaching and work, coaching and home, family life coaching, all that come from studying, acting without a doubt, and various. I’m just giving you a few tech. I mean there are many, many other techniques. I’m just giving you a few coming from the Stanislavski tradition. Soldiers for, preparing soldiers for armed combat. Yeah, absolutely. If you are preparing your people, how are you going to get them to act “Saving Private Ryan”, whatever? How you going to get them to act so they are, again, believable? Not necessarily truthful, as Meisner would say, but believable, as Yoshi Oida would say, or Peter Brook. How are you going to get them? You know, what do you do? And these are ways which are fairly quick ways you can help, especially in the huge scenes, not just the lead characters.
Roberto, thank you. The principle of intention first and the body follows. Yes. And that’s what so misunderstood. Bad actors is the emotion first. Good actors, the intention first. The thought produces the emotion. And the body follows the thought, produces the body. The thought produces the, the emotion, not the other way around. It’s such a, it’s a subtle, but it’s such an important difference. And the main difference between, for me, Strasberg and, and Stella Adler. Barbara, thank you. Vien, ah, Vivian. Silent film acting. Yep. Well, a whole different ballgame. And we have to get into that in a whole different way, because all of those actors, Buster Keaton, even, and in the Marx Brothers, why, why I showed it. Charlie Chaplin. They never read this or studied this probably for a minute. They learned on the job. They learned from studying with mentors who worked really good actors before. But I don’t know how much Einstein necessarily learned from his professors, et cetera.
So it, it can be in many fields that you have these remarkable innovators and remarkable creative or artistic brilliances and approaches. You know. Of course. And that’s why I wanted to show the Marx brothers, we can never deny just the sheer relishing of the, of the gift, of just being able to act brilliantly, whether it’s by intuition or instinct or a thought in one’s own way. You know, the Marx Brothers tradition of musical and vaudeville, whatever they coming out of, you know, plus the, the Yiddish tradition in New York and others. So it’s, you know, so many approaches. But what we looking at here, again, is the legacy of Stanislavski, who was the first to really try to research and investigate it as a serious art or a serious area worthy of study and change and approach and, and how these approaches are so effective, remarkably effective. And, you know, whichever approach or combination any actor may choose.
Okay. Thank you very much everybody. Hope you have a great rest of the weekend.