Acting up
I spent this stormy weekend locked up in a room with 15 other people, and it was intense! 11 directors (mostly tv directors) gathered with 1 teacher and 4 professional actors for a two-day workshop on « Directing Actors for Cinema » put together by the ARRQ. Most of us had none or little experience in directing actors and each of us had to bring a scene which we got to rehearse with the actors and film on digital video.
Actors are strange creatures; I knew that fact since my days as a film student at San Francisco State, where I would see theater students loudly rehearsing their lines in the hallways of the arts building. I would envy their playfulness and the way they were comfortable with their bodies, using them like clay to shape emotions, yet I couldn’t help thinking: « Will I really have to work with these loud, attention grabbers, if I want to direct some day? ».
Last weekend’s workshop was an excuse to bring directors and actors together in the same room and to try to get them to speak the same language. Not an easy task, but how exciting to hear your own lines read by actors of talent! It is fascinating to see these characters (who only lived in your head before) start breathing on their own and going in directions you had never thought of. It’s probably as close as I’ll ever get to parenthood…!
There was an amazing energy in the room at the end of the day, when we all gathered with glasses of wine to look at the « rushes » and talk some more with the actors about our two very different worlds. It was like being in film school again (probably the best two years of my life so far, creatively speaking) but the fact that we all had some work experience in the field made it all the more useful.
School should be like that: let us learn some of the basics for a little while, send us off quickly into the real world, and bring us back, tired, hungry and motivated, to teach us some more.
