I rented Steven Soderbergh's latest effort Bubble last night, about a triangle between three empyoees in a doll factory in an American small town. The actors were "regular people" (i.e. non-actors) that Soderbergh found. The woman who plays Martha gives an excellent performance. The film is good enough, certainly not great, but I enjoyed it for the perfomance I mentioned (the detective is quite good as well), and for the way that they showed what this kind of world really looks like. It is familiar to all of us, yet because it is not at all glamorous, it is relatively rare that it is treated with this kind of candor on screen.
Another interesting point is that I read somewhere that Soderbergh released the film in the cinemas, on DVD, and through cable TV all at the same time, attempting a kind of marketing coup. Not sure how much of a tremor he really made, but it could be shades of things to come.
In my last post, I wrote about a film called Friends with Money. I mentioned a few of the performances that stood out, and one was that of an actor named Simon McBurney. He was magnetic, real, precise, funny, physically animated, emotionally full. In short, everything you could look for in an actor. The performance was one of the best I have seen in a long while. There was something familiar about his name to me, and I checked IMDB, and then remembered where I had see his name. He is the founder of an internationally acclaimed theater company in London called Theatre de Complicite. I saw their work at the Lincolcn Center Festival perhaps eight years ago. The production was transformational, meaning the set was minimal, and the actors' bodies accomplished much of the constant scenic transformation. We've all seen this kind of thing, but this company managed to do it so inventively that it seemed totally new. The actors were clearly all highly trained movement specialists, who had remarkable powers of articulation throughout their entire bodies. If I remember rightly, they studied a rigorous form of movement training called Le Coq. the actor in the movie, Simon McBurney, had directed the production I had seen, and had choreographed it. Anyway, I found it significant that this actor who had stood out so strongly in the film had had such a strong background in theater and in theatrical movement specifically. It supports my ongoing claim that the differences between acting for theater and film get way too much play, that the important things is learning to be engaged with others in a truthful,compelling way. It also underscores the fact that getting a solid, thorough movement background is an enormous asset to all actors, regardless of their professional goals.
This is the title of a new offbeat indie comedy, my very favorite kind of movie. It is ensemble picture. There are some very fine perofrmances: Simon McBurney, Frances McDormand, Jason Isaacs, among others. Good laughs. I'd say take it in.
Miklos's (Spring '05) film, The Enfolding, has been accepted to the Boston International Film Festival. This is his third Festival for this film. Congratulations!
Recently, in class, an actor asked me about how I was able to ferret out a particular point in the text that was of crucial importance for understanding what was going down in a particular scene. She said she had read the play carefully several times and not understood this point. I had to reply that it just takes practice to learn to read for the hot, critical, lifemaking details and features of a script. We work on that skill in the class all the time. However, a little more than that needs to be said. As much as I feel that there are particular ways in which an actor needs to learn to approach a script, it is also true that an actor needs to be a sensitive reader and a nuanced observer of life's rich pageant in general. And this means a degree of introversion. Rilke enjoined his young poet to "find his solitude." The same could be said for actors. Often, we tend to associate a kind of extroversion with actors: actors are gregarious people who like to be in the spotlight, to receive attention. There is nothing wrong with these qualities. An actor does need a desire to be seen, to share himself or herself and his or her experience. However, I think what is often forgotten is that an actor needs an introverted side as well: he or she needs to have a keen sense of the landscape of his or her own thoughts and feelings, in order to have something truly rich to share with an audience. In my experience, one of the best ways to develop this is through reading. Reading is usually a solitary activity, and reading fiction or plays involves entering another world, and coming to terms with the complicated realms of life depicted therein. If one reads reasonably good literature, there is usually richness and complexity aplenty. It is through this activity that one can develop one's eagle-eye for the critical factors in texts. One learns about the world, and one also becomes more intimately acquainted with how texts work: what are the points they hinge on, what are their centers of gravity. So the bottom line is: I advise actors to read. Read stuff you enjoy, but also stuff that challenges you (in other words: read some good literature). The benefits will be large if you can cultivate reading as a habitual way of meditating on yourself and the world and spending time with yourself, getting to know your own soul.
That acting has both an introverted and an extroverted dimension is one othe things that makes it distinctive as an art, and also one of the things that makes it so fascinating
