EPISODE DESCRIPTION:
Episode three of this four-part miniseries launches into the next three don’ts of 12 that actors (and writers) should not do, and what they SHOULD do instead.
7. DON'T BE A DUMP TRUCK. Writers have a tendency to dump information in the form of back story or exposition. Actors don’t have this luxury. They HAVE to rely on subtext and human behavior to communicate history with the audience. For both groups, the key is to focus more on human behavior than on words. One great tool to help scenes come alive is if the actors are given objects that can be used during the scene, which can bring out deeper levels of nuance and reveal character relationships and their struggles.
8. DON'T HOLD BACK. Neither actors nor writers can afford to play it safe. The most memorable characters are the ones who are willing to go to extreme lengths to get what they want. So go big or go home. Milk the scenes for everything they are worth. There’s no room for half measures here. Your characters need to take risks be bold.
9. DON'T WORRY ABOUT THE MESSAGE - FOCUS ON TACTICS. Each character in a scene has his or her own objective. Instead of worrying so much about the specific words being used, writers and actors should focus on the tactics that each character uses to get what he or she wants. HOW does your character pursue their goal? WHAT LENGTHS are they willing to go to in each scene?
UP NEXT
Join us again next week for our final episode in this series, where we will discuss the final three don’ts that actors and writers should not do:
10. DON’T TELL; SHOW.
11. DON’T LET YOUR CHARACTER THROW A PITY PARTY
12. DON’T DESPISE YOUR CHARACTERS.
Don’t miss out on these great tips that can help you become a master of your craft.
QUESTIONS OR TOPIC REQUESTS?
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https://www.speakpipe.com/ZenaDellLowe
SPECIAL THANKS
The Mission with Zena Dell Lowe would like to thank composer Carla Patullo for the original music she graciously permits us to use in the intro and outro of this podcast. To find out more about this amazing talent, go to www.carlapatullo.com
Tags: Acting, Actors, Acting tips, Writing tips, Story, Storytelling, Storytellers, Writers, Zena Dell Lowe, Mission Ranch Films, The Storytellers Mission
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Ep 25 - The 12 Don’ts of Acting - Part 3 8:17:20, 3.57 PM
Wed, 11/4 8:35PM • 15:55
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
characters, objects, felix, extreme lengths, actors, dump truck, scene, dialogue, life, visual image, audience, oscar, writers, depths, point, blocking, real, don'ts, person, fighting
SPEAKERS
Zena Dell Lowe
Zena Dell Lowe 00:00
INTRO: Hello, and welcome to the Mission with Zena Dell Lowe, a podcast for artists and storytellers about changing the world for the better through story.
Zena Dell Lowe 00:10
TOPIC INTRODUCTION: On the last episode, we addressed three more "don'ts" that actors don't want to do, which means we've covered six "don'ts" in total so far. So, today, we're going to go on to discuss the next three "don'ts" in the list, and I also want to give you some really great tools to help you know what to do instead. So, let's dive right in.
Zena Dell Lowe 00:32
PRESENTATION: Number seven: don't be a dump truck. Now, I realized that this point probably applies more to writers than it does to actors, and that's because actors don't have the luxury to be a dump truck. They have the language already that they've been given that they have to say. So, they have to rely on the script, on the text that they've been given. But how this applies to actors is when you overly rely on the actual language that you're using on the dialogue. You become a dump truck when you fail to find innovative ways to create visual behavior that helps communicate your emotional state to the audience. You don't want to rely on the words. It's about behavior. Now, something that might help us understand this is when we talk about blocking. As an actor, I used to memorize my lines through blocking, because I needed to psychologically connect my thoughts to my movements. If I was supposed to move at this particular time on stage and cross and go to the other part, I needed to make sure that the cross was motivated by my internal state, my internal thoughts, feelings, etc. So, until I knew the blocking, I didn't know even how my character felt in that particular moment. The point is that I would memorize my lines in the context of blocking, because that's the only way I could psychologically connect my thoughts to my movements, and then I would know why I was saying whatever it was that was coming out of my mouth. So, instead of putting words first, think about your character in terms of human behavior as the primary way to communicate history with your audience.
Zena Dell Lowe 02:27
Now, writers, this applies to you, and then some, because writers tend to dump information. In fact, it's one of the things that drives me bonkers when I read, say, a fantasy genre. What will happen is, the story will start out wonderful. It'll be a nice pace of revealing information, it'll be a nice pace of something happening that launches that character on a journey, and then the writer will get into act two and all of a sudden, they start just dumping mythology down my throat. It doesn't come out in organic, absorbable chunks. It's like all of a sudden, a fire hose has gone off and they're just trying to cram all of this mythology down my throat all at once, and I can't keep track of it. I don't even have time to absorb it when they're giving me the next piece. And mythology is really hard, because you have to do it in slow chunks. And you have to do those things in moments that makes sense to the story. So, writers tend to just dump information. And this is true also in the form of something that we call exposition. So, exposition would be backstory, the necessary things that have happened in the past that they think that the audience needs to know. But the truth is, the best way to rob your audience of the joy of being invested in your story is to tell them everything from the past. It robs us of our bragging rights. I remember watching a film called Stargate with Kurt Russell, and at the very beginning of the film, he's sitting in a little boy's bedroom in the dark. He's sitting on the bed, holding a gun. And what do we know from that image, from that visual representation? Well, we can least extrapolate from that, that something's happened to the little boy. Probably, he's dead. Now, we don't know how he died, but we know that he's not there and we know that this guy is pretty darn depressed about it, to the point that he's probably contemplating killing himself, which probably implies he had something to do with it, somehow. That's all we needed to know, but they didn't trust us to be able to ascertain that. So, what they did is, they cut to two cops walking up to the house. "Hey, did you hear what happened to his son?" "Yeah, I heard that he found his gun and he killed himself on accident." "Yeah, isn't that terrible? I mean, the guy is just a mess." Oh my gosh, that's going to make me groan, because I already knew most of that. I didn't know the details. Maybe that's something I could have maybe found out later that might have added another layer of depth and understanding and sympathy or empathy that I might have for the character. But in that moment, I knew enough to be able to brag to my friends about how much I got from that visual image, and they robbed me of my bragging rights, of my joy of being able to interpret those things, because then they came back and just laid it out for me.
Zena Dell Lowe 05:44
But now I want to give you a trick or a tool or a technique that you can use, that can actually really bring out the dynamics and the excitement of any given scene. And this is, if you give your characters an object to work with. So, in some ways, I'm talking about props, yes. But you can also give them an object that's valuable, but something that can have a visual representation, that can really show things and convey meaning on a much deeper level to your audience. So, let me give you an example. In Henry VI, part three, there is a character named the Duke of York, and he's led a revolt against Henry, but he's been captured now by Margaret. And Margaret is a bloodthirsty queen. So, what she does is, she steps forward to him, and she's taunting him. And she shows him a handkerchief with a red stain on it. And she says, in the most casual way possible, that it was dipped in the blood of his youngest son, his much beloved son, whom one of her own followers had just killed. And then she presents it to him to dry the tears on his cheeks. But then she continued, and she said, "Oh, you want to be a king, huh? Let's see how you'd look in a crown." And then she makes a paper crown and places it onto his head. These are powerful examples, which largely come about from the visual images and the use of objects used between the characters. It's a very powerful way to communicate to your audience the essential information of their history. For example, in The Odd Couple, there's this great scene where Felix comes out of the kitchen with a plate of pasta and Oscar is furious with him, so he picks up the aerosol can, which is something that's associated with Felix, and he sprays Felix's food. Then he tells Felix to get that spaghetti off the poker table. Well, Felix laughs and tells Oscar it's not spaghetti, it's linguini, at which point Oscar picks up the plate and hurls it and says, "Now it's garbage." Well, then Felix refuses to clean it up, and Oscar says he doesn't want it to be cleaned up. Then Felix, who's OCD, actually makes a move to clean it up and Oscar threatens bodily injury if Felix like so much just touches it. So, the whole action is revolving around the pasta. However, that's not really what the scene is about. The food is a way to graphically demonstrate the disintegration of the relationship. So, including objects is not an artificial trick. It's a device that works well on stage, in screenplays, and in novels. And in some ways, I think it works well because it reflects the way people behave in real life. Think about how we are. If you are in a married relationship with a spouse, how many times have you battled over control of the remote control? Or how about children who are fighting over who gets to sleep in the upper bunk, or where they get to sit in the car? "I call front seat!" Right? We hear this kind of thing all the time. These sorts of power struggles over objects tell us a great deal about which child has what power and what their primary problems are. So, in other words, when you bring objects into a scene and have people fight over them or have people have to deal with them, it often reveals deeper issues that lie between those characters. So, instead of dumping information, bring in objects and let the objects themselves reveal things.
Zena Dell Lowe 09:43
Which leads me to number eight: don't hold back. Milk it. Go big or go home. There's no room for shy wallflowers here. You need to be bold. You need to make bold choices. Now, for actors, this means when your character feels a particular emotion, you need to go there. You need to feel it. Unless, of course, your character is trying to hold back that emotion. But still, you still need to feel it. Even if they're trying to rein it in, you need to experience it. And then you need to think in terms of behavior that would allow us to understand the depths of their emotion. Moreover, since the whole purpose of a scene is for the character to pursue some part of their goal, you need to be willing to go to extreme lengths to get what you want. This is how you raise the stakes. And writers, the same applies to you. You need characters who will go to extreme lengths to get what they want. It's what makes characters memorable, by the way. And here's a freebie for you, this is why we love romantic comedies. Do you realize this? In almost every case, the reason we love romantic comedies is because at the end of the day, one of the characters is willing to do some sort of crazy, over-the-top romantic gesture to show the depths of their love and affection for that other person, that they're willing to make a fool out of themselves, that they're willing to do anything at any cost to prove their love to that other person. And it wins us over. And notice, very few of us make these grand overtures in real life. It's too scary. We're too afraid of being rejected. We don't make grand overtures. We don't stand up in weddings and say, "I would like to object, because I think this person should marry me." That rarely happens in real life, but it happens in movies or in stories, because people are willing to go to extreme lengths.
Zena Dell Lowe 12:04
See, in real life, we're much more frightened. We are much more careful about what we're willing to do. In fact, we call that being self-controlled, the fact that we don't go to extreme measures to get what we want. But our characters can't make those choices. They need to go to the lengths, the ends of the earth. This is the scene in Robin Hood, where they show up and they're all going to either die or they're going to win. It is all or nothing. Everything is at stake, and they throw all in. Your characters cannot play it halfway. So, we want to raise the stakes by making sure that your characters are all in and that they're willing to go to extreme lengths to get what they want.
Zena Dell Lowe 12:51
Which leads me to number nine: don't worry about the words themselves. Think in terms of tactics. It is really hard to write dialogue well, but one of the reasons this is true for novelists is because, again, they're not yet thinking like actors or they're not thinking like characters. So, they're using dialogue in the same way that they would use words, language to convey message and meaning. So, when I say, "Don't worry about the message and focus instead on the tactics that your character uses to get what they want," what I mean by that is to start thinking more in terms of how people behave in real life. When I teach improv, what will often happen is I will give my actors a scenario, something that they're actually fighting over, something that they are actually negotiating, and then I'll just say, "Go." And what inevitably happens is, a pattern of trigger and response appears in the scene. And the reason this happens is because there's a hot word or phrase or idea that one of the characters says or brings up that the other character is compelled to respond to right then. And they could do that in a number of ways. They might object to what was just said, or they challenge what has been said, or they modify, slightly modify, what the person has said. And this very closely mirrors how it actually works in real life. Now, I'm going to go into this more when we get to the dialogue portion, but the point here is that, except in those rare situations when there's a lot at stake, depending on the specific words we use, we really don't worry too much about the words. We don't think about how we're phrasing most of what we say. Instead, we keep our attention fixed on what we're trying to achieve, and we trust that when we open our mouths, that the words are going to be there. And that's why dialogue is an extension of action. Dialogue is an extension of trying to achieve objectives. So, if you're interested in how to use the trigger principle well, then stick around. Come back and listen to the episodes on dialogue, because we're going to go into this in detail.
Zena Dell Lowe 15:19
CALL TO ACTION: And if you found this helpful, will you please subscribe to the program and maybe even rate or review it? And better yet, help promote it on social media. Tell a friend. We'd love to get more listeners who could actually benefit from the information being provided in this podcast.
Zena Dell Lowe 15:36
OUTRO: Until then, thank you so much for listening to the Mission with Zena Dell Lowe. May you go forth inspired to change the world for the better through story.