Acting in Film Read online

  MICHAEL CAINE

  ACTING IN FILM

  DEATHTRAP

  Directed by Sidney Lumet. Warner Brothers, 1982

  Pictured with Christopher Reeve

  01982 Warner Bros. Inc.

  THE APPLAUSE ACTING SERIES

  ACTING IN FILM by Michael Caine

  ACTING IN RESTORATION COMEDY by Simon Callow

  ACTING WITH SHAKESPEARE: The Comedies by Janet Suzinan

  ACTING: Basic Technique and Variations by Paul Kuritz

  THE ACTOR'S EYE: Seeing and Being Seen by David Downs

  THE ACTOR AND THE TEXT by Cicely Berry

  ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE by John Strasberg

  THE CRAFTSMEN OF DIONYSUS by Jerome Rockwood

  CREATING A CHARACTER by Moni Yakim

  DIRECTING THE ACTION by Charles Marowitz

  DUO! The Best Scenes for the 90s

  THE MONOLOGUE WORKSHOP by Jack Poggi

  ONE ON ONE: Best Monologues for the 90s (Men)

  ONE ON ONE: Best Monologues for the 90s (Women)

  ON SINGING ONSTAGE by David Craig

  A PERFORMER PREPARES by David Craig

  SHAKESCENES: Shakespeare for Two Edited by John Russell Brown

  SLINGS AND ARROWS by Bobby Lewis

  SOLILOQUY! The Shakespeare Monologues (Men)

  SOLILOQUY! The Shakespeare Monologues (Women)

  SOLO! The Best Monologues of the 80s (Men)

  SOLO! The Best Monologues of the 80s (Women)

  SPEAK WITH DISTINCTION by Edith Skinner Edited by Lilene Mansell and Timothy Monich 90-minute audiotape also available

  STANISLAVSKI REVEALED by Sonia Moore

  STYLE: Acting in High Comedy by Maria Aitken

  THE VOCAL VISION edited by Barbara Acker and Marian Hampton

  THE APPLAUSE ACTING SERIES

  Edited by Maria Aitken

  MICHAEL CAINE

  ACTING IN FILM

  An Actors Take on Movie Making

  REVISED EXPANDED EDITION

  CONTENTS

  Introduction ....................... xiii

  I Movie Acting: An Overview ............ 1

  2 Preparation ........................ 21

  3 At the Studio or On Location .......... 35

  4 In Front of the Camera-Before You Shoot .................... 45

  5 The Take .......................... 57

  Close-Ups and Continuity ........ 59

  The Art of Spontaneity .......... 68

  Voice, Sound, Lighting, Movement. 74

  6 Characters ......................... 85

  7 Behavior On and Off the Set.......... 105

  8 Directors ......................... 119

  9 On Being A Star ................... 135

  Filmography of Michael Caine ........ 149

  Editor's Note ...................... 15.5

  Biography ........................ 157

  01982 Warner Bros Inc.

  DEATHTRAP

  Directed by Sidney Lumet. Warner Brothers, 1982.

  Introduction

  DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS

  Directed by Frank Oz. Orion, 1988

  Pictured with Steve Martin

  01988 Orion Pictures Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

  If you really want to become an actor, but only providing that acting doesn't interfere with your golf game, your political ambitions, and your sex life, you don't really want to become an actor. Not only is acting more than a part-time job, it's more than a full-time job. It's a full-time obsession.

  your audition for the movies started the day you were born. If you wind up on the screen, it's because you've done something right since the cradle - and long before you ever made it to a producer's office.

  There's no one sure-fire trajectory to the movies, no one route to Hollywood. There's not one book to read, or one cafe to sit in. Your performance in all public arenas is part of the screen test. If you're in a bar where nobody's ever seen you before, you're being auditioned by the bartender. Ile knows that dude who comes in late Tuesday nights for a quick drink is married to the woman whose sister is the makeup artist on a sitcom. If you're taking your little girl to school in the rain, you're being monitored by the crossing guard. She changes costume and goes off as a part-time secretary to an off Broadway producer. You never know when or how the people you meet are going to suddenly set off the chain reaction that will generate your break.

  If you believe auditions only take place in a producer's office, you may just never get that call. Because the world is basically divided into two kinds of people: those who believe they're making it every day regardless of what "reviews" they're getting, and those who will never make it no matter how high they rise or how many statuettes line the mantel. Now, I'm not advising you to primp and prance when you take out the garbage. But know that the trash you take out today may wind up getting you the gold tomorrow.

  And you don't stop campaigning just because you've made it, either. I remember doing a film with Shirley MacLaine: Gambit. A tour bus pulls up pretty smartly as the actors are crossing the studio lot. Fans come piling out of the bus. The driver is trying to corral the actors into signing autographs on our way in. Most of the actors escaped the crowd through a side door. I, on the other hand, knew the bus driver had a jot) to do, and I was going to make him look good. I signed every autograph on that bus. No big deal, right? Until I tell you that the young driver of that bus turned out to be Mike Ovitz. See what I mean?

  There was no place allowed for the likes of me in the firmament of actors. Almost anybody has it made today compared to my chances thirty-five years ago. Well, I shouldn't say it was unheard of. Richard Burton and Peter Sellers did okay, didn't they? Not to mention my buddy, Sean Connery. He seems to be keeping the creditors at bay.

  iiversal Pictures, a Division of Universal City Studios, Inc. of MCA Publishing Rights, A Division of MCA Inc.

  GAMBIT

  Directed by Ronald Neame. Universal, 1966

  Pictured with Shirley Maclaine

  When I told my friends I was going to be an actor, they all had pretty much the same encouraging words for me: "What are you gong to do? Sweep the stage?" None of us had ever met anybody who'd been to drama school. I'm not sure we even knew there was such a place as a drama school - never mind anybody who'd made it to the big screen.

  Let me run through my curriculum vitae before I landed my first role. See what you think of my chances. I had worked in a laundry. I'd done a stint in a tea warehouse. I worked pneumatic drills on the road. I was the night porter in a hotel. I washed dishes in all the best restaurants. I remember making jewel boxes at one time. And I was a soldier.

  BLOOD AND WINE

  Directed by Bob Rafelson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.

  Pictured with Jack Nicholson

  BLOOD AND WINE

  Directed by Bob Rafelson. 20th Century Fox, 1997.

  Pictured with Jack Nicholson

  I was not researching roles, getting into the heads of my characters, doing heavy background on their psyches, feeling their pain. Nobody invited me to join the Actor's Studio. I was paying my rent. It's very difficult for people to comprehend that when I say I was broke at the age of twenty-nine, that I literally didn't have the price of a bowl of spaghetti down at the local diner. They think being broke is being down to your last couple of grand in the bank. My bank was in my pocket, and my account was full of lint.

  Chances are you've had some formal higher education. Well, to me and my parents, going to grammar school was higher education. I had no classes to go to, or instructional videos to watch. But I was a tremendous reader of books. And from the pages of those books I discovered what other people's lives were like. They weren't like mine. And I became determined to ch
ange my life. I wasn't exploring the possibility, I was determined.

  If you really want to become an actor, but only providing that acting doesn't interfere with your golf game, your political ambitions, and your sex life, you don't really want to become an actor. Not only is acting more than a part-time job, it's more than a full-time job. It's a full-time obsession. Anything less and you'll fall short of the mark.

  BLUE ICE

  Directed by Russell Mulcahy. M&M Productions, 1992

  Pictured with Sean Young

  X, Y AND ZEE

  Directed by Brian G. E Iutton. Columbia Pictures, 1971

  Pictured with Elizabeth Taylor

  You can master every word of this book until you can recite it backwards in your sleep. But without a will and a drive like a locomotive, without the cool steely focus of a safecracker, without the tenacity and wiliness of a weasel, this book and a dozen years of intensive scene study won't add up to diddly squat by way of a movie career. Let me put it another way: if you can imagine yourself doing anything else, forget it!

  Some actors always feel that they're "losing the light." Some little detail about a role or the auction or the production isn't quite perfect; it's the wrong director, or the right director is in the wrong mood; or the casting direc tor who was right to cast you was wrong about everyone else; or the right script but the wrong writer. Others, and I like to think I belong to this camp, are so constantly and sufficiently entertained by whatever the clay brings that we join in the game until it's pitch black outside. That's not to say that we're not aware of obstacles - we're on to them immediately. There's no obstacle course like the movies. When everything is running perfectly in the movies, it's not because there aren't any hurdles to jump; it's because everybody has seen them coming and cleared them in time and in style. And, may I add, with a certain amount of pleasure!

  After all the years in the business, some people still think of me as a professional Cockney. As if people were paid for being Cockney. I'm actually from South London, not Bow, and any day of the week you will find 1.3 million Cockneys more authentic than me. Now very few of them are in Hollywood. But they still say "Caine's a Cockney actor" as if I were some kind of lucky moron who just happened to be perched at the right bar stool when a Hollywood producer walked in.

  And yet that's also a battle that must he fought. You will have to fight the battle of your background and genetics, too. That's not to say you want to disown your past. There are a lot of tricks in that baggage we lug around with us that are worth taking out now and then. If you're a healthy, good-looking bloke there's no point in specializing in Quasimodo parts.

  My own big offensive came when I was up for my standard little Cockney part in Zulu. The break came when I got the bad news that the role I was up for had already been cast. Lo and behold, they were so desperate for somebody to play the upper-class English role, they agreed to give me a screen test for the lead. I've never looked back since. I was able to redefine what the producer and director were looking for in the part. They were after your typical pubic school chinless wonder and they wound up with me. I managed to get them to see me in a new way. But until that day, everybody in the business said, "Oh, he's a very good Cockney actor, a very fine Cockney actor, and should you ever find yourself needing a first-rate Cockney actor, you really ought to use him - not a huge role mind you - but a nice juicy little Cockney part." And despite my eighty films and umpteen different roles from different backgrounds, the battle goes on.

  Why am I telling you all this? What right does Michael Caine have to teach you how to act in film? Absolutely none. There are many actors who know as much and more. But part of the business is more than a business: it's a community. And a community where people share experiences with one another. What I know today is the result of what successful actors have shared with me. I'm just passing on the torch. Don't take my experience for bleeding gospel. Just take it and run!

  -Michael Caine,

  January 1997

  01992Jim Henson Productions, Inc.

  THE MUPPET CHRISTMAS CAROL

  Directed by Brian Henson. Walt Disney Pictures, 1992.

  Pictured with Beaker, Kermit the Frog and Bunsen Honeydew

  Movie

  Acting:

  An

  Overview

  The ordinary man in the street doesn't get up in the morning and say to himself, "How shall I act today? What impression shall I give?" Ile just lives his life, goes about his business thinking his thoughts. A film actor must be sufficiently in charge of his material and in tune with the life of his character to think his character's most private thoughts as though no one were watching him-no camera spying on him. The camera just happens to be there. They say you've learned a foreign language when you start dreaming it. A film actor must be able to dream another person's dreams before he can call that character his own.

  The first time you go out in front of a camera is not like going out on a first date. You don't have to make a special impression. The camera doesn't have to be wooed; the camera already loves you deeply. Like an attentive mistress, the camera hangs on your every word, your every look; she can't take her eyes off you. She is listening to and recording everything you do, however minutely you do it; you have never known such devotion. She is also the most faithful ]over, while you, for most of your career, look elsewhere and ignore her.

  If this amorous relationship with the camera makes movie acting sound easy, think again. Behaving realistically and truthfully in front of a camera is an exacting craft, one that requires steadfast discipline and application. Film acting was never easy, but during the past 30 years, this craft has become even more demanding, partly because of changes in technology, partly because of the requirements actors and directors have placed on themselves, and partly because of shifts in audience expectations.

  If you catch somebody "acting" in a movie, that actor is doing it wrong. The moment he's caught "performing" for the camera, the actor has blown his cover. He's no longer a private character in a private world. Now he's a highly paid actor on contract to speak these lines for the public. Good-bye illusion. Good-bye career.

  In the early talkies, actors came to the movies from a theatre tradition and, not surprisingly, they performed in a way that was designed for the theatre. "l'hey didn't just talk-they delivered orations as if to the last rows of the balcony. No one seemed to tell them that there was no balcony. To some extent this highly theatrical performing was necessary because the microphone was completely stationary in those days. The mike, in fact, was generally stuck in a bunch of flowers in the middle of a table, so if the actors moved away from the table, they had to raise their voices. But the technology is infinitely more sophisticated now. These days, microphones can be hidden under a shirt collar or in the fold of a dress and can catch an actor's softest whisper. There is no need for an actor to raise his voice artificially. In fact, he must do just the opposite.

  )1990 Casei RcWres Al tights reserved. Photo Ciecit Lprrre WzbergCorsdr Pic*ns.

  A SHOCK TO THE SYSTEM

  Directed by Jan Egleson. Corsair Pictures, 1990.

  Pictured with Elizabeth McGovern.

  PLAY FOR THE MOMENT; IMMORTALITY WILL TAKE CARE OF ITSELF

  The style of acting has changed, too. In the old days, if an actor had to cry in a scene, he'd launch into a big emotional number to show the audience his grief. Ile would probably base his performance on what he'd seen other actors doing in acclaimed performances. Whether that method was effective or not, it was the tradition of the times.

  The modern film actor knows that real people in real life struggle not to show their feelings. It is more truthful, and more potent, to fight against the tears, only yielding after all those defense mechanisms are exhausted. If today's actor emulates film, he'd be better off watching a documentary. The same is true of drunkenness. In real life, a drunk makes a huge effort to appear sober. A coarsely acted stage or film drunk reels all over the place to show you he's d
runk. It's artificial. And eventually, that kind of acting puts up a barrier between the actor and the audience, so that nothing the character says or does will be believed. Credibility becomes an issue; and once an issue, it is never overcome. In other words, screen acting today is much more a matter of "being" than "performing."

  THE IPCRESS FILE

  Directed by SidneyJ. Furie. Universal, 1965.

  Audiences themselves have had a lot to do with the changes in film acting. They catch on very fast to what is truthful and what is not. Once audiences saw acting like Henry Fonda's in The Grapes of Wrath, they tuned in to the difference between behavior that is based on carefully observed reality and the stagier, less convincing stuff. Marion Brando's work in On the Waterfront was so relaxed and underplayed, it became another milestone in the development of film acting. Over the years, the modern cinema audience has been educated to watch for and catch the minute signals that an actor conveys. By wielding the subtlest bit of body language, the actor can produce an enormously powerful gesture on the screen. In The Caine Mutiny, the novel's author tells us that Captain Queeg plays nervously with two steel balls in his hand. In the film, Ilumphrey Bogart knew that most of the time, just the click of those balls on the sound track was all the audience would need-he didn't even have to look neurotic.

  THE CAMERA WILL CATCH YOU EVERY TIME

  The close-up is the shot on which film relies most when it comes to transmitting the subtleties of emotion and thought. It can give an actor tremendous power, but that potential energy requires enormous concentration to be realized. The close-up camera won't mysteriously transform a drab moment into something spectacular unless the actor has found something spectacular in the moment. In fact it will do just the opposite: the close-up camera will seek out the tiniest uncertainty and magnify it. "Drying" (forgetting your lines) can be covered up on stage, where the actor is perhaps twenty feet from the front row of the audience; but the camera will betray the smallest unscheduled hesitation. If a member of the crew walks across my eye-line, off camera, when I'm doing a close-up, I immediately ask for a retake. I may not have thought my concentration lapsed-the director may assure me everything is fine-but the camera will have caught that minute flicker at the back of my eyes.