Marvin in Action
Tips & Tricks
Harsh Realities
Someone asked me recently if they should be an actor, and I said, if you have to ask them, the answer is no. I think the only reason to subject yourself to this is because you’re so passionate about it. You have no other choice.
Barbra Streisand
There’s a line in the film a league of their own when Gina Davis‘s character quits the baseball team and says “it just got too hard.“ And the Tom Hanks character says,”It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great!“
Besides some talent and a lot of persistence, every actor needs two things: hope and a sense of humor.
Jennifer Lawrence
Why Classes?
Instinct is not enough. Actors must tune their instruments daily in order to become completely responsive.
Lee Strasberg
If you are one of those people who believe you have “raw talent” requiring no training, you are in for a rude awakening. These people are crap-shooters who approach auditions haphazardly.
Ginger Howard Freeman
I don’t teach you to act. I teach you to live.
Lee Strasberg
What we do
The goal of drama should be truth, previously overlooked or disregarded.
David Mamet
In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce declared that the poet/writer or actor is someone who “recreates life out of life.”
Acting is placing yourself within the kaleidoscope of human character and seeing yourself as clearly as you can. It’s not looking at yourself egotistically but looking at yourself as a human being and what being human means.
Helen Mirren
The artist speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity and beauty and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity, the dead to the living and the living to the unborn. …To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile – such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.
Joseph Conrad
“To be an actor is tantamount to becoming part of something larger than oneself…Nobody offers a more accurate reflection of a given time. The actor is like a mirror in which everyone desires to gaze.”
Robert Brustein, Letters To A Young Actor p. 13
How We Do It
Film acting is talking softly and listening loud.
George Stevens
Never indicate. People don’t try to show their feelings. They tried to hide them.
Robert De Niro
MGM drama coach Lillian Burns has suggested that actors coming to film from theatre had to “learn projection from the eyes instead of just the voice for in motion pictures there is a camera which I have termed a truth machine. You cannot say “dog” and think “cat” because a meow will (read or) come out if you do.”
Know what you were saying and why you are saying it and the How will take care of itself
Konstantin Stanislavski
Every word must count.
Uta Hagen
Don’t do your homework in front of the auditors.
Ginger Howard Freeman
Great film acting is about simplicity, absolute truth and trusting yourself. It’s about knowing where the camera is and then forgettting that it’s there. Marilyn Monroe is said to have never known where the camera was and that was the secret to her success.
Simon Callow Actors On Acting
Don’t do anything unless something happens to make you do it.
Sanford Meisner
What is at stake for you in the scene? What are you fighting for?
Uta Hagen
The scene is always about you and the person to whom you are talking.
Ginger Howard Freeman
Stanislavski asked Rachmanimoff what accounted for the mastery of a master pianist: "Not touching the neighbouring key." The actor's mastery is in not using anything beyond what is strictly necessary
On stage you can give a performance. In front of a camera, you’d better have an experience.
Tony Barr
The great thing about acting is surrender.
Ed Harris
Don’t lose yourself in the part; find yourself in the part. Make it you. Play you, not your preconceived notion of the character. Don’t ever play just the mask.
Uta Hagen
Film is like a medium that likes to know less… It likes secrecy and the smallest gesture can be significant.
Rutger Hauer
I’d rather see someone make a choice and be wrong than not make a choice at all.
Gail Harvey, ACTRA Conference, February 2011
Acting is not about what your character feels about something but what he or she is prepared to DO about it. Acting is doing.
Uta Hagen
