12 Acting Words and Phrases For Directors – Part One
(c) Peter D. Marshall
Actors need to TRUST you because they rely on the director to help them create sustained and believable performances and one of the keys to getting successful performances from actors is good communication between the director and the actor.
For many first-time directors, working with experienced actors can be frustrating and intimidating because the actor’s world is filled with many strange words such as character spine, action verbs, objectives, obstacles, permission, in the moment, improvisation and motivation!
And this dilemma doesn’t just apply to first time directors. There are many experienced directors who are more comfortable working with the “mechanics” of filmmaking than working intimately with actors on their performances. These directors feel safer with the crew because their discussions are mostly about objective technical issues.
If you can’t direct actors in a language they understand, many actors will slowly lose faith in you and start to direct themselves and they do this, not out of spite or ego, but out of protection for themselves and their craft!
Remember, when it comes to communicating with actors, a director can be either part of the solution or part of the problem! So if you don’t know how to speak the actor’s language, you could have a difficult time getting actors to trust you and if your actors don’t trust you, you may have a challenging time blocking with them and getting layered performances from them.
To help you better communicate with actors, here are 12 key acting words and phrases used by actors in both film and theatre.
- Action Verbs
Action verbs are words that can stimulate specific emotions in an actor because they express an “action” anyone can actually do (to accuse, to control, to seduce, to flirt, to ignore, to flaunt, to berate etc.)
And if you want to increase (or decrease) the intensity of a line, you can change the actor’s intention by “changing the verb.”
For example, let’s say you gave this note to an actor: “Go to Sally and plead with her to tell you her secret” but it was not strong enough for the scene. So now you could say, “Go to Sally and demand she tell you her secret.” And if you really need to raise the stakes, you could say, “Go to Sally and threaten her if she doesn’t tell you her secret.”
- Emotional Memory and Sense Memory
Emotional Memory is an acting technique created by Constantin Stanislavski that recreates a real emotional or psychological moment of a past event that actually happened to the actor to help them realistically portray a character’s emotions on the stage.
When an actor uses this technique, they remember a past experience (as if it is occurring at the present time) which then helps them to create a believable emotion their character would actually be experiencing at that moment.
Example: An actress is looking at the actor playing her father laying in a coffin and has to feel real grief over his “death.” However, in real life she has never had anyone in her family or close friends die. To attain a believable feeling of grief for this scene, she remembers when her dog was run over by a car. She can then bring up those real emotions of grief she felt back then and use them in this scene.
Sense Memory is another Emotional Memory technique that involves remembering an experience from our 5 main senses (touch, taste, smell, sight, sound) to create a genuine emotional reaction to a specific moment in a scene.
- Given Circumstances
Given Circumstances are the facts in a script the writer has provided about the plot, characters, costumes, props, conditions of life, time period, locations etc. For the actor, a Given Circumstance is also information about who they are, what they are doing and why they are doing it.
- Improvisation
Improvisation is the art of acting and reacting to one’s surroundings “in the moment.” It’s an essential component of the actor’s training and is a particularly useful technique for helping actors focus and concentrate.
When actors are having a difficult time understanding or relating to a scene, give them some time to improvise the scene. It loosens them up and gives them the freedom to find the real meaning (subtext) of the lines and the scene. Improvisation also gives you a chance to discover something you may have missed in the scene and also lets you see if the actors are on the same page.
- In the Moment
Reacting in the moment means actors are totally present with both the text and their scene partners and not thinking about their next line or next action.
This technique creates powerful performances because when actors are not worried about their blocking or their next line they will be genuinely reacting on instinct and will be completely immersed in the scene.
A good way for a director to help an actor’s performance is to make sure they are always listening in the moment to the other actors in the scene. If this happens, then every take will be a little different because they are reacting to the other actor “as if for the first time.”
Remember, an actor always knows their character’s destiny but the character they are playing does not. So it is up to the director to make sure the actor is always in the moment and does nothing to foreshadow or give away anything that will happen to their character.
- Indicating
A common problem for some actors is the temptation to indicate (reveal physically) an emotional beat they are not actually feeling by “showing the audience something about the character through their acting.” Most people call this kind of performance over-acting – I call it “face acting!”
When an actor is not feeling a specific emotion, they may end up indicating the desired emotion by trying to “act” that feeling without being connected truthfully to the emotion. So make sure your actors don’t play the result of what they want the audience to feel.
Remember, “close-ups don’t lie” because the camera won’t let you get away with anything – especially when it comes to faking emotions.
Copyright (c) 2019 Peter D. Marshall / All Rights Reserved
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