WHAT IS ACTING? 289other cinematic techniques, movie actors always
come closer to the audience, and appear larger, than
actors on the stage do.
The camera makes possible an attention to
detail that was impossible before the invention of
cinema, mainly because stage acting forced actors
to project their voices and their gestures to the
back of the theater. Screen acting, as an experi-
ence, can be as tight and intimate as examining a
painting at arm’s length. As American screen actor
Joan Crawford put it, “A movie actor paints with
the tiniest brush.”^4
Movie Actors
The challenges facing movie actors in interpreting
and pretending to be their characters, and the
responsibilities involved in performing those char-
acters on the screen, are very different from the
challenges and responsibilities facing stage actors.
Stage actors convey their interpretations of the
characters they play directly to the audience
through voice, gesture, and movement. By contrast,
movie actors, using gesture and movement—and
voice since the coming of sound—convey their
characters directly to the camera. In turn, that
camera is the single element that most radically
differentiates the movie actor’s performance. Stage
actors play to a large audience and must project
the voice so that it can be heard throughout the
theater, and avoid the soft speech, subtle facial
expressions, or small gestures that are fundamen-
tal tools of the movie actor.
Stage actors, who must memorize their lines,
have the advantage of speaking them in the order
in which they were written, which, in turn, makes it
much easier to maintain psychological, emotional,
and physical continuity in a performance as the
play proceeds. By contrast, movie actors, who are
subject to the shooting schedule—which, for budg-
etary and logistical reasons, determines that most
shots are made out of the sequence in which they
appear in the screenplay—learn only those lines
that they need for the moment. Therefore, movie
actors bear the additional burden, particularly on
their memory, of creating continuity between
related shots, even though the shots may have been
made days, weeks, or even months apart.
Toward the goal of maintaining continuity (as
we will discuss in Chapter 8), editing is a major fac-
tor in putting shots together and thus helping to
create the performance. During the presentation
of a play, the stage actor performs each scene only
once; during the shooting of a movie, the actor may
be asked to do many takes before the director is
satisfied with the performance. Before a shot is
made, the movie actor must be prepared to wait,
sometimes for long periods, while camera, lighting,
or sound equipment is moved or readjusted; the
stage actor faces no such delays or interruptions.
Although the theater and the movies are both
collaborative arts, once the curtain goes up, stage
actors need not think much about the backstage
crew, for the crew will perform scenery or lighting
changes according to a fixed schedule. Movie
actors, however, while playing directly to the cam-
era, are always aware of dozens of people standingThe camera and the actorEnglish film actor Michael
Caine has compared the movie camera to an impossibly
attentive lover who “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.”^3
That appears to be exactly what the camera is doing in this
expressive close-up of Caine as Thomas Fowler in Phillip
Noyce’s The Quiet American(2002). The business and art of
Hollywood moviemaking intersect when “bankable” stars
such as Michael Caine (and, in this example, his costar
Brendan Fraser, left, back to camera) take on challenging,
unglamorous roles that transcend their physical
attractiveness.
(^3) Michael Caine, Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie
Making(New York: Applause, 1990), p. 4.
(^4) Joan Crawford, qtd. in Lillian Ross and Helen Ross, The
Player: A Profile of an Art(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1962),
p. 66.