North Country(2005), and Maggie in Hunter Hill
and Perry Moore’s Lake City(2008).
Spacek recalls how three very different direc-
tors helped bring out these three very different
types of screen performance:
From Terry Malick I learned how to approach a char-
acter.... With Terry you feel an incredible intimacy.
We spent a lot of time just talking about our lives,
remembering things that help you to tie the character
[to] your own life.... Bob [Altman] works by bring-
ing elements together, not expecting anything—he
brings things together to capture the unexpected.
Brian [De Palma] approaches films more like a sci-
ence project. With Brian I learned to work with the
camera.... [E]verything was storyboarded.... You
can act your guts out and the camera can miss it. But
one little look, if you know how it’s going to be framed,
can have a thousand times more impact.^6Each directorial style requires something differ-
ent from actors. Malick, encouraging actors to
identify with characters, promotes a style loosely
referred to as method acting. Altman, favoring
spontaneity and unpredictability in actors’ per-
formances, encourages improvisation. De Palma,
choosing neither of these two roads, pushes his
actors to see their performances from a cinemato-
graphic point of view, to explicitly imagine how
their gestures and expressions will look on-screen.
In so doing, he essentially encourages actors to
think more than to feel, to perform their roles
almost as if they are highly skilled technicians
whose main task is to control one aspect of the
mise-en-scène (performance), much as set design-
ers control the look and feel of sets, sound mixers
control sound, directors of photography control
cinematography, and so on.
No matter what type a movie actor is—how def-
inite or changeable the persona is, how varied the
roles are, how successful the career is—we tend to
blur the distinction between the actor on-screen and
the person offscreen. The heroes of today’s world
are performers—athletes, musicians, actors—and a
vast media industry exists to keep them in the pub-
lic eye and to encourage us to believe that they
are every bit as fascinating in real life as they
are on the screen. Inevitably, some movie actors
become rich and famous without having much
art or craft in what they do. Essentially, they walk
through their movies, seldom playing any charac-
ter other than themselves. Fortunately, for every
one of these actors there are many more talented
actors who take their work seriously; try, whenever
possible, to extend the range of roles that they play;
and learn to adapt to the constantly shifting trends
of moviemaking and public taste.
One definition of great acting is that it should
look effortless—an achievement that takes talent,
training, discipline, experience, and hard work. It
also takes the skills necessary for dealing with
the pressures that range from getting older (and
thus becoming more apt to be replaced by a
younger, better-looking actor) to fulfilling a pro-
ducer’s expectation that you will succeed in carry-
ing a multimillion-dollar production and making it
a profitable success.
As we continue this discussion of acting, remem-
ber that it is not actors’ personal lives that count
but rather their ability to interpret and portray
certain characters. In today’s world, where the
media report actors’ every offscreen activity, espe-
cially indiscretions, maintaining the focus required
for good acting poses a challenge. Although the
media have always done this, the behavior of some
of today’s actors is not only more reckless, but also,
is seldom covered up by a studio’s public-relations
department as was done in Hollywood’s golden age.The Evolution of Screen Acting
Early Screen-Acting Styles
The people on the screen in the very first movies
were not actors but ordinary people playing them-
selves. The early films caught natural, everyday
actions—feeding a baby, leaving work, yawning,
walking up and down stairs, swinging a baseball bat,
sneezing—in a simple, realistic manner, and “acting”
was simply a matter of trying to ignore the presence
of the camera as it recorded the action. In the early294 CHAPTER 7ACTING
(^6) Sissy Spacek, qtd. ibid., p. 518.