An Introduction to Film

immediately as a metaphor for the ultimate outsider.
But the challenge to Depp as an actor is not only
to acknowledge just how different he appears to oth-
ers (“hands,” scars, makeup, hairstyle), which he
does in a very self-conscious and often comic man-
ner (e.g., using his hands to shred cabbage for cole
slaw), but also to humanize this character so that
he can be accepted as a member of the community.

Improvisational Acting

Improvisationcan mean extemporizing—that is,
delivering lines based only loosely on the written
script or without the preparation that comes with
studying a script before rehearsing it. It can also
mean playing through a moment, making up lines to
keep scenes going when actors forget their written
lines, stumble on lines, or have some other mishap.
Of these two senses, the former is most important
in movie acting, particularly in the poststudio world;
the latter is an example of professional grace under
pressure.
Improvisation can be seen as an extension of
Stanislavsky’s emphasis that the actor striving for
a naturalistic performance should avoid any man-
nerisms that call attention to technique. Occupying
a place somewhere between his call for actors to
bring their own experiences to roles and Brecht’s
call for actors to distance themselves from roles,
improvisation often involves collaboration between
actors and directors in creating stories, characters,
and dialogue, which may then be incorporated into
scripts. According to film scholar Virginia Wright
Wexman, what improvisers

seem to be striving for is the sense of discovery that

comes from the unexpected and unpredictable in

human behavior. If we think of art as a means of giv-

ing form to life, improvisation can be looked at as one

way of adding to our sense of the liveliness of art, a

means of avoiding the sterility that results from rote

recitations of abstract conventional forms.^39

For years, improvisation has played a major

part in actors’ training, but it was anathema in the

studio system—where practically everything was

preprogrammed—and it remains comparatively

rare in narrative moviemaking. Actors commonly

confer with directors about altering or omitting

written lines, but this form of improvisation is so

limited in scope that we can better understand it

as the sort of fertile suggestion making that is

intrinsic to collaboration. Although certain direc-

tors encourage actors not only to discover the char-

acters within themselves but also to imagine what

those characters might say (and how they might

act) in any given situation, James Naremore, an

authority on film acting, explains that even great

actors, when they improvise, “tend to lapse into

monologue, playing from relatively static, frontal

positions with a second actor nearby who nods or

makes short interjections.”^40

Among the director-actor collaborations that

have made improvisation work effectively are

Bernardo Bertolucci and Marlon Brando (Last

Tango in Paris, 1972); Robert Altman and a large

320 CHAPTER 7ACTING

(^39) Virginia Wright Wexman, “The Rhetoric of Cinematic
Improvisation,” Cinema Journal20, no. 1 (Fall 1980): 29. See
also Maurice Yacowar, “An Aesthetic Defense of the Star
System in Films,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies4, no. 1
(Winter 1979): 48–50.
(^40) James Naremore, Acting in the Cinema(Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1988), p. 45.
Improvisation “You talkin’ to me?... You talkin’ to me?”
Screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote no dialogue for the scene
in Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver(1976) in which Travis Bickle
(Robert De Niro) rehearses his dreams of vigilantism before a
mirror. Prior to filming, De Niro improvised the lines that now
accompany this well-known moment in film history, a
disturbing, darkly comic portrait of an unhinged mind talking
to itself.