gave direction “with his entire personality—his
facial expressions, bending his eye. He didn’t ver-
balize. He wasn’t articulate, he couldn’t really finish
a sentence.... He’d give you a clue, just an open-
ing. If you didn’t produce what he wanted, he would
pick you apart.”^42 Newcomers faced a challenge in
getting it right the first time. Similarly, Otto Pre-
minger, the director of Laura(1944), was so pre-
dictably cruel to his actors that he was known as
Otto the Ogre.
However rigid Ford’s approach may at first
seem, we find it in similarly fruitful collaborations
between Rouben Mamoulian and Greta Garbo,
Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich, John
Huston and Humphrey Bogart, William Wyler and
Bette Davis, François Truffaut and Jean-Pierre
Léaud, Akira Kurosawa and Toshirô Mifune, Satya-
jit Ray and Soumitra Chatterjee, Martin Scorsese
and Robert De Niro, Spike Lee and Denzel Washing-
ton, and Tim Burton and Johnny Depp. These direc-
tors know what they want, explain it clearly, select
actors with whom they work well, and then collabo-
rate with them to create movies that are character-
ized in part by the seamless line between directing
and acting. Alexander Mackendrick, the director of
the classic Sweet Smell of Success(1957), was once
asked how to get an actor to do what he needed him
to do. “You don’t,” he said. “What you do is try to get
him to want[emphasis added] what you need.”
By contrast, the line that can exist between
directing and acting is evident in the work of
director Alfred Hitchcock, who tends to place
mise-en-scène above narrative, and both mise-en-
scène and narrative above acting. Hitchcock’s
movies were so carefully planned and rehearsed
in advance that actors were expected to follow his
direction closely, so that even those with limited
talent (e.g., Tippi Hedren in The Birds, 1963; and
Kim Novak in Vertigo, 1958) gave performances
that satisfied the director’s needs.
On the other hand, Stanley Kubrick, who was as
rigidly in control of his films as Hitchcock, was
more flexible. When directing Barry Lyndon(1975),
a film in which fate drove the plot, Kubrick gave
his principal actors—Ryan O’Neal and Marisa
Berenson—almost nothing to say and then moved
them about his sumptuous mise-en-scène like
pawns on a chessboard. When working with a more
open story, however, he encouraged actors to
improvise in rehearsal or on the set. The results
included such memorable moments as Peter Sell-
ers’s final monologue as Dr. Strangelove (and the
film’s last line, “Mein Führer, I can walk!”) and Jack
Nicholson’s manic “Heeeere’s Johnny!” before the
climax of The Shining(1980). Malcolm McDowell
inA Clockwork Orange(1971) and Tom Cruise and
Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut(1999) are also
said to have worked out their performances in
improvisations with the director. Perhaps the most
extreme example is director Werner Herzog, who,
in directing Heart of Glass(1976), hypnotized the
entire cast each day on the set to create what he
called “an atmosphere of hallucination, prophecy,
visionary and collective madness.”How Filmmaking Affects Acting
Actors must understand how a film is made,
because every aspect of the filmmaking process
can affect performances and the actors’ contribu-
tions to the creation of meaning. At the same time,
audiences should understand what a movie actor
goes through to deliver a performance that, to their
eyes, seems effortless and spontaneous. Here are
some of the challenges an actor faces.
Although there are certain exceptions, most
production budgets and schedules do not have the
funds or the time to give movie actors much in the
way of rehearsal. Thus, actors almost always per-
form a character’s progression entirely out of
sequence, and this out-of-continuity shooting can
also force those who are being filmed in isolation to
perform their parts as though they were interact-
ing with other people. When these shots are edited
together, the illusion of togetherness is there, but
the actors must make it convincing. Actors must
time their movements and precisely hit predeter-
mined marks on the floor so that a moving camera
and a focus puller know where they will be at every322 CHAPTER 7ACTING
(^42) John Wayne, qtd. in Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford:
A Life(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), p. 299.