Thespian Interjections

An Actor's Responsibility

This could be an article on how often actors have made fine films, though its purpose is more to understand acting as a type of direction — that a strong thespian presence in front of the camera is often necessary when comprehending the energy of a work. In a passionate defence of acting available on TikTok, Ethan Hawke says at film school you are always taught about camera and lighting but not enough emphasis is placed on acting. Hawke says that very few cinematographers have become great directors, while actors often turn into fine filmmakers. He names Woody Allen, Spike Lee, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, as well as Warren Beatty and Robert Redford. He could also have mentioned most obviously John Cassavetes, but also Charles Laughton, Gary Oldman, Clint Eastwood, and more recently Greta Gerwig and Bradley Cooper. Then there are all those directors often acting in small roles or large: Roman Polanski, Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese. There are a reasonable number of cinematographers who turn to direction (Haskell Wexler, Jack Cardiff, Jan De Bont, Michael Chapman, Barry Sonnenfeld, Gordon Willis) but the rare one who becomes acclaimed chiefly for their directorial work over the cinematographic oeuvre. Wexler made the important Medium Cool and also Latino, but he is still better known for photographing Whose Afraid of Virgina Woolf?, In the Heat of the Night, Bound for Glory and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The gap between cinematographic and directorial achievement is more pronounced with Chapman and Willis — shooting The Last Detail, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull in the former instance, Klute, The Godfather and All the Presidents Men in the latter. The proper exception to this rule is Nicolas Roeg, who may have filmed brilliantly Masque of the Red Death, Fahrenheit 451 and Far From the Madding Crowd, but is much better known for directing Walkabout, Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing. 

        To look at directorial presence from the perspective of those who have moved from one profession to another is to show that acting is a more important stepping stone than cinematography, and would help justify Hawke’s claim. Yet he makes another, potentially more interesting one. He reckons the audience is smart and an actor has to be as smart. Saying he learnt a lot from Denzel Washington, he adds Washington wanted to know why his character in Training Day would be doing what he was doing even if it messed up the director’s shot choices. The director might chiefly be concerned with making sure the spatial layout is consistent but, according to Hawke, Washington saw it as his job to be in the head of the audience through the consistency of his character. Hawke sees this as logical in the context of Washington: the pragmatics of a character taking risks and trying to understand why as he wonders how many bullets he has in his gun, or why he should go down a dark corridor etc. But Hawke also proposes that many a film has been ruined by a character wearing the wrong jacket; where the clothes don’t match the personality and an actor would know this but the director who is more concerned with technique than plausible behaviour doesn’t care. 

          Hawke may be exaggerating his case but we can think of very contrasting positions. Paul Thomas Anderson says that “I genuinely adapt to the actor. If somebody likes to rehearse, we can rehearse. If somebody doesn't like to rehearse, we're not going to rehearse. In that way, I'm a kind of a producer to them, making the environment suit them, rather than them coming to the movie. That said”, he adds, “there is a job to do, and there are certain things that I have to bring to it, it's not all just experiments in acting every day. Working with Joaquin kind of requires looseness, it requires an ability to improvise, instinctually, where he might go. Trying to plan something out while working with him is very difficult. Because inevitably if you feel that he should sit on the couch, he's going to find a way to sit over there on the chair.” (Cineaste) In contrast, David Mamet reckons the actor’s “job is to accomplish, beat by beat, as simply as possible, the specific action set out for them by the script and the director.” (On Directing) By Mamet’s reckoning, Phoenix wouldn’t sit where he feels would be right; he would sit where he was bloody well told. 

     Mamet reckons making a movie should be like a syllogism: “which is the logical construct of this form: If A, then B. A play or movie proceeds from a statement: “if A (in which condition of unrest is created or posited), to a conclusion: then B(at which time entropy will once again rear its correct head, and a condition of rest will have been once again achieved.)” (On Directing) We can extract from Mamet’s comment on the syllogism one thing: that it is often used to explain a priori reasoning but often also used in contrast to the empirical. If we might say that the syllogistic is a dimension of story, the empirical is a vital element of the milieu. Mamet says, “the fairy tale is the great teaching tool for directors. Fairy tales are told in the simplest of images and without elaboration, without an attempt at characterisation.” (On Directing). He isn’t completely wrong and neither is he necessarily right. Classic Hollywood often feels closer to the syllogism and the sort of cinema Hawke so admires (seventies film) closer to the empirical. Speaking of some remarks by his co-star in the Before Trilogy, Julie Delpy, Hawke says: “People think that the hardest thing about acting is crying or yelling or having to do an accent; but truly listening, walking, talking, and moving like a real human being is what’s really hard. Part of working out the character’s bodily behaviour involves creating an environment where it’s okay whatever happens.” (Cineaste) 

      Such an environment is empirical rather than a priori, reliant on many different elements to be found on the set, rather than principles defined before making the film. Admiring Humphrey Bogart, Mamet quotes the actor on Casablanca. Rick in the film is asked whether they should play the Marseillaise now the Nazis are here and Bogart nods to the band and they start playing. When Bogart was asked how he made such a beautiful scene work, he said: “‘they called me in one day, Michael Curtis, the director, said, ‘stand on the balcony over there, and when I say ‘action’ take a beat and nod’”, which he did.” Mamet sees this as great acting, that the audience is very moved by Bogart’s simplicity and restraint at such an emotional moment, and “this is the essence of good theater: good theater is people doing extraordinarily moving tasks as simply as possible.” (On Directing) However, good acting can sometimes involve indecisiveness as readily as the decisive, depending on what the film needs and the part demands. Dustin Hoffman was never as assertive a persona as Bogart and he often seems in his body language between decisions. In The Graduate when Mrs Robinson seduces the gormless Benjamin it is an incremental process similar to an assertive salesman persuading a reluctant buyer to purchase an item. First, she gets him to drive her home; then into the house, then to have a drink, and then up to her room. Every step of the way Mrs Robinson dictates Benjamin’s actions as if he were incapable of directing his own, and he ends up in her bed for no better reason than he doesn’t know his own mind. He might not end up in it that first night but a stronger personality would have seen that nothing good could come from the assignation. Robert Redford did a screen test but director Mike Nichols couldn’t imagine the role played by such a winner: Nichols…recounted a conversation the two had, over a pool game, about the test. Nichols said, "I said, 'You were wonderful, but you can't play this, you could never play a loser in a million years.' He said, 'Of course I could.' I said, 'No, you can't, I'm looking at you. You cannot possibly play a loser.’ And he said, 'That's not true, honestly.' And I said, 'All right, have you ever struck out with a woman?' He said, 'What do you mean?' That's a true story.'" (Huffington Post) 

       The film needed an actor capable of being seduced, not emanating seduction, and Hoffman was correctly cast. “I think there have been more than a few occasions where a picture is better because of the actor who is in it,” (Playing to the Camera) Hoffman says, and this is often twofold. First, the right actor plays the role and, secondly, the actor is willing to see the part as evolving in the process of the production. As Hoffman says: “…we can work on a screenplay, we can work on a structure, we can work until we’re blue in the face, then look at the first day of the rushes and it’s different.” Hoffman sees film as an evolving process and will use the reality around him on the set to try and augment the role. He speaks of having conversations with the camera operator on Kramer Versus Kramer after the operator said of the film: “‘Jesus, this is right out of my life’. And I’d go up to him and I’d talk to him and I’d say, ‘tell me. Tell me.’ And he did. And it’s on screen.” (Playing to the Camera) This is empirical as opposed to a priori; quite distinct from Mamet’s insistence that “directing is just a technical skill. Make your shot list…the good actor performs his tasks as simply and as unemotionally as possible."   (On Directing) In Mamet’s take there is no need to go off and speak to people in the crew about their emotional lives; shouldn’t it all be locked down in the script and ready to deliver with the shot list? (Hoffman may have appeared in a film version of Mamet’s American Buffalo but nothing indicates they work in the same way, even if Mamet does of course in his theatre productions have characters who are less decisive than he himself clearly happens to be: characters like Hoffman’s in American Buffalo and the character played by Jack Lemmon in the film version of Glengarry Glen Ross are key examples. 

    But there is also a difference between a play written and already often performed and a film script that is a blueprint for a work in progress. Mamet often ignores the distinction and when we look at the films he has made they have frequently been little more than filmed scripts (House of Games, Homicide and The Spanish Prisoner) — the sort of work a writer will direct to protect his material. Mamet appears like a diligent writer who wants to guard the source even if it is a script and not one of his plays, while many writers are seen as sloppy. “Writers are partially to blame for their low standing” Mark Litwak says. “They incur disrespect when they submit unpolished work. They may reason that since extensive changes are likely to be made anyway, it is not worth bothering to refine their script.” (Reel Power) So Mamet may be right that you want to make a script as tight and workable as you can before large sums of money are thrown into the production. Yet Hoffman is surely right to assume he knows the character as well as anybody else, and if someone does know more about the experience of going through a divorce a little like the one he is going through as a character, that person, however high or low down in the filmmaking food chain, is worth a listen. Such a claim needn’t be a necessary component of the filmmaking experience, but it appears a useful one given a certain set of filmic circumstances, the character an actor is playing, and depending on the type of actor. 

    Hoffman is this type of actor, taking an element of Jack Lemmon’s fussy, nervous disposition and making it more realistic and improvisatory. Straw Dogs may have been part of a wave of vigilante films in the early seventies that included Joe, Dirty Harry, Walking Tall and, of course, Death Wish. But these were all films with assertive men who were in little doubt they wished to take the law into their own hands whether they were part of the law or not. Hoffman’s character is someone who would always wish for the law to represent him, aware that he isn’t imposing enough a personality to represent it himself. In Dirty Harry, Eastwood is a cop, but he is even more an assertive personality, just as Charles Bronson might be an architect by trade in Death Wish, though it is vigilantism that brings out his inner character.  The point to Straw Dogs is that if Hoffman’s David Summer is a worm that turns who will remain that worm. This isn’t to denigrate the character at all, and one reason why director Sam Peckinpah is a much greater one than Michael (Death Wish) Winner, and a more nuanced one than Dirty Harry director Don Siegel, is that he can give to violence sorrow and regret. In the best of circumstances, Eastwood and Bronson will turn to violence; Hoffman will only in the worst of them. Peckinpah’s purpose is to show this is the worst, and finds in Hoffman a perfect embodiment of reluctant violence. Peckinpah might have said: “You get hired to take this bad book and make a picture out of it. You get handed a scriptwriter, David Goodman, and an actor, Dustin Hoffman, and you’re told to make a picture. You’re given a story to do and you do it the best way you know how, that’s all.” (Playboy) But integrity needn’t only be about the control one has over the material; it can be even more the ongoing shape given to it. Hoffman might have been a big name thrown at the film and who “…accepted a fee of $600,000 – not only three times Peckinpah’s, but a third of the entire $2 million budget – and therefore elevated the project from B-movie curio to major Hollywood project. (Telegraph) But he also gave to the work a question. Casting Eastwood or Bronson provides an answer; it doesn’t raise a query. They propose that in difficult circumstances, they are the types you want to take care of you; strong, masculine figures. But Straw Dogs in casting Hoffman proposes instead that everybody has a terrible violence in them that merely needs certain circumstances to become apparent. Peckinpah reckoned, “everybody was fighting against the violence, fighting against this, fighting against that…everybody had it in them.” (Telegraph) Casting Hoffman makes the film potentially much more troubling even if paradoxically he is a much gentler screen presence. 

       When Hawke speaks so well of seventies American cinema and especially its acting, it no doubt rests partly on the collaborative aspect of the period and not just the auteurist freedoms of the decade. “It was fascinating to study their performances. But we're talking about the period between 1967 and 1981. Weirdly, that track falls directly in line with what I would say is the greatest run in acting history", Hawke reckons, "which is Jack Nicholson ’69-81.” (Cineaste) It might often indicate a failure of craft when an actor is so centrally involved in script work and that will no doubt be so as we’ve noted in Litwak’s earlier comments. But it can also show that the film is a medium of collaboration and contingency, of improvisation and ingenuity. A theatre production needn’t concern itself with weather conditions, complicated locations and extras who have lives beyond the film and whose presence is to fill in the background detail without the remuneration that will likely leave them as invested in the material as stars given trailers and large salaries. Mamet reckons the well-made script should just be there to be filmed, but this seems to ask for an a priori medium out of what is often best seen as an empirical one. Mamet is clearly a very good scriptwriter and an important playwright, but if his reputation surely rests much more on the latter and not the former (and hardly at all as a director), it lies in the sort of control he wishes to exert being more naturally a dimension of the theatre than the cinema. 

     Screenwriting, Robert McKee reckons, consists of two distinct skills. “There are two talents involved in screenwriting and they don’t have anything to do with one another...The talent to write dialogue…the other talent is the talent to tell stories. That talent is rare.” (Reel Power) Yet the way Hawke sees it, the actor is more the storyteller than the writer. It makes sense that an actor will change a line or two, feeling that it rings a bit false on the page and needs to be authenticated by the actor’s augmentations, but it seems much more radical for an actor to alter the shape and feel of the story. Mamet makes clear that even an actor changing a bit of dialogue is unnecessary: he insists that the reason Bogart’s moment in Casablanca is so great is that he did what he was told, adding nothing to the script - the shot list would do the rest. Anecdotally, we know of actors who have been involved very early on in production and have a strong say in the development of the script. Martin Scorsese admitted on Raging Bull that De Niro was central to getting it made and that Leonardo DiCaprio brought The Wolf of Wall Street project to Scorsese after being so taken by Jordan Belfort’s autobiography. The danger here is of course that the actor wants to make a film not because it has a great story but because it will have at its centre a great character. A writer or director is invested in the overall design — an actor potentially is chiefly interested in what will be their incarnation of just one person. It is a point Bette Davis makes when saying: “I personally believe…that actors and actresses are notoriously bad judges of story material. Principally interested in the part intended for us to play, we are apt to lose sight completely of weak and insignificant plot construction or the developments of the rest of the characters in the story.” (Playing to the Camera) 

        However, this might be more a problem of the actor’s ego and their financial power within the industry. Davis is modest enough to propose this needs to be tempered; she would have well known that a film with Davis in it wasn’t just a film but a star vehicle — one that needed to be chauffeur-driven rather than with Davis taking the wheel. Yet as Hawke says, sometimes you need an actor at least as co-driver. Speaking of Great Expectations, he says “English was a second language for [director] Alfonso [Cuaron], and the fact that the dialogue wasn’t working was not interesting to him. So we had a hard time. And then [Robert] De Niro came in, and it was awesome. It was six days of shooting of absolute creativity, and I remember saying to Alfonso, why are we having a good time now?" De Niro brought all that with him.” (Cineaste) While Davis can see how misshapen a film can become under an actor’s influence, Hawke proposes that it can help save a project when the director isn’t interested enough in the actors and dialogue. 

      To explore this further, let us think of three anecdotes. On I Confess, “Hitchcock ‘simply couldn’t understand the fanatical intensity of Monty. He complained constantly about ‘all that preparation … Over and Over, Hitch had to stop and explain to Monty why, at the end of a certain scene he had to look up at a church or suddenly turn around. He wasn’t used to having to explain to his actors that he intended to edit in a shot of a clanging bell or some such event. (The Films of Alfred Hitchcock) Working on The Chase with Arthur Penn, Brando would offer his thoughts on the character, a decent sheriff working in a racist town. “Marlon told me at the outset he would present his ideas, and that if I didn’t like them I should tell him so. That’s the way it was. Most of the notions were excellent.” (Brando)  Finally, in Aliens, while director James Cameron was chiefly interested in the hardware, Sigourney Weaver, who was once again reprising her role as Ripley, wanted a strong say in how the character would be performed. Producer Gale Anne Hurd said, “her script must have had five thousand notations in it…every intonation, every line, every motion came from a deep character place.” (Blockbuster) 

        What do these three anecdotes tell us, especially in the context of the earlier remarks by Hawke and Davis? Firstly, that power matters. When Clift was making I Confess he was a star, and a big one. He had already appeared in Red River, The Heiress and most especially A Place in the Sun. But Brando by the time of The Chase was a legend and even Richard Burton, who Brando called an idiot for staying with Elizabeth Taylor, could say that Brando was “the best actor America ever had.” (Marlon Brando) If Brando wanted to talk about his character, directors would listen. But, secondly, it would also depend on the director how much they would care to do so. Penn was always going to be more sympathetic to the developments in acting in the fifties and sixties: it was his generation and many of the best filmmakers of the period like Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray and Sidney Lumet were in various ways actors’ directors, with Lumet saying “I became the kind of director who became whatever his actors need…I think part of the job of directing is to not make the actors work your way, but for you to work as a director in any way that makes them comfortable .” (NPR) Hitchcock was far more an actor’s director than he might seem, well aware that casting was key and that actors like Cary Grant and James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman and Tippi Hedren, were far from interchangeable. But he also saw cinema as about shot choices over authentic characterisation. He was more interested in the economy of means and how the viewer reads the images’ relationship than the viewer observing the intricacies of behaviour. What he wanted from Clift was to look up so that he could join together two disparate shots; what Clift wanted was to explore what would go into going to the window in the first place. Clift wouldn’t have been a big enough star to dictate terms to Hitchcock and Hitchcock wasn’t the type of filmmaker to care so specifically about an actor’s input. 

         Then there is the question of what type of film the director is making. If the Clift anecdote might show Hitchcock in a better light than the Method actor, it rests on Hitchcock’s ongoing desire to make films about guilt as a situational problem more than a psychological one. Priest Clift is caught in a dilemma: he finds himself accused of a crime that he knows has been committed by someone else — he knows because the killer confessed the crime to him, but he also has a duty to keep the confession to himself. This is why it is situational rather than psychological, and Hitchcock resolves it situationally. The inspector manages to trick a confession out of the killer and, anyway, Clift has been found not guilty due to insufficient evidence. What Hitchcock needed to do was tell the story in such a way that the plot would be more important than character. I Confess is one of Hitchcock’s mistaken identity films — North by Northwest, The Wrong Man, The 39 Steps) and since all the characters are innocent there is no need of Dostoevskian soul-searching, even if I Confessmight seem the closest Hitchcock came to Dostoevsky in mood, though Rope might seem a more Dostoevskian film in its conception. It would make sense that Clift would wish to make much of the choice: does he tell the truth and defy his faith; does he stay mum and risk his life? But all Hitchcock believes he has to do is hold true to his beliefs and the situation will resolve itself.   

         If Hitchcock felt little need for psychology in I Confess, surely Aliens needed even less of it, with Cameron a director who has always talked about his films’ hardware over the software of the performances. When Cameron talks about diving deep he is being literal: the sort of plunge to the bottom of the ocean that motivated The Abyss and Titanic. If Weaver hadn’t been such a big star in the mid-eighties and if she hadn’t been the one surviving character in the original film, then we might wonder if Cameron would have listened to quite so many of her suggestions. There is in such instances listening to the actor because they have power; not because they have insightful things to say about the character. Weaver may have had interesting observations to offer as she had already played Ripley in the original film, but it would have been at least equally because she was a star that Cameron and Hurd would have been listening to her very numerous proposed changes. Sometimes, though, the actors’ clout is very useful indeed, and proof that the actor isn’t only interested in protecting their own role but can see the vision demanded of the overall production. Andrew Kevin Walker may often have had his scripts sliced and diced as a Guardian article testifies, with Walker well aware how little status the screenwriter so often has. “With any script, the best you can hope for is that you and the director are of a like mind” — and he has found this like mind working with David Fincher on Seven, The Game, Fight Club and The Killer. But he also needed the help of the actors on Seven. Producer Arnold Kopelson had no intention of filming Walker’s head-in-the-box conclusion, “but after reading the revised draft, Fincher — with the support of his actors Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt — convinced Kopelson to reinstate the original ending, believing the darkness of the material should in no way be diluted. Indeed, Pitt had it written into his contract that the studio couldn't change the ending.” (Guardian) 

             Davis may see well the dangers of actors who have so much power,  abusing it for augmenting their characters. Yet the example with Pitt shows that it can be useful when an actor uses their star power to retain the integrity of a project. If we have often noted and will say more about the actor as a transformative presence, working on the material during filming, Pitt here proposes protecting the script. Just because we often see the importance of the actor as an empirical presence, someone who is on the set, engaging with the complexities of character in the context of the filmic space, we can see that sometimes they can represent the a priori as well. Pitt has hardly been alone in protecting a writer or director’s perspective but what is much more common is giving texture to material that may be very well-written but needs the presence of the actor and the location - and a willingness on the actor’s part to see that perhaps something in the script might work well enough on the page but is less plausible on the screen. 

      Imagine for example you have in the script that the two lead actors kiss passionately but find on the set the chemistry between them is tense rather than charged, with the actors more given to nit-picking than flirting. The director might see failed professionalism or recognise this tension can be used a little differently. Perhaps, in another example, it is a film about a couple going through a divorce. If you find onscreen chemistry between the actors, the director might be more inclined to offer an inflection towards the tender; if it is absent — the film may move more towards the acrimonious. Almost nothing need to be changed in the script (the couple will get divorced as the screenplay insists) but they may do so with more ambivalence or with more insistence. On Kramer Versus Kramer, Hoffman and Meryl Streep didn’t appear toget along. In 1979, Hoffman was a much bigger star than Streep, and he didn’t take kindly to the changes she made after discussing the role with writer-director Robert Benton. “When Hoffman saw the changes, he angrily shouted…’Meryl, why don't you stop carrying the flag for feminism and just act the scene.’” (Marie Claire) There were moments too that could be deemed abusive. In one, Hoffman improvises a slap, and in another during a dinner scene he smashes a glass against the wall. In both, few would deny they add tension to the scenes, with Streep looking terrified and thus too her character. There are obviously ethical problems when an actor deviates from the script to get a real reaction from another actor, all the better to register a response that cannot easily be faked. Yet acting had become much more liminal than it was in classic Hollywood, especially after many Method actors started working in film and later - when numerous directors were interested in creating works that drew on improvisation or at least the appearance of it (Cassavetes, Forman, Altman, Scorsese). It isn’t that one agrees or disagrees with such behaviour (that is a moral question) but only to recognise it as a different thespian space than had previously been accessed (an aesthetic question). Equally, this needn’t mean we don’t concern ourselves with the ethical complications of this shift, but to reject it outright would be to underestimate its importance, and the films it helped create. 

       To understand this complexity we can think of numerous divorce films released in the late seventies/early eighties - An Unmarried Woman, Starting Over, Shoot the Moon and Kramer Versus Kramer, a film Milan Kundera saw as the definition of kitsch, that Pauline Kael hated, and, after turning the role down, James Caan thought was bourgeois horse crap. Kundera (giving it a passing mention in The Art of the Novel) may have been wrong in a strict production sense if we accept the film drew on real emotions, even if it may have been in the process produced in the audience overly manipulated ones. Initially, Hoffman explained, in a television interview from many years later, and that Michael Schulman explored in Vanity Fair, that the studio wanted Kate Jackson from Charlie’s Angels, couldn’t get her and Streep appeared like a possibility. The producer couldn’t see in the few words Streep offered anybody who looked likely they could play the role but Hoffman told Benton that Streep would be ideal. Hoffman said that he knew that she had recently lost her husband John Cazale and that was why she was so quiet. She was grieving and Hoffman thought this wasn’t only an excuse for her uncommunicative aspect during the interview, but that knowing how good an actress she was, this could be used in the character’s favour - that she could draw on her grief. 

       Schulman notes “that improvising his lines, Dustin delivered a slap of a different sort: outside the elevator, he started taunting Meryl about John Cazale, jabbing her with remarks about his cancer and his death. “He was goading her and provoking her,” [exec Richard] Fischoff recalled, ‘using stuff that he knew about her personal life and about John to get the response that he thought she should be giving in the performance.’” (Vanity Fair) Hoffman was offscreen, the camera on Streep, with Hoffman there to facilitate her acting. From one perspective this can seem like a generous actor helping another to give the very best; from another, it is an abusive male star dredging up his co-star’s personal life for the most sadistic of reasons. Perhaps both claims are valid, with Hoffman wishing to take Streep out of her thespian comfort zone as he did famously with Laurence Olivier on The Marathon Man. Neither actor was given to the Method, with Olivier classically trained in the British theatrical tradition, and Streep rejecting the “teachers she had at Yale who wanted her to delve into her personal life for a role.” (The Art of American Screen Acting: 1960 to Today) 

            What is clear when reading Schulman’s account of the production is how important acting happened to be and the involvement of the actors. Streep may not have been Method inclined but she was instead methodical and conscientious, and concerned not only to play her character. She also wished to improve the plausibility of Joanna Kramer and even elicit a sympathy that was missing from the book it was based on and also from early drafts of Benton’s script. Benton had suggested Streep might change some lines for the courtroom scene, forgot about it under the stress of production, only for Streep to show them to him late into the schedule. He was wary of any more complications but saw that she had greatly improved these lines and there was a moment in her additions where she says “I was his mommy for five and a half years. And Ted took over that role for eighteen months.” Benton reckoned he would never have used the word mommy and he knew his script was putting men’s thoughts into a woman’s mouth. Streep put a woman’s words into a woman’s mouth and gave her a richer character than she would have had otherwise. 

       Of course, men have been putting words into women’s mouths for centuries: Medea, Cordelia, Ophelia, Nora Helmer and Martha are fascinating characters without requiring a rewrite from a female actress.  Even Brando admitted that you had to learn the lines when working on Shakespeare or Tennessee Williams. “Some things you can adlib, some things you have to commit to memory, like Shakespeare, Tennessee Williams — where the language has value. You can’t adlib Tennessee Williams.” (Conversations with Marlon Brando) But if we have noted that films often and increasingly tookplace on location rather than on sound stages, then part of this move to verisimilitude should surely include the actors’ greater investment in the characters they are playing. As De Niro says: “when you do a movie it changes. You always make adjustments…even if on paper it looks good, you know it won’t be right if you shoot it that way….I would say, offhand, twenty, twenty-five per cent of the film is different from the screenplay.” (Playing to the Camera) 

     If theatre and classic Hollywood of the thirties and forties was often about making dialogue present, in the fifties through to the seventies it was more about making presence present. Brando, Clift and Dean weren’t always verbally articulate; they would absorb the inarticulacy into their bodies and insist that the eloquence of expression would come through means other than the language. When Brando’s Terry Molloy asks Edie out in On the Waterfront we might only half hear what he is saying but there is potentially a greater sensitivity as a consequence. In the scene, he and Edie are up on the roof and he shows her a pigeon, says they get married, just like people, and stay married until they die. There is plenty of symbolism in Elia Kazan’s direction, and an insistent if impressive music score by Leonard Bernstein, but the scene is memorable because Brando suggests that his character needs that pigeon in his hand to express the emotion he is feeling. He nurtures the bird and Edie will sense how loving he may be by how lovingly he caresses the tiny creature. For the viewer, it might be symbolic, but for Terry, it is as if he must show that whatever love he has to offer will be similar to the love he will show the bird he holds. To reduce the pigeon to a symbol would be to reduce the complexity of Terry’s feelings to the metaphorical. Instead, he wants to register that he and Edie are animals too, and might just be capable of a similar loyalty. Embedded in this scene is Terry asking Edie for a date, but the idea of going for a beer seems to be contained by a need that leaves the date too weak a word to register what he is asking.

               Kazan’s film still has remnants of classic Hollywood in Bernstein’s score, and the theatrical in the symbolism that can be extracted from the material. One could imagine easily enough the pigeon on the stage, a stuffed bird that the actor toys with as the viewer extracts from it a connotative meaning. But Brando, Dean and others insisted on seeing what would be function or symbol as affective object —  a means to carry what can seem like indifference as a different form of intensity. In Kazan’s East of Eden, Dean’s Cal tries to give his father money at a surprise birthday party for the older man but the father rejects the cash as money garnered from the local farmers dishonestly and Cal is distraught. But he doesn’t throw the money at his dad; it falls from his hands as he goes to hug him, proving that the money doesn’t matter next to the credence he seeks from his father. Though this would be easy enough to replicate on the stage, with cash more controllable than a live pigeon, Dean makes its metaphorical value weak next to its emotional import. As he collapses into his father, the money can’t buy love symbolism is subordinate to what seems like over-acting. It will be, if we see the money as the symbolic rejection of Cal, but Dean plays it as if the symbolism cannot initself carry the weight of rejection and must acknowledge it too in the resistance he feels as he tries to hug his dad. To have thrown the money at his father after he rejects it would have conveyed the idea but wouldn’t have captured the messiness of their relationship. Dean’s achievement, in only three films, was to make messiness vital to the work. Drawing out the difference between Brando and Dean, Kazan noted: “I felt that Dean’s body was very graphic; it was almost writhing in pain sometimes […]. He even walked like a crab, as if he were cringing all the time. I felt that, and that doesn’t come across in close up. Dean was a cripple, anyway, inside – he was not like Brando. People compared them, but there was no similarity. He was a far, far sicker kid, and Brando’s not sick, he’s just troubled.” (Kazan on Directing) 

        Kazan also makes a point of seeing another important difference between Dean and Brando: “Dean had the most natural talent after Marlon. But he lacked technique: he had no proper training. He could not play a part outside his range.” (Kazan on Directing) What Brando brought to cinema wasn’t just the raw energy so often invoked, but energy contained by craft, which is partly why Brando can talk of the importance of respecting the language of theatre while also searching out a new cinematic language for acting. Hoffman in getting Streep to react instinctively to certain situations may have been trying to get out of her a better performance. However, he may have been underestimating her technical skill and overestimating how important grieving Cazale was in accessing the character’s demanding emotions. Whether Kramer Versus Kramer is as good a film as another divorce film like His Girl Friday is questionable. What shouldn’t be is that it would seem absurd for Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell to be drawing on personal chaos to play Walter and Hlldy — the roles are gestural and performative; they aren’t existentially exploratory. Hawke sees Julia Roberts as central to this return to the performative, noting: "...then Julia Roberts came along with Pretty Woman. There is such a power to her personal charisma that everybody started chasing that. (Cineaste) Roberts herself reckoned: “You know, not to be criticising others’ choices, but for me to not take off my clothes in a movie or be vulnerable in physical ways is a choice that I guess I make for myself. But in effect, I’m choosing not to do something as opposed to choosing to do something.” (Vogue) When Streep told her Yale teachers that she had no interest in exploring her own psyche through acting, it can resemble Roberts’ claim that she wouldn’t do it exploring her body. 

    These are actors’ choices and important ones, especially when it has become increasingly clear how many actors in the seventies were coerced into nudity, retrospectively wishing they hadn’t capitulated. Nastassja Kinski, for example, said, “If I had had somebody to protect me or if I had felt more secure about myself, I would not have accepted certain things. Nudity things. And inside it was just tearing me apart.” (Guardian) Yet at a particular point in film history, acting became a very complex process as it interacted with the world rather than simply illustrated it. Hawke sees Nicolas Cage as another actor who transformed things, but in a way very different from Roberts. “Nic Cage is commedia dell'arte. He is the first person to take us away from naturalism since Lee Strasberg and Brando.” (Cineaste) Cage possesses elements of the Method — as Manhola Dargis believes. “Still, the shadow of the most acclaimed actor associated with Lee Strasberg and his Actors Studio hangs over Cage as for so many of his generation, and others: that of Marlon Brando.” (BFI), “It’s key that, however identified with the Method and its emphases on interiority and psychology, he [Brando] was a resolutely physical actor. Over time this emphasis on the corporeal resulted in a body transformed…” (BFI) Cage plays up that physical aspect.

        If Hawke sees Cage and Roberts transforming cinema acting, just as we can see that for other writers it was Streep before them, we are interested in what has been lost in that process, even if we should also acknowledge legislative gains. The powerless in cinema have gained greater rights, whether it is animals or women, a possibly troublesome conflation but not if people like Hoffman acted as if the person he was acting opposite must react behaviourally — as if Streep didn’t have the full range of Hoffman and needed to be prompted into terror rather as one might frighten a horse to get the response required. Some of Hoffman’s actions wouldn’t now be seen as thespian breakthroughs but tantamount to generating in others a nervous breakdown. Hoffman may or may not have had the predatory instincts of a Harvey Weinstein (claims against Hoffman have been made and countered) but he would at the very least have been abusive in a different way — and both ways would be less tolerated post-Me Too. “Does that mean there is no longer any predatory behavior in this business? I’d say that would be a ridiculous assumption”, Gail Berman, a producer and co-president of the Producers Guild says, “But I can tell you I think there is a great deal of sincerity on the part of a lot of people to change the culture.” (New York Times) Equally, the sort of cruelty to animals that was frequent in 70s cinema wouldn’t be acceptable now: “the ongoing expansion of the AHA Guidelines for the Safe Use of Animals in Filmed Media has raised the standard of care for animal actors worldwide. In addition, technological advancements have created safe alternatives to risky action, enabling filmmakers to maintain their creative vision without compromising the welfare of animal actors.” (American Humane) 

       Yet eradicating as much as possible a problematic ethos also endangers the complex truth actors seek if they always have to worry about litigation. If one can see problems with a filmic sensibility insisting actors shouldn’t deviate from the script; how much worse is it if they must be constantly vigilant in the face of a legal blueprint as well? Hawke clearly proposes that actors should take risks and part of that is overstepping boundaries. Christopher Walken, speaking of The Deer Hunter’s initial Russian Roulette scene said: “that was one of many big moments I had in the film, where I walked onto the set thinking, 'I wish I knew what I was doing,' he recalled. 'But when somebody belts you 50 times, you don't have to fake a reaction. You don't have trouble shaking.’” (New York Times) De Niro noted that it “was very hard to sustain that kind of intensity. I mean, we were really slapping each other; you sort of get worked up into a frenzy. It’s a very difficult thing to do. It took a long time.” (Playing to the Camera) This was at least equal opportunity slapping, with the actors all in agreement over the intensity they were seeking, while Streep (who is also of course in The Deer Hunter), in Kramer Versus Kramer, was on the receiving end of a slap she didn’t see coming. This works for the film just as the slapping in The Deer Hunter works, and while Robert Benton and Streep could probably see that while this wasn’tconsensual, it added to the scene. The purpose isn’t to remove moments of the real from cinema, but ideally see that it isn’t only the star who has this sort of freedom. Instead, the direction of travel seems to be eradicating risk altogether. 

       Some notice this with intimacy coordinators: “The fundamental functions of an Intimacy Coordinator involve their role as an advocate or liaison between the actors and production, ensuring performers and other production personnel adhere to safety protocols. It’s important to remember that while the Intimacy Coordinator might seem like a stuffy administrator, there only to stifle one’s creative vision for a project. The reality is they are the opposite.” (New York Film Academy) Mia Hansen- Love isn’t so sure. “As long as I’m not forced to, I won’t use them. I don’t think I need it. I’m extremely sensitive and pay lots of attention to the respect that the actors need to have for one another. I’ve never had any kind of problem. I’ve never forced any actor to do anything,” she says, “Everything is discussed and happens in a very smooth way. So for me, intimacy coordinators aren’t necessary. If I was forced to have some kind of virtue police on set, I’d rather not film those scenes. I understand why some people might feel reassured, but it’s very far from the experience of my own film sets.” (Guardian) 

       Hawke is asking for more input from the actor, to see that the actor can contribute to the project without always being beholden to the script or the shot list of the director. But this sensitivity to the actor’s needs he sees as a creative process over an ethical concern, even if we may notice our article has come full circle, with Hawke directing his daughter Maya in Wildcat, filming her in sex scenes and having on hand an intimacy coordinator. “We made sure to have an intimacy coordinator on set for them” his daughter Maya said. "So that they felt safe and comfortable and not like they were being spied on…” (IndieWire) Perhaps they are a necessary evil if it means cinema can still explore the complexity of human feeling, with both the actors and the director on Blue is the Warmest Colour all retrospectively ruing the absence of one on set. Yet one of the film’s stars, Lea Seydoux reckoned “It was beyond. It was the whole film, not only the sex scenes. The way we shot this film was just insane. The guy [director Abdellatif Kechiche) is just nuts.” But she also added, “It took a year of my life and I gave everything for that film…It really changed my life on many different levels.” (Indiewire) 

           Seydoux’s remarks capture the complexity at work when there is a tension between aesthetics and ethics; some actors find themselves seeing the significance of the former over the latter and are willing to push the ethical envelope to arrive at what they believe will be a superior film. Seydoux and Kechiche may have different perspectives on the ethical, just as Streep and Hoffman would have as well, but they are all equally happy about the result. What does this tell us: that men should continue having power over women, using their status as stars or directors to get moments of raw cinema at the expense of the more vulnerable? Surely not, but it also proposes that the rawness matters, and that removing it all the better so we can avoid the exploitation and abuse evident in so many film productions isn’t quite the answer. If Streep and Seydoux acknowledge the importance of making such difficult films, then this suggests a vital dimension to cinema. This is one that resides in the tension between the story the film wants to tell, and the moments of thespian intensity that will help augment the story. Thus to the a priori and the empirical. If Hawke wants the actor to be a strong contributor to the film’s design, then how strong that contribution will be depends partly on how involved with the production the actor is. Not just in trying to involve themselves in the sort of plausible choices their character might make and the clothes they will wear, but also in how willing they are to expose themselves to difficult and perhaps personal revelations, even moments of surprise and shock that will make the moment more authentic. This means that a contraction of vulnerability and revelation isn’t the answer, but an expansion involving far more people and not only those with the most power. 

     The scandals around Weinstein and others proved that the casting couch was still very much in place in the 2000s but rather than formalising many aspects that Weinstein would take advantage of in their informality — where he thought nothing of interviewing an actress for a part in his hotel room wearing a dressing gown — better to retain the informality while removing the predatory. Davis was wise to see actors needed to be careful over the power they wielded and that their involvement could be a sign of authority rather than generosity: that they wanted to improve their parts but didn’t care so much about improving the film. By the same reckoning and often even more problematically, actors, directors and producers have exerted power extraneously rather intrinsically: for reasons that had little to do with the film but for sexual reasons beyond it. Now many films are made by women but in the seventies, it was an occasional thing, and producers wanted to make clear who was boss. Claudia Weill who directed Girlfriends said many years later that, the producer “‘Ray Stark ran his hand up her back on set, among the crew, and said: ‘Claudia, you’re not wearing a bra today.’ She kept silent. ‘If I was to say, “Fuck you, get your hand off my back” in front of an entire cast and crew, most of them middle-aged men, what would it have served me? I would have become ‘that bitch’.” (Guardian) This had nothing to do with fighting over creativity; it was Starkey exerting power over a thirty-year-old female filmmaker. If litigation limits the pestering power of problematic producers, all to the good. However, if it means films get made under the constant eye of legal minutiae then rather than generating greater freedom for all it becomes a contraction of aesthetic considerations. What matters is risk and responsibility, power and purpose being shared more evenly, a point even so apparent and insular an actor as De Niro well understood many years ago. Speaking of working with Francis Ford Coppola on The Godfather II, De Niro said: He [Coppola] respects actors. In my experience he lets them do what they want. He gives you the support. He wants you to be comfortable. I think he does that with all the people who work for him. That’s the first thing — to allow people to feel they’re contributing and that they’re not being held down all the time and can’t express their own ideas.” (Playing to the Camera) Hawke would approve, and no doubt Mamet would continue to grumble: “Directing is just a technical skill. Make your shot choice.” (On Directing) But what we want to make clear is that film is as readily an empirical medium as an a priori one, and the question of ethics and aesthetics aren't always easily distinguishable - and that neither sometimes are acting and directing.

© Tony McKibbin