The Actor and the Camera

Denis Lawson

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780014906
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Acting & Auditioning

Drawing on his lifetime career in front of the camera (and sometimes behind it), Denis Lawson offers a wonderfully accessible introduction to acting for film and TV. For the young actor hoping to break into the industry – whether in a drama series, soap or sitcom – this book is the ultimate insider's guide.

The author takes us on a guided tour of the film or TV set from day one. We meet the various members of the crew, from the director of photography to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd ADs, and learn what each of them does – and how to get the most from them in your work as an actor. Then comes the actual business of shooting the scenes, beginning with readthroughs and rehearsals (if there are any), on to hitting your mark and getting your eye-line right, finishing with the actor's involvement in post-production.

Throughout, Lawson takes the actor's point of view, offering encouragement and enlightenment, as well as being refreshingly candid about some of the more inane procedures. Above all, he offers a magnificent array of tips and inside knowledge for coping with what can be a daunting experience for a hopeful young actor.

'Denis is a great actor and he's always been my inspiration, since I was a child... He's the only person really in the world who I discuss acting with if I feel that I'm stuck. I love watching him still.' Ewan McGregor

MY FIRST TAKE

When I was in my final year at drama school in Glasgow, I landed a role in Dr. Finlay’s Casebook, a very successful television series at the time, starring the late Andrew Cruickshank and Bill Simpson and set in the thirties. I played a schoolboy who suffered from tunnel vision (no peripheral vision). So the first shot I ever did as a professional actor? I had to sit on the kerbside in a wee Scottish village in Perthshire, in shorts and tackety bits (big boots), and play with some stones. Bill Simpson drove a very large vintage car down a hill towards me. My instructions from the director were: when I thought (note the word ‘thought’) that the car was near enough to me, I was to run across the road right in front of it – I couldn’t look at the car, I was supposed to judge when it might just miss me, then run! I did my first ever take. The director came over to me, ‘That was a bit early. I don’t mind if your hand goes onto the bonnet as you run in front of it.’ Well, what did I know? I did it another couple of times, I got it in the can and I’m still here! How would I handle that now? Well, in these days of health and safety, it would never arise, but if it was requested, I’d say to my director, ‘Sure, show me with the car just exactly what you want me to do.’ Or to put it more succinctly, ‘You must be fucking kidding.’

Starting out, as I did, in the early seventies, there were plenty of provincial theatres that you could go to, to do a season of plays for, say, six to nine months; rehearsing and playing constantly; putting on a new play every two or three weeks (at that time even weekly rep was still around here and there); playing parts that you were perhaps not best suited to (in other words, being able to fail) and generally finding your feet technically and emotionally. There were also ample opportunities for much more avant-garde work on the fringe, where you’d find companies challenging accepted norms of performance, with plenty of success and failure.

For the contemporary actor, emerging into the glare of the profession today, these theatrical opportunities have shrunk considerably. The result of all this is that a British drama student, who has spent three years working his or her arse off and has been given what is arguably one of the best stage trainings in the world, is more likely leave that institution and walk in front of a camera, and not onto the stage. Maybe they’ll do a couple of days on EastEnders or Casualty, maybe they’ll be whisked straight into a lead in some major movie or television series (the camera and the modern industry has an insatiable appetite for young faces).

It’s taken most drama schools quite some time to wake up to how radically the profession has changed over the last twenty years or so, but they are now trying to get to grips with this side of an actor’s training.

Having looked at the range of options in various schools, I would say, at this point in time, that they are tackling this with varying degrees of success.

Present courses seem to be run mostly by directors. Of course, a director’s viewpoint is entirely valid, but it’s a very different view from an actor’s perspective, when it comes to dealing with the vagaries of a film set. I’m sorry to say that I spent a day not too long ago in a very well-established drama school and was shocked by some of the ‘advice’ the students had been given by a director.

I’d certainly encourage the inclusion of experienced actors into the mix and, where possible, experienced technicians. It took me many years of work to feel able to cross-examine a Director of Photography about his work and the workings of the camera, and to get into the editing suite after the shoot. It would be a great gift to give students that opportunity before they get out into the business.

I guess the catalyst for this book (and for quite a lot of other things) came from a movie I was in called Local Hero. We were shooting on the beach one day. I was standing beside the camera, doing off-lines, hugging the lens for my fellow actor (I’ll explain that further down the line). The camera crew were reloading the camera (putting in a new reel of film). The clapper loader and focus puller were busy with this intricate task, which they’d repeated a thousand times; it was all automatic to them. I was staring at this black box and I realised I knew nothing about it, how it functioned, its inner workings: but this was where my performance was going. Down the lens. Into what? What? How?

That moment, on that beach, has driven me to this one. I decided to learn as much about the film-making process as I could, so that I could be more effective in front of this mysterious piece of machinery. It’s been a long, drawn-out process and a fascinating one, which eventually turned me into a film-maker myself – and curiously also into a stage director. I still have plenty to learn but the endless fascination of this job (a weird way to make a living by anyone’s standards) is that you never quite arrive, you’re always pushing to get there.

This book is basically a technical one, to do with the way an actor functions within the lumbering animal that is the film unit. Hopefully it will give you some clues as to how to deal with that animal, how to use it to your best advantage to get what you need from it, to help you do a better job. How to sit in the centre of the unit, when all that frantic activity finally quietens down and the focus moves on to you, the actor – and essentially (and here’s the big secret) to feel relaxed in the centre of the unit; to feel at home in front of the lens so that it always feels easy and never strained.

I’m throwing in some lifemanship – how I approach my work and the situations that arise from it – which you can take or leave. Acting is, after all, a deeply personal business: your approach is your own; you are unique to yourself and that is how it should be. Don’t trust anyone; always question either outwardly or inwardly. I am deeply suspicious of anyone who maintains that they can somehow ‘teach’ you to act, or worse, can lead you towards your ‘emotional life’ as an actor. This book is essentially information, and as an actor who attended one of my workshops said: ‘information is power’. I hope that sense of empowerment will quite simply help you to enjoy your work! We all signed up to do this weird acting thing because we have a vocation and are passionate about it, but it seems to me, that, of course, we’re stressed when we’re out of work but a lot of the time we are also stressed when we’re in work! I love this side of my work, getting onto a set and working with a crew gives me such a buzz; largely because I understand the process I’m involved in and therefore feel totally at ease in that environment. The purpose of this book is to help you understand it and therefore love it too. The more you know, technically, about film work, the less you will feel at the mercy of the unit (that film-making machine). You’ll begin to achieve relaxation in front of the lens, feeding it, giving it, and thereby giving the director and the editor, the material they need to create that polished final cut. Hopefully you’ll walk away at the end of a day or when you’re finally wrapped, feeling that you’ve got the best result out of the whole process and therefore achieved the best possible performance for yourself.

I trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow. We were fortunate enough to have our own multi-camera television studio, and we were involved in about three different productions on camera, while the technical students had experience behind the cameras, at the mixing desk, etc. Now this was all very useful and certainly helped with my early jobs, but… but: no one at any time discussed how to approach this side of our work, so that through my early years with the camera, questions kept formulating in my head.

•‘Is there a difference between the stage and the camera, in the way I pitch the performance both vocally and in intensity?’

Here was a real nagger:

•‘Do I find the camera, or do I let the camera find me?’ (i.e. ‘Do I just give a performance and ignore the camera?’)

•‘Is there a difference between a wide shot and a close-up? Again in the pitch, the intensity of the way I play?’

•‘How do I cope with shooting a script completely out of sequence, even within scenes sometimes?’

•‘How do I sustain shooting a two- or three-page scene over a period of six, seven, maybe eight hours?’

•‘Is there a difference in my approach to the text from a play to film script?’

•‘Is there a difference in my fundamental approach to the character from stage to film?’

•‘Is there a difference between television and movie acting?’

•‘Is there a difference between television drama and sitcom in front of a live audience?’

Not only were these questions, and many others, not addressed at drama school, they were never even posited as ideas. Now, I am not being disloyal to the school that trained me: I’m convinced that these kinds of questions remain unanswered, even today, in most acting institutions.

In retrospect, I feel that, because none of these issues were raised in my training, it took me several years on film sets to piece it all together; a slow process because, first of all, as a young actor you don’t want to look like an idiot, and secondly no one has the time on a unit to sit down and explain. In any event, you’re coming from such a state of ignorance that you don’t really know what the questions should be in the first place!

Oh… I’m still searching for a few answers.

Questions, though, are how you progress; finding more searching questions to ask, particularly of yourself; your own internal dialogue as an actor.

By the way, I will use the term ‘film’ in the book as a generic one, covering movies, television, traditional film cameras and all forms of digital cameras as well.

CLASSICAL TO JAZZ

On stage we take great notice of the text; we want to be entirely accurate with it, to serve the play and the author to the best of our abilities, as a classical musician would with the score. We think about emphasis and phrasing to help project the emotional journey we want to take our audience on, as a classical musician might do. Rehearsals are a carefully structured process, with the director and the actors, as with the conductor and the orchestra. In both mediums a strong technique is essential and invariably demonstrated. However, in film, as with jazz, rehearsals can be minimal and there is less emphasis on ‘placing’ the text/music. What I’m getting at here is that, in film work, accuracy in the text can sometimes be secondary to spontaneity and character.

One of the most famous jazz albums ever made is called Kind of Blue, recorded in 1959 by Miles Davis and his quintet. If you don’t know it and are sufficiently interested, it’s very easy to get hold of. It’s an absolute classic. On the day of the recording, Davis brought in the chord structures for the pieces. None of the musicians had seen anything of them. They played through them twice and then recorded what you hear on that album. For me, this is the most sublime ‘chamber music’, which I’d rather hear than any number of Mozart quartets – yes, sacrilege, I know! But these musicians were improvising together as a seamless team, working off the top of their heads, flying by the seat of their collective pants, like a cast of brilliant movie actors taking off from the text with only that rehearsal on the floor, on the day, then shooting/ recording.

Let’s drop into this team of fabulous players and push into a close-up on the piano player, Bill Evans. Evans straddles both sides of my argument. He was a classically trained musician, who became so enamoured of jazz that he left his formal training behind to embrace the disciplines of improvisation. This is a quote from an interview with him:

The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It’s the same with technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion… love, excitement, and sadness… and often your technique gets in the way. It becomes an end in itself when it should really be only the funnel through which your feelings and ideas are communicated. The great artist gets right to the heart of the matter. His technique is so natural it’s invisible or unhearable. I’ve always had a good (technical) facility, and that worries me. I hope it doesn’t get in the way.

Demonstrating stage technique on camera is an absolute disaster; actually, to my mind, demonstrating stage technique on stage is a disaster too.

When I read this statement by Bill Evans, I realised that I’d gone through a very similar journey myself: shedding my stage technique, working against how I’d been trained for the stage. For instance, risking not being heard, losing all sense of ‘projecting’; speaking even more quietly than I would do in life; throwing lines away; not driving them through to the end but letting them simply trail away. Flattening my delivery, not colouring the lines, as you might do for the stage. At one time (and this is a tricky suggestion), I experimented with not necessarily knowing the lines that well so that there was no danger of pressing too hard on the text – so that it seemed to slip out, without me thinking about it too much.

There’s a wonderful movie called Sweet Smell of Success, starring Burt Lancaster and Ton...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Important Notice
• The Actor and the Camera
• Thanks
• About the Author
• Copyright Information