jobloffski
Posts: 1837
Joined: 30/9/2005
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It's practically impossible for an actor to give anything like their best without the person they are supposed to be speaking to in the film being there. I've only have very small amounts of experience in directing people to act (non professionals) and there is an absolute world of difference between what someone is able to do when trying to perform their lines alone and when they are able to hear and see the person they are responding too. Tone of voice of one person affects tone of voice of the other, body language likewise.
It's a cliche, but it is absolutely true: acting is reacting. You need something to react to. If you have a bunch of individually delivered line readings assembled later you don't usually end up with anything that sounds remotely natural. It works better in animation because actors record their lines many different ways to give options when the pictures are created and the process is assisted by the nature of animation making larger than life characterisation easier to buy into, because it is animation.
If you have real live actors on the screen, you get the best if they are actually looking at, and listening to, each other (or if need be, a stand in) during the production process, no matter what levels of technological jiggery pokery ,are required to produce the final imagery of the film. And given the already hokey nature of fantasy material, the chemistry produced between actors becomes more important because the key to making the audience suspend disbelief is the actors being able to convince us that THEY, while acting, believe the story they are in is actually happening. It's why Jaws still works so much better than other, more ostensibly 'scary' movies.
Lucas has made a lot of amazing advancements in film making possible. But even he admits to not really being that interested in the performance side of things. He, over his career, has increasingly made the actors an element in an environment to be coloured in later, when in the most basic terms, the characters on the screen have to be seen to be, and feel like, the most important things on the screen for the illusion of film to stand a chance of being the best it can be. You can pretty up the image as much as you want, you can put little visual gags in the background for people to seek out, whatever.
But as early as the special editions of the star wars films, Lucas starting making the compositional(?) mistakes that only became writ larger in the prequels for example the addition to the background of a scene, large weird creatures being ridden by small weird looking weirdos, falling off said creatures, swinging round by the reins, making stupid noises, attracting attention to the background of the shot, instead of leaving it at the foreground of what was actually happening to the characters we are supposed to be along with the ride for.
The focus on creating environments for the action to take place in is a vital part of creating 'like nothing you have ever seen before' films. But when the creation of the majority of the image requires the actors to always be pretending something is there that is not, not allowed to move around much because that would compromise effects to be added later, and cobbling together lines from different takes, at different times, without allowing the mood of a performance between a number of characters to build by having them actually reacting to what is being done and said, and how things are done and said,that's not good for the actors, the acting, the film or the audience.
What is on the screen doesn't have to be real world real. But if the actors aren't able to even pretend they, when in character, 'believe' things are real (the only thing that makes any performance any good at all) the film become one with flaws you have to put up with in order to appreciate what is good about them. That's not a barrier to making films that make money, because spectacle sells, and people who hate films they have paid to see have still paid to see them.
But why not give the actors what is most necessary to acting, and that is the bare minimum of props, set and people to look at required for them to sell the illusion of what they are doing to themselves, in order to stand any chance of it being 'real' enough to make people 'forget' they are looking at people pretending to be the person they are playing?
< Message edited by jobloffski -- 22/11/2012 11:53:59 AM >
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Yes, dreamers dream and doers do. But if dreamers DON'T dream, doers don't have anything TO do. Everything that is only here because people exist, only exists because someone thought of it., or in other words, dreamed it.
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