The Stanislavski System and Method Acting

No, that's not fair to say really. There definitely is a lot of unconscious activity going on that supplies inspiration, but it's in different form, more subtle, and needs to be applied very realistically. I just don't have the freedom to present characters as mythical figures or something like goddesses and monsters, the way you can in a dreamlike story. But as I'm writing there's definitely an assist from the unconscious. I think I just miss that freedom and want to write something that allows it again. Though my current stories do have built-in parts that will allow a lot more freedom. They both involve magic that will be presented in very dreamlike/mythical form. Maybe I just need to jump ahead and write up some of that stuff rather than plod my way toward it through all the realistic parts.

And of course you can put dreamilke mythical figures like gods or goddesses into a more realistic story depending on how you present them. Just like in Daredevil or Logan, where the world is extremely reaslistic, except there are some people who have certain mythical-style capabilities. It doesn't even need to be that unrealistic—there are people in real life who seem to have strange attributes like that, often because you're projecting some unconscious trait onto them.

Yeah, sorry, I lost the thread there for a moment is all.

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I struggled with where to post this. There's no place it seems to fit. I almost dropped it in General Writing, and then I almost started a new thread for Writing Advice where people can drop links to good blogs and videos etc, but none of that seemed right. Finally I decided to just put it here because he talks a lot about developing the inner world and the imagination.

The guy gibberishes a lot. I mean a LOT! He gets going and his mouth runs away with him, and for periods of time he makes almost no sense, but he keeps coming back to things that I think are excellent advice. And not the generic How To Plot, or How To Show Not Tell etc, this is more intermediate/advanced stuff, concerned with inner self development and ideas.

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This one isn't about Stanislavki's system, it's about Method Acting, derived from it. Pretty good video. And despite the subtitle, method acting is pretty much what I thought it was, though now I have a much more developed idea of it. Oh, I did think it meant they stayed in character all the time though.

I can see what's in the future for me. When I've got a pretty good grasp of this stuff and figured out how parts of it apply to writing, I need to analyze one of my stories and the characters and develop them to much greater depth. Some of them have basically no character traits, and the others have almost random ones, though vaguely right for their part in the story. I always disliked the idea of making character sheets, because it felt like filling in a speadsheet. And it can be, if that's the way you approach it. But now I see that underlying those traits is a lot of deep thought and work, creating a past and a future for each of the main characters, and the events that have shaped them. You don't create them on the character sheet, but in your imagination, and quite likely through some exploratory writing. And then you can fill in some boxes. And maybe it actually helps that the stories are already partially written. That gives you something to work with and develop.

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This one also deals mostly with Method Acting (several variations of it actually), and goes into a great deal of depth about it. Much of what we think is method acting is actually something else, and not exactly what any of the well-known teachers taught. I consider videos like this to be some very in-depth disambiguation, and that's helpful in understanding what something is. This is really adding depth and richenss to the process for me, and it helps to see video of some familiar actors and hear how they approached it.

I now remember reading about the movie Let Me In, specifically about how Elias Koteas approached his role as the detective. He said he came up with the idea that he moves like a crab, coming in sideways toward his target. That really blew my mind, and I didn't really get why he did it, but it did add something to his portrayal. And I htink it was used mostly in the scene where he had entered the vampire-girl's apartment and knew she was some kind of brutal killer possibly of supernatural origin, and had to check each dark room looking for her. Of course he was terrified (for good reason), and his terror was completley justified. I think if I decided to actually go through with it I'd also approach somewhat sideways, with gun drawn.

It's a part of what's taught in some versions—imagine yourself as a particular kind of animal in order to put some oomph or some 'English' on your physical movements. I also remember Joaquin Phoenix talking about bringing Popeye the Sailor into his characterization in The Master. I think there were a few other influences as well, I don't remember what they were now. You can really see Popeye in his performance, and it makes him a really strange dude, in a fascinating way. I think he also took his weird stance from some old pictures of a lot of WWII vets who were being treated for Shell Shock, and also the way they wore their pants pulled up almost to the bottom of the ribcage in those days. You can see that in a lot of movies from the period, like the noirs etc. Men would also frequently sit with their legs crossed at the knee. I remember my grandpa sitting like that a lot back in the day.

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I wish I could find this little thing I watched last night about her. It was behind the scenes from a movie I had never heard of and don't remember the name of now, and she was channelling a wolverine to play a really fierce part. I must have done that thing where you hover the cursor over a video thumbnail and you can watch the video in the tiny frame of the thumbnail itself, because it doesn't show up now in my History. And when I search for her name and the word Wolverine—well, she played Lady Deadpool in Deadpool and Wolverine, so that's the only thing that comes up.

EDIT—Oops! Obviously I haven't seen Deadpool and Wolverine, and I was wrong about Margot Robbie playing the part. Apparently it was Blake Lively. I saw a picture of Margot Robbie in the costume with no mask on and I believe the caption said she was playing the part. I think I got hoaxed by AI or something.

I think what animal channelling does is help an actor break out of being their ordinary everyday persona, and begin to move in strange ways, which can help toward creating a new persona for the role. I think because it's an animal rather than a person you don't approach it through your head but your body and your basic animalistic impulses and instincts—the animal drives as they're called. This can definitely help in creating a character for a story as well. Also, whenever you take in something new, a fresh perspective, and especially if it's something deep enough to really involve you profoundly for some time, it cracks you open and refreshes your perception and your ideas about the world and yourself. It's like taking a vacation from being who you always are, which is getting stale and routine. At times like this you feel powerful and enthusiastic. Of course if you'd take it to heart and act like that animal all the time it would eventually become stale and dull as well. This is why you use new animals for each character. It's like what I do through this blog—I dig in to fresh ideas that fascinate me, and it refreshes my enthusiasm for life each time, as well as allowing me to learn new things.

• Animal Work in Method Acting @ Actors Atelier
• 8 Actors Who Use Animal Work to Construct Their Characters @ Backstage
• Animal Exercise For Actors @ theatrgroup
  
• The Method Acting Exercises Handbook @ CRAFT|Film School

Wow, that last link above is amazing! One of those great nuggets of excellence you sometimes turn up if you get deep enough into a subject (and into the usually extremely shallow internet). A quote:

"Strasberg told his students that he believed that being truthful isn’t a state achieved by discussion or by a description from an instructor or director. He told us that actors must understand their own nature and how to respond sensorially before transforming into a character."
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I think this kind of transformation is also necessary to become a good writer. A little earlier in the Introduction it also said (paraphrasing):

you don't learn these techniques by reading about them, though that's extremely helpful and probably necessary. You need to work with them, and in a group of other acting students.​

I've found that things you do in isolation often don't feel real. I remember back in the nineties I went to an art festival in a small college town in St. Louis. I couldn't find anybody who wanted to go, so I went by myself. I drove over the Mississippi, parked my car in a little parking lot, got out, and spent a few hours walking around. All the art galleries and book stores had their doors propped open (it was a beautiful summer day) and the streets were thronged with artsy-type college people. Traffic had been blocked off. There were little food stands on the sidealks, and street performers. It was all really cool stuff. But somehow after I drove back home none of it felt real. It was like I saw it on TV or something, because I just walked around silently, not speaking to anybody or interacting with anybody the whole time. Alone in a crowd as they say. Completley different from when I used to go to the St. Louis Art Museum with my mom and sometimes my sister. That always felt totally real, and I realized it was because there were people I could talk to about the experiences. We could share our enthusiasm and thoughts with each other.

I was struck once by the song lyrics "They say the world is built for two." I think it was in a Lana Del Ray song. It was undoubtedly a love song (though probably a sad one knowing her), but I took it in a somewhat different way. Yeah, it's from the song Video Games. "They say that the world was built for two, only worth living if someone is loving you." I guess that's just a more extreme example of the same thing though—sharing your experiences and ideas and feelings with another person that you have some connection with. The back-and-forth is filled with all manner of unguessable feelings and feedback that you just don't get when you travel though life alone. It charges both people up. I'm not sure what this means for a writer, whose work and passion is often experienced and expressed in solitude. It bears some thinking about. In a sense we share our experiences in here, but it's a poor substitute for actual face-to-face human interaction.

From the Foreward of The Method Acting Exercises Handbook:

Marlon Brando
on
Lee Strasberg and the Heart of The Method​

“Acting—and living, and everything else, for that matter—is compassion. What Lee and Stella [Adler] and Mira [Rostova] and Herbert [Berghof] were all espousing was compassion, an amplification of humanity, which is all that will save a scene or a play or a relationship or the world. The world is so inordinately tiny—not geographically, but spiritually. We shuffle along, happy to do the least amount of work, the least amount of exploration, perhaps because we feel we don’t deserve all the riches that surround us.

Movies and plays and art and music and interaction with other people who sought compassion and understanding saved me. They will save us all. What is at the heart of The Method is compassion, empathy. Go into your private moments and private spaces and realize all that you’ve felt and all that has been given to you and taken away.

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• Joaquin Phoenix on His Brutally Physical Performance in ‘The Master’

The Master is an amazing movie. I think it's time to watch it again. According to the article he channelled a monkey (a very specific one) for this role. I didn't know that. Plus he watched videos of animals that had "wandered into suburbia" and got tranquilized, to see how they react. He said they demonstrate pure terror and shock—it's like their brain just switched off. One leg is going one way, the other is going another way—sheer pandemonium. Yeah, I can definitely see that in his performance.

I remember reading somewhere once (and this fascinated me, and might be what made me buy it) that the movie seemed to be contrasting Phoenix's method acting technique against Philip Seymour Hoffman's classic Hollywood Studio approach.

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Damn, now I want to watch this movie too!

I just watched The Master and noticed how much Philip Seymour Hoffman reminds me of Orson Welles. At times anyway. I wonder if he did any of that on purpose? The movie has good rewatchability, because it's mysterious and you have to piece things together to understand what's happening, or especially what any of it means. Each time you see it a few more pieces of the puzzle fall into place.

I also always notice how over-the-top Joaquin Phoenix's characterization of Freddie Quell is. It's far from naturalistic. And yet I'm always fascinated by the performance as well as the movie itself—elements like the cinematography and the music etc. One very good reason to watch performances that are over the top or that aren't necessarily good is because when a perfomance is really good it's invisible. Like special effects—when theyr'e done right you hardly notice them. I'm not saying his performance is bad—it's impossible for me to say. It does fascinate me, and that's not a bad thing. I guess the performance and the movie both have so much depth and nuance to them that you can't flat-out say anything about it is bad (until you understand the underlying reasons or meanings). Oh, you could, and some people definitely will, but when I'm powerfully drawn to something, even if it would ordinarily be called bad, I don't pass judgement on it. Partly because I'm trying to learn, and I do understand the value of 'bad' performances or effects of cinematography etc. You often learn a lot more from examining the bad ones than the good ones, where you can't tell what's happening or how it was done.

An Actor Prepares has arrived. The way it's written is interesting—it's fictionalized, as if it's the journal of a young acting student learning his craft. It could be the basis of the little story segments of the Snowflake Method book.

A strange thought has hit me, and I probably should have realized this a long time ago—

I suppose I'm a sort of method writer, since my characters come alive in my head and make their own decisions. ​

At least it's a good starting point for it. I don't think there's a lot from method acting that would carry over to writing, as far as the performance part goes. Analysis of the script and fleshing out characters, sure, and maybe to some limited extent you could use animal characterizations, but you'd have to be careful or it could get ridiculous.

I do recall now that in one of the videos I posted on the Superhero thread somebody said Claremont would "become the characters" he was writing. That's pretty clear evidence he was trained in some form of method acting. I suppose I ought to play around with becoming the characters, as opposed to just allowing them to make decisions for themselves. It might bring a different kind of result.

I'll bet a big part of this book and possibly parts of the other ones are dedicated to how to become the character.

Here's a blog entry collecting all the threads I could find where I discussed characters living in my imagination:

• The Inner Life (when characters come to life)

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I briefly interrupt this blog entry for a (closely related) newsflash—
Several times on this blog, and possibly on the message board, I've mentioned the difference between Imagination and Fancy (the second being derived etymologically from Phantasia, then transformed to Fantasy, and then to Fancy).

Some time ago I tried to find some good info on it, and only came up with a couple of semi-crappy articles about Coleridge's writings on the subject. He was one of the main writers who developed the ideas, though there have been many others, some in the realm of philosophy. After making that last post I ended up re-reading the threads it linked to, and the ideas stirred again inside me. So I tried another search, and this time I found a really good PDF going into a great deal of depth on the subject:

• Coleridge On Imagination And Fancy @ Archive.org

Not only does it go into his ideas about the difference between fancy and imagination, but also between what he calls the Primary and Secondary Imagination.

Fancy combines ideas without unifying them, in the manner of combining for instance salt and iron filings. They make a mixture, a powder of sorts, but could still be separated into their component parts. There's no fusion of the components. Imagination on the other hand combines things and fuses or unites them, to form something new, in which the identities of both original things are lost or merged. Like combining sodium and chloride in such a way that they form salt. It's a transformative combining—alchemical in fact. I couldn't help but be struck while reading this by the idea that the conscious mind combines things without transforming or unifying them, while the unconscious does just that. This makes him one of those artists (a poet) who made important discoveries or developed them long before scientists or psychologists became aware of them. I believe he was writing well before Freud.

The secondary imagination differs from the primary in that it's loftier, more poetic, and much more difficult to attain. It requires a very poetic soul and many years of developing it through artistic pursuits of some kind. Basically it's the creative or artistic or poetic imagination raised to the highest order. Inspired by all this, I also ordered a(nother) book—The Romantic Imagination, which covers the writings of many Romantic poets, writers and thinkers on the imagination, including Coleridge and Wordsworth.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled blog entry.