The Most Acting Possible

The aim of a performance, a good performance, a truly compelling performance, is to make the audience believe that you are a real human being who isn’t acting, performing or pretending. If I can see you acting, I won’t believe you. If I don’t believe you, I won’t get lost in the fiction of the film.

I recently received a link for a short film with a request to feature it on this blog. I will do them the courtesy of not featuring it in this blog because within 45 seconds I stopped watching and deleted the email, and if I did feature it, I could do nothing but criticise the very poor acting, or should I say, the amount of acting they were doing.

I do not denigrate the effort of the team, I admire people that don’t wait for permission, don’t sit around expecting it to happen, but if you are going to do something, the script, the direction and the acting must be good.

Within 45 seconds I had seen enough ‘acting’ to realise I wasn’t going to enjoy it. They were pretending, conveying things that in no way resembled the real world and unfortunately on film, we expect it to be true to the world. It can be set on Mars, but the behaviour of the actors must convince us that this situation is real. When I see acting I think ‘actor’, I don’t engage, I am repelled.

Acting is something that you are better at – the less that you do. That doesn’t mean you do nothing, that doesn’t mean that you give a flat emotionless recitation, but the skill of acting is not how much you can do, but how little you can get away with.

Speak with a truthful intention, in response to what is before you. Speak with an intention that is similar to the psychological drive of the character. Do not try to show anything, convey something or help the audience to understand something. Speak with truthful intention in response to the others around you and this over-acting (or indeed acting at all) problem will vanish.

This is a serious problem because people are leaving their training, completely unable to act for film and tv because they pantomime everything and the camera hates that, it despises it.

Don’t act. Do.