Time for a Better Sense of Direction

In our industry, we place a LOT of value on how well an actor can take direction. But I’m afraid we pay very little attention to the efficacy of the direction itself.

There are more directing courses now than ever before, but how are the directors taught to give verbal instructions to their actors? No director ever wants to confuse the actors they work with. But often, a director’s instructions just get in the way. I can see why they say that Gene Hackman never took direction. It acts as mental clutter for the actor. That’s not my opinion, that’s precisely what verbal instructions often do. Verbal instructions take up space in an already crowded brain.

Since action is the language of actors, directing schools usually advise on using active or transitive verbs to communicate action with actors. But, a ‘language of action’ is an oxymoron. When action is translated back into plain old words the same problem presents itself. When you tell the actor to ‘circumvent’ the other actor, they may or may not know what the means, but even if they know that it means ‘go around’ them, the director does not mean that literally, they mean go around them psychologically. But how?

This then invokes the knowing/doing gap – the space between understanding the word and putting that understanding into action.

Talking about something rarely produces the clarity of action that it intends. Verbal instruction is weak because it is filtered through the fog of semantics and experience.

When a director wants to give an actor some direction, their thoughts are translated into language and that language is then translated back into thoughts and then translated into action by the actors. This means that by the time the actor has received the instructions from the director, they are translated THREE times.

To show you how ineffective that this translation is, I took the line “Where are your notes?” from David Mamet’s play Oleanna.

I translated that line with Google Translate into Finnish, and then back into English, and then into Arabic and back in English.

The end result is “Where is the diary?”  - If that’s what Google does, imagine what your brain does.

In the way that I approach teaching directing, I teach the directors to get most of the directing done before the actor ever gets on their feet. I ask a series of questions that let me hear the actors’ thoughts on the scenes, which allows me to hear if we’re all aligned. Listening to the thinking is the more important than what they are actually saying, because its at this stage that I can hear if there are problems with our shared interpretation and these can be discussed at length, with no pressure to perform. We start with the actors’ ideas and go from there. If we’re on set that day, we’re not going to have time to ‘explore the text’ like theatre, so it’s important that we’re on the same page quickly.

But how do we deal with direction as a form of instruction?

The best way to direct an actor is to use their own experience of the world. By this, I don’t mean relying on their sense and emotional memory. I mean that if you want them to ‘circumvent’, you need to give them the opportunity to feel and experience what circumventing is like. Then, they will have a direct reference point for the word ‘circumvent’ from the inside. Until they experience this, ‘circumvent’ is just an idea that is badly translated between the director and actor.

The shortest route between two points is often the best route. Experience is the shortest way to teach the actor what it is you’re attempting to get them to do.

Your job is to create a set of highly tangible reference points within the actor to build a bridge between what you want and what they do. Your job is to design the experiences they have to explore what you’re looking for.