Blog Post #5

If you for a moment think that acting is easy, you better think again. Have you ever acted before? It’s a lot harder than what people think. A lot of people think that actors have it easy, they just live in a fake reality. While that part is somewhat true, there is a lot of mental preperation that goes into acting as well as emotional energy. People say, “But it’s all pretend, how does that take energy? You’re just pretending!” — but it’s not! I heard this analogy that really makes a lot of sense to me; you can’t take a picture of a photograph and say it’s the real thing because it’s not. Just as you can’t copy a character and say you’re that character. I mean, you could, but your character wouldn’t be believable, nor the action or dialogue natural. It’s not copying a character, it’s actually being the character. Acting is about painting a backstory for your character and stepping in their shoes.

Directors are the ones who help their actors create a backstory, that way the directors get exactly what they want. When directors tell their actors, “Okay, be mad.” That doesn’t help because what the actors are doing is all pretend, why do they need to be mad? When good directors want their actors to be mad, they give them a reason to be mad, they say, “Okay, make him quit laughing at you.” Good directors direct with action verbs rather than adjectives. With an action direction, the actor is experiencing emotion making an excellence and believable presentation of their character. This is why acting can takes preparation and emotional experience, they are creating backstories and experiencing things in a new way which takes real emotional tolls.

I think we really need to understand there is more to directors and actors than what you see on screen. Sure, they get a lot of fame, but do we really know how much they put into what they do?