An (especially long) update/letter/peek into my thought about my impressions after working for two weeks in New York on my first feature film. Dear my own future self, as well as whoever wants to read this, Im back on the train heading home. Three and a half days again on the train, watching the country roll by. During the day you can see all of the landscapes of the United States, at night, you see nothing but the distant headlights of lonely trucks. On Sunday I will be back in California. There are two schizophrenics on my train car alone. One of the caused a scene and had to be wrangled. When I say the cross-country train is a den of crazies, I am not making a metaphor. You just cant get entertainment like this when traveling by air. The train is full of travelers of all kinds: hippies, old and young (one of whom looks like he just walked out of a Simpsons episode), mothers with children, mothers without children, older couples, truck drivers, a few amish families, one traveller from Argentina. Theres a deaf guy who is always sign-language Skyping his girlfriend (sweetest thing ever). Two babies are crying behind me, I have days left to ride, and something about where I am in my life right now: I dont give a damn. I just had the time of my life, and Im in no rush to get anywhere. Even with all this around me, I feel relaxed. (Then again, the return trip always feels quicker than going there.) The shoot was excellent in every way. At one point I got to photograph three Radio City Rockettes in Jim Parracks house. Youll know why when the movie comes out... A typical day of filming was twelve hours long, and went like this: Call time was at 10 am, which is when everyone showed up go get the cameras ready, get themselves ready. There was a piano standing in the theater where we were filming so I would play for almost an hour every morning while the cast and crew got ready. I spent the rest of the day either in front of the camera, or else between shots I was running around getting peoples portraits and interviews for the Behind The Scenes Doc. (New York actors actually enjoy getting their pictures taken). On our set you could see something tragically unique: rehearsals. In between shots you would see actors interacting in character, preparing character bios, doing research, you would almost think that these people enjoy acting, watching them do these things. But of course this is what happens when the people involved are rooted in craft and know how to rehearse without direction. This is one of the distinguishing traits of a true professional actor - the ability to create a role without being told what to do. After seven years of acting, I can say it is this more than anything which separates the wheat from the chaff. It is basically the definition of craft - the ability to figure out what is wrong and to fix it. Yourself. This requires great humbleness. Take it from someone whos been a math tutor, unless you are completely humble, it is not possible for you to learn anything. To have someone tell you that you are doing something wrong, and then to adjust it, takes great humility. And humility means vulnerability. It means putting your skills forth with abandon, but still remaining ready to receive teaching. And teaching does not only come from teachers, but just the same, from experience. And remaining vulnerable to experience is part of the game. You must remain vulnerable when working with people: This means never coveting their talent. You must remain vulnerable when watching good movies: This means never being jealous of someone elses work. You must remain vulnerable when acting, and that means not caring what anyone thinks of you. This is when truly emotional acting emerges. Everyone is a different kind of puzzle to crack, emotionally. Having been around actors of all levels and ages for the last seven years, I can say that some have their emotions right at the surface all the time, and some people need a pneumatic drill to even come close. According to the greatest acting teacher of the last century, Sanford Meisner, getting to your emotions is a matter of figuring out what makes you tick - going deep into your imagination and finding the circumstances that really move you. Every actor has this problem, and must learn to solve his own instrument (himself) like a puzzle. For some people this puzzle is as simple as one of those childrens put the circular peg in the circular hole, and the triangle peg in the triangle hole puzzles, and for some people it is a damn Rubiks Cube. It all depends on your history and disposition. The role I was chosen to play was Meisners assistant, which I played as extremely obedient with a bit of comedic flair. Even after two years of the Meisner Technique I have not abandoned my comedic flair, and I never will. The role for me was a great exercise in listening. I didnt have any set lines, but often in the middle of his speeches, Sandy would sometimes surprise me by asking something like Phil, what the hell was the point I was just making? And Id have a window of about a second to get him back on track before he saved himself. Anyway, what Im saying is that if I wanted to get any lines in this movie, I had to be on my shit and just speak out. Anyone who has known me since I was a child will know how difficult this would be. I cant say much more about the role until I actually see what gets into the movie. Because this was a largely improvised movie, we had to shoot many takes of the same scene, and each time it was completely different. This is the beauty of the way we work, everything you see happen is actually happening or else it wouldnt be happening. This may seem dense to non-actors, but what it means simply is that we are not following a set track, just playing through a situation until a desired result is achieved. For example, one of the most delightful scenes in the film, where a rebellious student (played by Parrack) is kicked out of class by Meisner. In take two, he wasnt kicked out at all, because he didnt manage to piss Meisner off enough, and managed to weasel his way out of his predicament. And the rest of the film was like this too: many of the circumstances being created by the actors themselves. This is what is possible with a directing style that grants autonomy to the actors. (Also helps that all the actors are good. Like actually good, not just know how to cry when they need to, good.) Jim Jarrett, who plays Mr. Meisner, is a master, nothing less. He can improvise, in character, for ten to twenty minutes at a time, and ALL of it is usable. He studied with Meisner at the end of his life for two years, and then was taken on as a teaching protege for two more, this meant something like two thousand hours of class time spent with the man. (It is one thing to see Sanford Meisner on video, it is another to see him embodied in a master actor who knew him well). All of this resulted in a role that is so well-rehearsed from years of touring a one-man play, that we could fire off single-take shots that are over twenty minutes long. Very few modern films do anything even close to this, and frankly it is what sets us apart. The kind of acting that a project revolves around determines its entire style. Jarrett would frequently teach classes in character in between takes in order to help himself and all of the other actors into the imaginary circumstances of our film. What other lead actor would spend time on this? Coaching and leading the whole troupe throughout the entire shooting process. It shows a class of the highest order. But again, it is only possible in an environment which fosters creative autonomy in the actors, and that is the job of the director. Parrack was a force of nature as a Director. He is incredibly well read in film. Whenever he wasnt working, he was always surrounded by a group, telling an anecdote about one of the great actors or filmmakers. Im talking Tarantino levels of film knowledge - and this level of taste influenced our whole production. For example, this is the kind of direction he would give: You are free to do anything, and I mean anything that you have the impulse to do, as long as it is not the impulse to draw attention to yourself. He let all the actors create all their own characters without any superfluous micromanagement. Above all, this takes trust, and actors who feel trusted are actors who perform best of all, take this for an example: One actor, JR (Who when he is not working as an actor, works as a New York City Detective [I shit you not] ) was given a role which was designed to be as a simple unauthentic TV actor, meant to be foil for Meisners detestation. He took this role and made it completely his own, creating a man with great depth, one who eventually won over Meisners heart. Not only was this was unplanned, It contradicted what happened in the script. It was done without any previous agreement. It completely changed the course of the scene, but because all of the actors were present and ready for anything, it resulted in one of the most beautiful scenes of the film. It would take pages to recount every time that something like this happened, because it happened over and over non-stop for the whole film. It was the best example of that mysterious artistic alchemy that we often read about in books but rarely get to encounter in real life. It happens only when a group of people who completely trust each other are working towards a common goal. Alchemy actually describes very well what happened these few weeks. People kept saying to me during my interviews how it felt like none of us has to make friends when we got there - we somehow just seemed to be friends by default. There was something deep that bound all of us, and everyone could sense it. We felt like family as soon as we came together. There was not an ounce of overt drama. It certainly made working together much easier. But there was something almost unsettling about it as well: what exactly is this invisible thing that binds us together? How can it bring us all together from opposite ends of the country by train and by plane to collaborate on something for free, for twelve hours a day, only to happily get up the next morning and do the same thing again. I am tempted to say it is something obvious and clean like our devotion to art, but something else tells me that there is more to it. I would only be speculating if I tried to say what it was. The cameras we used were industry standard, precision devices. Arri Alexa, armed with a full selection of Leica prime lenses. A kit that if you bought it would cost you $200K. The images it produced were excellent, and the device was made mobile by a rail system which carried a dolly that took 4 people to lift it. Industry standard in film is a strange thing, a mixed blessing, certainly. At one level, the image quality of films has been steadily increasing since film first came out, in one of those manifest-destiny kind of ways which claims even higher resolution and cleaner images ad infinitum, but at the same time, something is lost. Paradoxically, filters are often applied in editing to make the images of modern cameras less perfect. Something similar happened at the dawn of electronic music, when programmers took pride in being able to produce the purest tones, but people only began to enjoy the music once a certain degree of impurity was artificially introduced to the sound. A similar thing happened with the latest Hobbit movies, where the quality of image is so pure that you can clearly see the actors make-up. Artificial film grain is often added to footage in the editing process for the purpose of making it look like it is shot on an older camera. We all know the feeling of being photographed on a too-high-resolution camera only to be shocked by the amount of blemishes and imperfections on our skin. (This is why I shoot most of my portraits in soft black and white) It would seem that our artistic sensitivity demands a degree of imperfection before it is capable of biting into a work of art. The nutrients need to be attached to a bit of fiber in order to be digestible. The political economist Ivan Illich wrote in the 70s that the evolution of technology must not be allowed to continue unchecked, since what frequently happens, is that once our machines get powerful enough, our role in relation to them shifts from creative users of tools, to mere operators of machines. The machines stop serving our creative goals directly, and we become servants of the machines in meeting what is called The Industrial Standard. The question of whether the machines serve us, or whether through them, we are serving the Industry, is a complicated one, and not even on the radar for most filmmakers. Especially most actors: They see a crazy expensive looking camera with a bunch of cords and crap attached to it, they see all the big lenses, they see the image quality and are dazzled. Even actors who are dedicated to the philosophy that it isnt all about the looks will rarely stop to question a tool which seems to favor looks over creative flexibility and mobility. (It is even latent in the language that we use when describing the cinematographer: we say things like: This guy is here to make you all look good) But the standard must be met, for multiple reasons, and the problem is much more complicated than I have the space here to talk about. Consider the counterfoil idea planted, for anyone who reads this far. Our young Director of Photography, Hunter Nolan, shocked everyone with his skill at operating that beast of a camera (It was about the size of a car engine), and despite how crotchety I am about modern cameras, I know that the cinematography will rival that of any hollywood movie out there. The whole thing was shot in one room, and they managed to make it dynamic. No easy feat. At the end of ever shooting day, we practice a incidental kind of meditation - the sound technician has to record a few minutes of something called Room Tone - which means the baseline drone sound that is present throughout the day. (Its needed for editing bits of audio together so that there wont be an awkwardly distinct cut in the sound where there is a transition) The practice takes on the feel of a ritual because literally every person in the room - dozens of us, have to remain completely silent while he does this. So we all sit there together, in meditative silence, taking in the impressions of the twelve-hour shooting day, all while becoming more and more aware of the volume of the silence that has permeated every single moment of that day underneath all of our talking, footsteps, crashes of construction, and shouts of action. It is a few minutes at the end of the day where we can all sit and meditate together, and it quickly became my favorite gem of the workday. Everyones energy could be felt in the air. It is beyond any of us to know how big this thing is going to be. Anyone interested in Meisner will certainly want to watch it, once it is available, which means that as long as people are studying this technique, people will be watching this film, which is an encouraging thought. As to how long people are going to be studying this technique for, who knows. It is one thing to say that Meisner will never be forgotten, but still, acting techniques must develop and progress with time. Nothing can remain frozen for very long, even this. As soon as there are no more people around who have ever known Meisner, he will become a subject of lore, but the resonance of the work he did will still live on in all the actors he worked with, and all of the actors theyve worked with. That chain of influence comes back through us all now, where the top Meisner studios in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia all came together in one theater to make this film, in Brooklyn where Sanford Meisner was originally from. It seems too perfect to be true. But its done, and everyone is on their ways (the footage too, into the hands of the editor, to be cut up and assembled into the final film). What else can I say, I am proud to have worked with all of these people. My work finally feels like its starting to pay off. Now its time to reflect and let the fact sink in that this all really just happened. And then its on to the next thing. Back to finish off my final session at the MTS. One final scene and I will be part of a graduating class of four people(!). Who knows where life will lead from there. If you read this far, I love you. -Boris
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 04:51:02 +0000
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