Infulecati: NEW YORK MAGAZIN CULTURAL OCTOBER 9TH, 2014 Maria Roman- Actress in America Good heart I wish you to have. I’m Maria Roman. Actress born, raised and trained in Bucharest. I started working in this industry while I was still in school and the plan was that theater directors would come and see me in my final year at ‘Casandra’ and Id find myself a place somewhere in a theater. But that didn’t happen, even though I had three graduations shows that I’m still proud of. I thought maybe I’m not a good enough actress, so I decided to do everything I could to have access to the best acting training. Marlon Brando was my acting role model, I knew he attended the Actors Studio, so I put together my file, went to audition and got accepted with a small scholarship that made me very happy, especially since I knew that’s very hard for a foreigner to receive financial aid. I knew that from NYU-Tisch, where I had auditioned the previous year, when the Actors Studio was on a hiatus, while relocated to Pace University, where I was going to, later on, go to classes. The NYU board was pleasantly surprised by my attendance and delivery, no other Romanian had gotten so far in their audition process, but they did have Liviu Ciulei as headmaster for ten years. They told then can’t accept because I’m a foreigner and their program is based on American dramaturgy. I had a pretty strong accent back then but want surprised them the most was that I didn’t personally know Mr. Ciulei. I told them he hadn’t lived in Romania for a while but I went back to Romania with the mission of making his acquaintance, at Zelda Fichlander’s urge, the Tisch headmaster at that time. Mr. Catalin Naum, my first mentor, was the one who took me to Liviu Ciulei’s house, where I was warmly and happily greeted by him, being the first Romanian actor to make it to the final audition at NYU-Tisch. And so I had the privilege to work on my monologues in English with him. He was, indeed, a man of genius. Upon hearing me with my first monologue, he immediately realized I had some emphasis issues that no one else had been able to pin point in the 6 years since I’d been acting. The three years spent at Actors Studio were incredibly creative, I learn a lot and put everything in practice. When I had graduated this school as well, I finally realized that talent and training are not as important as a practical sense that most successful actors have. An unexpected event though put things for me in a different perspective. While looking for auditions online (something every American actor does on a daily basis), I found a contest/audition where the big prize was the display of the winner’s photo, for a week, in the famous NY landmark, ‘Times Square’, on a commercial billboard, for moviehatch. I picked a photo where you can’t really see my face, but my attitude inspires great positive energy, because I thought, if I was to win, I’d like to offer everyone rushing through Times Square that saw it, a moment of respite from the chaos, and something to make them smile. I won due to a sustained facebook campaign to receive most votes, and I realized that the most important thing is to have friends. But New York was not the place for me either, so I moved to Los Angeles, where I found a much more pleasant and inspiring environment, and where I live at the present moment. I decided to stay here, so I can finally grow some roots somewhere. I had the opportunity to work with John Savage, Danny Trejo, Peter Coyote, Lance Henriksen, Jessica Hecht and other wonderful actors, even if not as well known as the ones I’ve mentioned. A pleasant surprise was to have had the opportunity to collaborate with four times ‘World Press Photo’ winner, photographer Gerard Rancinan, on his project ‘Chaos of Love’, that got me exposed at the Opera Gallery in Geneva, as well as in other renowned European exhibits. I have a few projects in development, in the States, as well as in Romania, so I look forward to soon have more to share with you. Art as Necessity Very few thoughts have I repressed this lifetime. I’ve always enjoyed looking into the depth of ideas, of people, of life. But it did cross my mind a couple of times in my now 16 years old acting career, that what I’m doing might not be necessary. And this was the one thought I refused to expand on, until I read it expressed by Tarkovsky: “Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.” It was too late for me to stop the emotional outpour these words had triggered. My intuition led me in that direction and these thoughts deeply pierced my idealistic soul. So I stopped and pondered. Yes, it’s true; in an ideal world we wouldn’t need music, because we’d rather enjoy the birds singing and how their melody blends with the rustling of the leaves and the sound of the ocean. We wouldn’t need painting or sculpting, because we’d allow ourselves to be mesmerized by nature’s beauty and we’d play with what she has to offer, we’d blend the lily’s yellow with the raspberry red. Who would have time to write and why would anyone do that when we have so many stories to tell each other! And when it comes to acting, it’d be totally beside the point: what souls to purify when the whole world is pure and bursting with love? But it’s more than obvious that we don’t live in an ideal world. We need art as badly as we need air. So we can keep the soul alive, even if caught up in this materialism that has nothing to do with the essence of our creation, but which defines this reality. Art reminds us we are more than individual bodies fighting for survival. It makes us feel that there’s more to it, something bigger than all of this, something where we all perfectly fit in. I chose acting as a means to express myself. And I focused on movies based on a few different reasons, one being the desire for my art to reach and touch as many people as possible. It’s just that meanwhile I realized something that was a bit shocking at first. One of my favorite movies is ‘It’s All Quiet on the Western Front’, where it’s most clearly stated how nonsensical wars are, the lie we live in (that we can’t do without them) and how it all brought us on the verge of extinction as a civilization (I don’t think anyone can argue that, technologically speaking, we are at this point). This movie received the highest recognition given in this field of art; it was awarded with an Oscar in 1930. Right in between the two world wars. So, as Tarkovsky was saying: „It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good... Art can only give food - a jolt - the occasion- for psychical experience.“ I have an enormous admiration for Tarkovsky for his art, as well as for his understanding of life, which I completely resonate with. Than something strange happened: I finally got to watch ‘Andrei Rublev’. And I was shocked when I saw that horse being pushed down the stairs and then shot. Art is supposed to be reality transfigured. I make a clear distinction between an actor that’s crying on stage his own drama and one that transfigures his own drama to create a character and a situation that the audience will empathize with. Maybe a better example is an actor who’s playing someone who dies of tuberculosis. If the actors forces himself to cough ‘for real’, he’s going to hurt his vocal folds, and that bothers me in the audience, because I’m forced to watch a man hurting himself and I feel the need to make that stop. But a well-trained actor, as I once saw this at NYU-Tisch, will transfigure that cough into something I can empathize with, because nobody gets hurt in this process. And in that scene from ‘Andrei Rublev’, I could feel horse’s pain and terror. I did a research and found out that Tarkovsky bought this horse that was going to taken to the slaughter house the next day. I am able to understand the director’s thought process that convinced him it’s not a sin to kill an animal as long as it was going to end up on our plates the next day anyway. So he also tortured it a bit, as a sacrifice for the art. I’m always careful not to judge, I stir away from thinking I know what’s good and bad, but there are some fundaments I can’t ignore and life is more important than art. Anybody’s life, animals included. Nobody should have to suffer in the creation of art when its very purpose is healing of the soul. I have no idea how good of a rest did Tarkovsky get the night after that shoot, but I felt the need to write these lines, in the hope that we all understand that nobody’s perfect, that art is art and ideas are ideas. But let us please have, in any circumstances, compassion as our guide.
Posted on: Tue, 07 Oct 2014 16:09:26 +0000
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