||Bonding with so called 'Intellectuals' #CC 17 (IO) - Page 25

hummm i read in reviews same thing...

waah ady😉 will catch happy journey with subtitles online😛 later

sharing a recent discovery of a beautiful soulful song = movie "david"...

[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTe6YMjg0g4[/YOUTUBE]

so googled to find out who is the music director - turns out it was annirudh, who composed "why this kolaveri di"😲😆 is he very big in south music industry? he seems to a popular music director down south from wiki page...but yunhi re is beautiful and I heard the tamil version - kanave kanave...👏👏👏

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While I'm a writer-director, I feel the most important thing in a film is the energy or "chemistry" that's actually happening in front of the camera"not what I planned or what I wrote. So I'm always inviting the actors to find the overlap between the character and themselves and live the character's problems as much as possible.

One day in rehearsal for "Beginners," Christopher Plummer said something like, "I need to tell him more in this scene"""him" being his son, played by Ewan McGregor. I loved that he was saying "I" and that he was upset, which means he was invested. "What do you need to tell him?" I asked. "That I loved her," he answered. I don't know how Christopher knew that this character, based on my real dad, who came out of the closet at age 75, also really loved my mother, who he was married to for 44 years.

I followed Chris' instincts and added a page of dialogue about how my parents honestly cared for each other, how the marriage wasn't just a fiction. It's one of the most important scenes in the film, and I think one of Christopher's best moments, partially because this message was so real to him. In Christopher's heart and mind, it was vital to us really understanding him. What we're all after are those little moments that go beyond what you expected or could have planned, nuggets that can only come out of the heat of playing and experiencing and being alive in the scene.

Paul Feig, New York and Los Angeles; 'Bridesmaids,' 'The Office,' 'Nurse Jackie'

Without chemistry between your cast members, there is no point in shooting your script. In comedy, if your principal cast doesn't gel and aren't funny together, the audience will reject the movie. In order to guarantee the chemistry is there, we look to discover it in the casting process.

Early in our prep period (once we have a script we're happy with), we first have each actor read using extended sides that allow him or her to do more than what's in the actual script. It's usually a conversation between two people in which the actor's character says the lion's share of the lines. This allows us to really see the actor's take on the character. Then from those auditions, we bring in the actors we feel might be right together and have them perform in different combinations, mixing and matching to see how they play off each other and if there is chemistry between them. From that, we then choose our cast.

Once we've done that, we begin rehearsals and improv sessions with the actors, which we use to really explore their characters' personalities and relationships. We then use what we learn to rewrite the script to take full advantage of the strengths and chemistry of the cast. Only by doing this do we know we're going into production with a script that allows us to take full advantage of our cast's talents and chemistry. Which makes my job as director a little easier!

Jordan Bayne, New York; 'The Sea Is All I Know,' 'Argo'

As a director, I am always open to what my actors bring. It's their life experience that informs the character and brings it from the page into a living, breathing human being.

One moment in my latest film, "The Sea Is All I Know," I imagined would be more sexual from the beginning, but in the exploration of the scene, Peter Gerety and Melissa Leo found the prodigal son/husband/little boy forgiveness moment, and its intimacy led to the sexual intimacy of the scene.

For me, that was always a part of what was written, but it was the connection and trust the actors have with one another that found the humanity of the moment. It was a deep understanding of the frailty of the broken relationship between the parents and how powerfully their choice right then with one another could affect the entire future of the family. Part of the story line in the film turns on this moment. Even though it is true to the script, for me the

story was richer, more human, because of how Melissa and Peter found and lived those moments so beautifully.

Drake Doremus, Los Angeles; 'Like Crazy,' 'Douchebag,' 'Spooner'

Because of the unknown chemistry between actors, I write a 50-page story outline instead of a "normal" script per se, but I include the subtext, the relationships between the characters, and every specific story point in the writing process. I use the actors to elevate it and bring it to life. We find the truth together. That's why there is no dialogue written. It is all improvised. The outline is very factual; the scenes evolve in the rehearsal process, and it's very important to me that I don't

get in the way of the natural dynamic between the actors. Instead, I aim to nurture and expose it onscreen.

The actors become giddy with each other, and their shared sense of humor can sometimes change a scene. Every day is a surprise. My goal is for the actors to feel so comfortable that spontaneous things will happen. The characters live from the inside out, not the outside in, like most films.

In "Like Crazy," we had written about specific areas where the two characters would walk on the beach in Santa Monica and specific things that would happen while they were there in the honeymoon phase of their relationship. But as a result of the chemistry that Anton [Yelchin] and Felicity [Jones] had with each other, they brought a whole new dimension to the scene. In this case, my actors had a ritual of strangling each other in this very playful fashion, which we incorporated into the scene, as well as many others. That's where the truth is.

Nick Hamm, Los Angeles; 'Killing Bono,' 'Godsend,' 'The Hole'

If there is no chemistry, there is no scene. The ability of the performers to play off one another and deliver a moment of emotional truth is the building block of any film. It's a clich, but as is the case with most clichs, it's true: Actors bring words to life.

Often an actor in rehearsal will do something that takes the scene in a different direction. I like to set up a working situation that allows me to respond to this. No matter how much you prepare, it's always interesting to conduct the rehearsal as part experiment and part preparation. Sometimes a scene doesn't deliver what you imagined it would. Either the writing falls short, the actor can't "get it," or the technicality of filming destroys any spontaneity. It's in these moments that you dig deep.

In one of the final scenes in "Killing Bono," the young Ivan sits in the back of a limo with a young Bono. As they journey to the event, they both talk about their childhoods, their dreams, their lives. They are at ease with each other, and the scene requires a certain intimacy to work. We shot it on a late January night in Ireland. It was freezing, even in the car. This had a massive effect on Martin McCann. He couldn't deliver his speech. So we gave him a warm water bottle, he

relaxed, and they started to play the lines in different ways. They traded words for gestures and turned emotion into comedy. They built the moment together.

So a hot water bottle saved the scene. Remember, keep your actors warm!

How Does Chemistry Between Actors Influence Your Understanding and Direction of a Script?

Impulses are visible. Impulses create energy, and energy is the actor's use of body; therefore, like the wind or a magnetic field, an impulse is an invisible force made visible by its effects. First I saw this between the actors I couldn't hear, in my own rehearsals. Now I've seen it in ordinary conversations; across a table in the food court, the speakers nod and shift and respond, mutually creating a dynamic physical flow. By contrast, through the window of a theater studio, I see actors fail to connect. Their bodies activate only with the energy of what they have to say; they are physically blind to the energy being sent to them by their scene partner, and each new impulse flattens and dies against the invisible wall between them. Impulses are not only visible, but tangible; if you look for the impulses, you will see them (and what happens to them) as concretely as a balled-up sweater.

This leads to a practical definition of chemistry. "Chemistry" is people's impulses affecting each other. The more impulses that are shared, and the stronger the effect of those impulses, the better the chemistry is. If you think about your own examples of "good chemistry" between people-- even in real life-- you'll realize that you're evaluating their responsiveness to each other. If one person coughs lightly, does the other raise an eyebrow? If one of them relaxes a shoulder, does the other tilt their head? The words we speak are merely the most blatant of the thousands of impulses being constantly transmitted; actors with "good chemistry" will let themselves respond appropriately to as many as possible. You can deliberately develop good chemistry between two actors by causing them to acknowledge and respond to more of their partner's impulses. Whether there are only two people or an ensemble of two dozen, the impact of their impulses is visibly recognizable as chemistry. Because body impulses are visceral ideas, they create a physical connection as an unbroken flow of energy; where we see people with good chemistry we perceive a single physical entity.

This leads to an expanded definition of body. It seems to me that the most appropriate definition of "my body" is the physical matter which responds to my will. Sigmund Freud referred to the human being as a "prosthetic god"; that which our flesh is incapable of, we may accomplish by creating prostheses in tools, vehicles, and proxies. When I was visiting the San Diego Convention Center as an exhibitor in 1996, the loading dock buzzed with miniature forklift operators; I watched in awe as one of these men, manipulating a series of levers and knobs, positioned a metal plank with such deft precision that I would have sworn the fork's tines were his own two fingers. I sat in on a stage-combat rehearsal last semester and was amazed to see how-- after a series of presentations in which the actors swung dead metal objects at the ends of their arms-- one man picked up his weapons and his living limbs were suddenly that much longer. Your body extends beyond your flesh. Your body is whatever your will may act upon. If your body is already fully engaged, you can get more energy by kicking a chair. You can get more energy by connecting to your scene partner. You can get more energy by opening your body to connect to your environment and the impulses it naturally provides. Your body is as "big" or as "small" as you allow it to be.

This leads to a logical definition of stage presence. Stage presence is an advanced application of closure-- the same psychological effect which makes you see a rectangle when I type two brackets [ ]. If your body creates a visible relationship between itself and the space around it, then a viewer will be forced to perceive the space as part of your body, and you will seem "bigger". Once you recognize that this relationship exists, you can manipulate the size of your stage presence to whatever you wish it to be; in a scene where you are (for example) quietly nurturing a baby sparrow, you can maintain a "powerful presence" by asserting your body's relationship to the space around you. In a scene where your schemes are at last thwarted by the hero, you can shout and scream and bluster but physically fold in on yourself so you seem to become smaller and smaller. If you kick a chair and maintain your physical relationship to it as it clatters and tumbles, you become larger as its space is added to yours. But if, having kicked the chair, you disengage from it, then you are cut off from its space and will therefore appear smaller than you were before.

This definition of stage presence is logical, but it's still impractical. That is, I can define it, I can explain it, and I can use it-- but I can't teach it. I can't explain it any better than I have already done. I can demonstrate how to control stage presence with my own body, so that anyone can see what I mean, but I don't have any gimmicks or tricks or exercises which make these same strategies instantly comprehensible and accessible to anyone. It should be possible to teach stage presence, because we all do it; we instinctively create relationships between our bodies and the objects of our focus. A few semesters ago, one of my students brought his pet ferret into the classroom. Anyone looking at the scene would have been unavoidably drawn to the exact spot where that ferret sat, as every student's body was completely oriented to that point in space. I was able to apply this principle to a scene with some theater students-- rather than awkwardly reaching to look at a ring, they positioned their bodies to create a physical frame visibly centered upon the ring-- but so far, stage presence remains an elusive teaching concept. Either the students get it from this explanation, or they don't. Unlike my other strategies, I can't get them to experience it directly and immediately use that experience; I can only give them hints and clues and guide them toward a discovery. Good for the occasional exploration, but still not good for the classroom.

This is the reason I'd like to teach an advanced class. I've learned plenty about basic technique in the past semester, significantly advancing my understanding from the previous term, and I look forward to tackling it again next semester... but I wonder what would happen if I were working with a group of students who had already gone through this part of the process. What would we explore instead? This time around, in the early class, I have recruited three "ringers" (one in each show) with whom I've previously worked and who, therefore, understand the basic technique. I'm glad of their presence because they have been able to monitor and assist their castmates without my supervision, but that function has naturally prevented us from developing their own performances beyond the same basic technique. Given the stresses and challenges of the early morning slot, I have settled for that much. What could they accomplish if this process became a more complete curriculum? What does this develop into?

This week, I've seen the eventual results of the standard curriculum. Until this week, I didn't believe that the standard acting curriculum taught anything. Where a student tries to "make the scene good" instead of exploring technique, and a grade is ultimately decided by on-paper analysis rather than performance, I concluded that a student would finish a scene and learn nothing they could apply to their future performances. I was wrong. From this process, over time, a student learns how to make any scene "good".

That's what I saw displayed this weekend. I attended the department's production of Dating and Mating in Modern Times-- a series of twelve monologues presented by eleven women. I was told that the rehearsal process was essentially this: the actors were asked questions and told to respond "in character", so they would improvisationally create the characters' backstory while they became accustomed to the character's physical Shape. I was informed that, except for running the monologues, this had been the director's sole approach. As a "showcase" production, the director had cast both graduate and undergraduate students (usually, the grad students are favored exclusively), and the responses of each group to the same process were blatantly different.

All of the graduate performers, without exception, were programmed. One of my students applied this term and it seems to fit perfectly. The graduates had surely done their analyses; they must have "scored" their scripts with intentions and objectives and whatever else they'd been taught, and carefully considered how each little choice affected their speeches. Each sentence communicated exactly what it was supposed to mean; each inflection and each movement was specific and deliberate. Because the performers knew how to keep their focus and maintain a relatively high energy, each of their monologues was, without question, "well acted"-- but every sentence was spoken exactly as planned. Each monologue was a lively recitation, but within a plastic veneer that prevented them from being honest and real. The first two monologues were from graduate students, and I was so dissatisfied by them that I began to wonder if maybe my expectations were unrealistic and unreasonable. After all, the monologues were by women, about women, for women; maybe I just didn't relate. But then the first undergraduate came on, and I breathed my relief, because I saw that it wasn't just me (or just the men).

All of the undergraduates were real, and the effect on the audience was obvious. The undergraduates-- presumably less familiar with the process of "making scenes good"-- performed as they had rehearsed, allowing their Shapes to respond to the available impulses. And the audience, who had calmly sat back and appreciated the graduate students, leaned forward and engaged with each undergraduate. The graduate students, through their programmed actions and expressions, destroyed their access to the spontaneous and sincere reality enjoyed by the undergraduates; furthermore, by denying the natural impulses in their speeches and in the environment, their bodies were operating on an internal, contained and regulated energy which the audience could not share. If you weren't looking for this, you wouldn't have seen it. Each of the graduates' presentations was an effective and entertaining recitation, with all of them "well acted". There is certainly a place for this in the professional theater, as some directors value consistency over anything else, but the graduates' learned technique of internal "programming" kept the audience firmly at arm's length.

I was grateful to have seen this, because it gave me the foundation I needed to initiate a discussion with one of my students. I had been puzzling the entire week over what to do with this fellow. Of all the students in all three sections, this guy is perhaps the one with the most stage experience, and on occasion he has made sharply insightful directorial suggestions which, if I'd had more time, I would have wanted to explore more fully than a brief verbal encouragement. On the face of it, he seemed to have the most potential for success, but as late as this week-- despite his apparent comprehension of the "natural read"-- almost everything he did or said on stage was still forced and unnatural. My dilemma arose because he wasn't ruining anything for the other actors. From our rehearsals, he knew how to maintain the necessary pacing and energy, so nobody stumbled over him and he didn't drag anyone down; and even though he has three long speeches that can't be understood as he currently speaks them, the background actors were doing something interesting at that point which inadvertently made it seem that we weren't supposed to pay attention to him. His delivery might be plastic, but it was harmless, and the other performers were find enough in his delivery to effectively react and play off of him. If I did nothing at all, the show would still succeed... but he would stick out glaringly from the ensemble as the one "bad actor". I couldn't imagine that he would want that to happen, especially when he said in his bio that he wants to continue acting, but how could I broach the topic without damaging his morale or destroying the contribution he was already making? How could I ask him to improve without making him think he was doing a bad job?

Seeing Dating and Mating gave me the ammunition I needed. It helped me understand what he was doing, and gave me the perspective to frame the discussion as a warning rather than a criticism. What he had been doing was "programming" his performance (I'm employing a verbal twist here for the sake of brevity; once I explained the circumstance with a flood of words, it was he who boiled it down to the term "programming"). He acknowledged that he had been building himself in that direction from the start. Because he knew his castmates had so little stage experience, he didn't trust them to progress, so he developed his role and his performance apart from them. This, I assured him, is absolutely normal. Most amateur theater stinks, and most amateur performers will give you nothing to work with, so continued experience in the amateur theater will train you to perform despite your castmates instead of with them. But the "programming" process is crippling, as it cuts you off from your audience and limits your performance to what you're capable of planning for. I compared what he was doing to the Dating and Mating cast, and explained that this is where he could end up if he persisted in this direction. You've got everything you need internally, I urged, so now open up to the life around you. You've got so much potential-- why confine it? Why act in a box? Connect, relate, open. Add to what you've got and see where you go. If your castmates give you nothing, let your character assume they are boring people and fight to get a response from them. When your castmates don't respond naturally, let your character struggle to bring them into your reality. Include them as what they are, and the audience will be with you. Block them and you block the audience as well.

This conversation gave me a new perspective on his three longer speeches. I'd thought before that perhaps he was just speaking words, and tried some strategies to help him understand better what he was saying... but those strategies did not work. This time, I wondered if maybe he did know what he was saying, and his incomprehensibility was the probable effect of ignoring his castmates. This could definitely lead to meaningless delivery, because being understood depends on having a listener. So rather than try to drill into his monologues, as we'd done before, I advised him to use them to make me respond, and for a model I pointed out how I was "checking in" with him as I spoke. He tried this, and he naturally achieved most of what I'd been trying (and failing) to do with him before. The effectiveness of his objective suffered as a result of my not being the actor to whom he'd actually speak this, as my responses were not exactly those of a young girl-- but he succeeded in speaking to me openly instead of delivering the programmed lines. If he lets go of that programming, and lets himself naturally communicate, I dearly hope that should transform his performance from "harmless" to "effective".

I don't want to give anyone an excuse for failure. Not even myself. I'd almost forgotten how, at the beginning of this semester, I pressed into service scripts that I wasn't sure I was capable of directing. I was sure any experienced theater person would scoff: actors find these shows difficult, so how could I seriously expect non-actors to succeed? But I put those doubts out of my mind so firmly that I surprised myself by remembering them this week. In the morning session, we had two casts which were each missing one person; we tried running one of them, but with that missing piece the energy was stubbornly low and the pacing was considerably looser than it should have been. At its conclusion, I grimaced and acknowledged that we'd gotten through it, but at really only twenty percent of where we wanted it to be... at which point one of the performers, bursting with curiosity, asked the other cast (who'd been our audience) if they had any feedback. I liked it, was the response; I thought it was entertaining and fun. Not wanting to contradict, I had to explain-- I'm holding you to a professional standard. If this show isn't good enough for us to charge admission to someone who doesn't know you, then we're not there yet. These shows are actually very complicated, I admitted. They're hard! But I didn't tell you that because I knew you could do them, and now don't you dare cave in and say oh well, it was too much for me anyway. You're already doing it. And we'll still make it better.

I'm forced to admit that the shows don't have to be good. Reading my students' bios, I've been surprised to see how many of them have never been on stage before, or how many of them haven't acted since their primary years, and I know that their lack of experience is part of the everyone's expectations. The audience is expecting us to play the loser's game. They know they're watching non-actors, and they'll be adequately impressed just to see that everyone remembers their lines. "If a dog talks, one is amazed that it does it at all, not that it does it well." I didn't have to push any of my students to do anything more than saying lines and they could've been fooled into thinking that was the most they could expect. I had to acknowledge this when I saw a student-directed production this weekend, and it can be summed thusly: a 25-minute one-act was performed in 50 minutes. But the audience, whatever their specific complaints might have been, clapped with honest enthusiasm for the effort of all the actors and crew. This show, I had to admit, is what we're being compared to. These performers were selected by an audition process, and are for the most part theater majors, had more hours of rehearsal than we've enjoyed, and this is what they've done. As randomly-selected non-actors, nobody expects anything better from us. However, I don't accept that as a reason to allow failure.

I won't give up on anyone. I will never say to myself "oh well, that's the best they can do" and stop trying, because I know that anyone is capable of an excellent performance provided they actually want to. The catch, such as it is a catch, is that I have a very specific idea of what constitutes an "excellent performance": a base of honest, natural communication, layered over with the circumstances of the play. I have been repeatedly reminded, this semester, of how critical it is to establish and maintain that base of communication. Each time I (or they) have tried to layer anything without first conquering the basic mechanics of the conversation, it has become fake and weird and confusing and we've had to completely strip away whatever we were trying to add and return to the basic mechanics before we could proceed. C.S. Lewis said it well in his preface to The Great Divorce:

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A wrong sum still can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit... if we insist on keeping Hell we shall not see Heaven.

This is what we did on Monday when I was rehearsing with two of the afternoon girls. I had scheduled time with them individually because what they were doing was not working at all. One of them was the same girl who had so potently flipped off the taxicab earlier in the semester, so I knew she had the power her role required, but in each rehearsal her body was persistently weak. She kept retreating into corners with a crumpled stance, peevishly whining her lines. As we began the Monday session, I told them flat out that I'd made a mistake by giving them so much to do and think about. You already have everything you need, and all I've been doing is getting in the way of that. So throw away all of my stuff, I said, and let's hear the lines. They did this, and I was relieved that it did sound natural and unforced (if dull).

Step by step, we fixed it up. First let's add one thing, I said, turning to the girl who had been whining. I tried one of Keith Johnstone's tricks: play "high status", I said. Whatever that means to you, do it, and let's see what happens. And sure enough-- pow. The whining disappeared immediately, and her bent-legged posture was replaced by that same brick wall I'd seen on the imaginary New York street. But something was still off, and I asked them to try again so we could find our what it was; very quickly I stopped them, gestured to the other girl, and said "Very simple! Receive the impulses." Because until now her partner had been whining and weak, this girl hadn't noticed the stronger impulses now being generated by the sturdier body. A third run revealed that, also in response to the whining, she had gotten into the habit of diffusing her own impulses instead of delivering them, so we changed that. A fourth iteration found a few occasions where she was actively preventing impulses from entering her body; I could see how her body was physically keeping these specific impulses about two feet away. I assured her that this would be how she could successfully "not listen" on stage, but asked her for the sake of this performance to let every impulse in for maximum effect. Which she did. And then we had all the dynamics we needed, and the conversation was active and energetic where before it had been dull and listless. But it still wasn't interesting. This is where I took a deep breath and proceeded to attack the objective. We're not telling the story, I said. We need the objective.

The deep breath was for two reasons. For one, my theory of the relationship between objective and event was still only a theory; although a few of the other shows were telling their story, I hadn't done any explicit work with them on their objectives. Their success could have been accounted for by other unknown and unnameable factors, so I didn't know for sure that the objective was the best thing to try here. For another, I was unsure that the taxi girl understood her character's story well enough to know what her objective could be anyway; I remembered trying to discuss it before, and what I principally remembered of those discussions was her confusion. Still, with all the mechanics in place, the next step had to be the analysis. First I asked her to tell me her version, then I volunteered my version; as we seemed to agree, I asked her for a potential objective, and I was startled when she immediately suggested a strong and appropriate objective. Let's try it, I said. And click. The scene came to life... up to a point where it came apart, but then I was able to make a quick suggestion in the context of her new understanding, and snap the entire scene not only had energy and purpose, but they began finding humor and fun where I hadn't even known it was supposed to be funny! We tried their second scene and almost immediately wrestled it into shape.

Building on our success, the taxi girl asked me about the play's final scene. It doesn't make sense compared to what we've just done, she said, and she proceeded to explain to me what would make sense instead. I had to agree that yes, what she had in mind was definitely a better ending than what we'd tried before. She nodded triumphantly and, with a little further discussion, convinced me that she had known her story perfectly well, but had been deliberately not performing what she had interpreted because she was trying to do instead what she thought I wanted!

Her statement underscores and validates the point I made early on: if an actor is doing the "wrong" thing, it's because they don't understand their purpose in that scene. Fix the understanding, and you fix the scene. The experience of these two girls, as they turned a weak, lame scene into something energetic and funny, offers a clear example of the fact that they have what they need without my meddling. I coached them to use their natural communication skills, I prompted them to give me useful objectives, and I helped them make specific choices about how to use their skills and their objectives-- and I took away all of my instructions. I took away all my impositions, so all that was left was their natural selves and their own understanding of the show. Ironically, of course, the less I tell them what to do, the more they give me what I want, but it took some confidence and not a little courage for me to reject the "work" I'd done and to trust the natural talents of these two young ladies.

this one is 😉

Aparna, let me get my big cup of coffee and then will sit down and read the stuff you posted. I started reading it. Not only did it stir my curiosity to read further but I realised I would need to do more than skim through it.

So will give my comments later on it.

Coffee making time...⭐️

stage presence workshop bearing and all...

Someone's hosting skills have improved a lot.Haven't watched last week.

Yesterday's episode I caught - He is much better esp with voice modulation and his speaking at right pace

Nice , heavy article for the start of a day on IF...Aparna...😆

Read all of it...

Detailed breaking down of the term "chemistry" as applied in theatrics / acting field.

(This part, I felt I was reading more of an excerpt from The auto biography of a Yogi ...🤓)

A very good...very logical explanation.😃

Balance is all about the a director's and respective cast role in differentiating the two aspects, acting and performing.

How a mutual trust between an actor and a director is extremely important for any scene to work, in addition to their respective understanding of the characters.