Imagine you’re sitting in your home, doing something casual, you’re not using much effort or thought. Then there’s a knock at the door.
Who’s knocking at your door?
What do you do?
How does it make you feel?
You’re immediate answer might be something like—
“I don’t know, who is it?”
—and that’s a totally acceptable and not an unexpected answer to such questions. But if I asked you to think about yourself in the moment, in this time, in this place, surely something or someone came to mind as you thought about it, right?
There is no right or wrong answer, the intent is not to prescribe how one should think or react, the intent is to give you context and a space for your own imagination to flourish and flex and invent who or what is knocking at your door. Once you do that you might find that much like a snowball beginning it’s journey down the hill, the momentum of creativity begins to build.
Why is it that person at your door?
Are they here for a reason?
What time of day is it?
How does that person at the door make you feel?
If my suspicion is correct (and it may not be) you are able to answer all or most of these questions with little thought, and in fact the thought that might be holding you back might be, “What’s the correct answer?”
There isn’t one.
Context Is A Catalyst
I have had the pleasure and honor of working with and directing a number of talented actors. I love the collaborative spirit in those exchanges. For the most part, actors want to act and bring ideas to the characters they are playing, filling a script and a story with energy and life. But, as with other collaborative efforts, someone or group of people need to guide that energy so that is fills the space that is needed to be filled, and not spill over into other spaces or require a space to be reshaped entirely to accommodate it. This is where direction and context are essential.
As hopefully seen from the example at the beginning, having context, even a little, gets the creative thoughts going. If I were to guess, many of you imagined a door like I did…
Someone is knocking at the front door of a home, the one I live in now or perhaps the one I spent the most time in growing up. It’s made of wood and has a hollow but harsh sound when someone knocks on it. The door has a handle/knob that must be turned to open it and when opened the door swings on hinges attached to one side.
Most of this description or context didn’t need to be explained ahead of time because most of us probably had the same thoughts, the same image in our heads without it being spoken to directly. This is the natural context, the expected. This is important to keep in mind as a director. It’s easy to assume, and in many cases fine to do so, but there will always be a time when you will have to explain the context in more detail so all parties involved are on the same page.
Where The Magic Happens
The context is now clear, the imagination is cooking, filling in the gaps if there are any, now what? Now we watch the magic happen. As a director your job is not to tell an actor how to act, how to say a line, or how the line should feel. Well, okay in some cases those kinds of descriptions may be necessary, but it shouldn’t be your initial approach. You shouldn’t be giving an actor line reads (when you perform a line of dialog and expect an actor to repeat it exactly how you performed it). You created the space for the actor to play in, and now you let them fill that space with their own unique and creative performance. Their imagination and creativity have the tools to take over. This is where the magic happens.
You will, undoubtedly, have an idea of how something should be performed. Be cautious of these thoughts. We rob ourselves of surprise and delight if our expectations are prescribed beforehand. Sometimes an actor will perform something exactly as you had in your head, and at that point you can celebrate that if you both thought it, it’s likely a very natural performance. But now it has given you the chance to see it from a new perspective and evaluate if it really is the perfect performance.
There will be times when a performance seems so far from what you expected you will question if it is expressing the needed reaction from and audience. You’re first thought may be to go back to the way you thought it should be performed and attempt to prescribe it to the actor. Push these thoughts back again (for now). Instead think about why this performance has gone in a different direction than you expected. Did the actor have enough context? Do they have a clear understanding of the character in the scene and how it fits into the greater story? Consider this first, then work with the actor to see how and why your perspectives are different. This is collaboration and it should, with practice, become an easy conversation to have. Find an understanding, and try again. Work with an actor, not for them and certainly not against them.