Film Courage: Top 3 movies every actor should watch and which performance they should study
(that is, in terms of the acting performance)?
Doesn’t mean the story but whether it’s a film like GLENGARRY GLEN ROSS, whether it’s
NETWORK, just in terms of acting and performances.
Mark W. Travis: Okay.
Top movies and top performances are two different categories.
Film Courage: Okay.
Top performances.
Let me narrow it down.
Mark W. Travis: Top performances, BLUE JASMINE.
Film Courage: Oh, yes!
Mark W. Travis: Cate Blanchett.
To me it was a stunning performance because in terms of the way I work, I think there
are certain actors, when I say actors can’t do this alone, there are some actors who have
these amazing abilities to allow themselves to sink deep into a character.
Cate Blanchett is one of them and BLUE JASMINE’s one of those performances almost regardless
of what you think of the movie.
You just watch her work and the multi-faceted ways because of different timeframes she had
to experience that character.
Another actor Daniel Day-Lewis if you look at his work in LINCOLN or GANGS OF NEW YORK
or something.
He’s another actor who has found a way of dropping himself deeply into a character and
(very quickly) one interview I read about him (not with him), an actress he worked with
him asked him at the end of the movie (because she couldn’t talk to him during
the movie because he was in character all the time), asked him why he spent so much time
and so much energy just to get into a character like that.
And his answer was…he says “I’m not a good enough actor to do it any other way.”
Which I thought was profound.
He sees himself as a very limited actor but he knows what he needs to do to get deep into
that character.
If you watch MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, Casey Affleck’s performance I think is stunning
regardless of his history, his background and the problems that he has, watch that performance
because there’s another actor who has dropped so deeply into the nuances of the characters,
it’s sort of startling.
Meryl Streep will do this frequently…Frequently?
She’s only been nominated 20 times.
But there are certain actors who you watch them and they can literally disappear, you
feel that the character takes on and that’s what we are looking for.
Film Courage: Chameleons?
Mark W. Travis: Chameleons in a way but I see it as…more than a chameleon.
Chameleon is more like I will change myself into something which it is chameleon like
but it is I will release myself, I will give myself over (this is my experience of these
actors) is that they give themselves over and just allow themselves to be in that world
with…in a way…ignoring themselves regardless of what happens to them as an individual,
as an actor.
They have to be that, that’s a total relinquishment to the character.
Film Courage: And if someone were to watch let’s say those performances from those
four or five actors that you mentioned, what about turning down the sound and just seeing
the body language, the reactions, the expressions, the micro-expressions.
Mark W. Travis: Yeah.
Watch them exactly, watch them in detail and watch the movies (which Elsha and I do.
We can have a whole discussion about that), we watch it several times and watch and even
stop and look at and go back and just look at that moment, look at that reaction and
understand that the best performances, that reaction was not planned.
That stunning reaction probably was not planned at all, it just happened.
I remember I was working with an editor that I had worked with on a couple films of mine
(he was showing me a film that I didn’t direct).
There was a scene and a stunning moment in that scene he says “You know that’s the
only time she ever did that?”
And that to me was a key thing, to capture those moments that happen but first of all
the actor has to allow themselves to give that unplanned.
Planned performances are death!
Unplanned performances are where the gold is.
Just go in there and just see what happens.