When you get started in acting, it is difficult to know who to listen too. Luckily there are lots of talented actors willing to share their experiences. Many years of acting experience have shown me who is worth listening too. Uta Hagen provides acting instruction in her book Respect for Acting. I’ve been acting for ten years and I can shed some light on the poor information.
An especially poor acting tip is how to commit lines to memory. As an actor, your focus should not be memorizing dialogue. You should focus on why the character is speaking the lines. What are the characters goals? What is he feeling when he is speaking? How does he respond to other characters? The audition process is not about finding the person who can memorize lines. You want to rehearse with the script. But no director will scold you for improvising some of the lines. What is important is how well you can act. How well you remember the script is not important. Actress Jessica Alba said in Elle Magazine December 2010 issue “Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.” That demonstrates how often professional actors stray from the script.
Related articles
- How to Become an Actor (answers.com)
- Uta Hagen’s “Nine Questions” (gointothestory.blcklst.com)
I must be clear that Improvisation is different from “Improv” in just about every way. In Improv the object is to come up with clever and provocative things to say and do. Curiously, the fundamentals are the same; you listen, take personally what is said and done, then freely respond; but in Improv your responses come from your thinking. In improvisation your responses come from your instincts. You use improvisation to discover that which is missing emotionally, experiencially, and find your personal artistic way to fill it in. Now it becomes obvious that without learning the fundamentals, Scene Work is impossible. Working improvisationally means working freely with the text in the beginning, even putting it in your own words, understanding what you’re talking about, being emotionally engaged, and discovering how you feel in the given circumstance. As you rehearse the scene, you progressively tighten up the text so that in three or four improvisations you know your lines, you know how you feel about the situation generally, and will have discovered something personally meaningful in it. This gives you a way to do the scene that is both artistically interpretive and instinctual. Take any scene through this process, before an audition or acting assignment, and your work will reflect a serious effort on your part. That’s the approach to preparation for your auditions. Your improvisations are cumulative. After a few years of working this way you’ll find that when you pick up a script for the first time you already have a feel for what’s going on in the scene. After six or eight years you won’t need the improvisation any more. You will have “learned” yourself and the whole of your acting will reside in your instincts and talent. Just like any occupation the more you do it the better you get.