FREE ACTING LESSON: Introduction to Acting

okay so today we're going to talk a little bit about what acting is I think that there's a lot of um uh confusion about exactly what it is when we when we what we do when we actually act if you were to uh ask somebody who is there um favorite actor and they may say something to you like Robert dairo or Anthony Hopkins or Susan sandon and um I think the next question would be well why why what makes them so good why are they good uh and most people can't actually even answer that question they just say they're good they're just good and so what what makes an actor a great actor is not the ability to get up on stage and perform something uh I think that one of the biggest uh mistakes is calling acting acting or performing because it implies that we need to get up on stage and actually do something and the idea of acting is is for you to have the ability to actually create another person so in order for you to be another person you have to give the mechanism and use the mechanism of a human being when you act so our job as actors is to be able to duplicate human behavior so we first have to understand how it is that people uh interact with each other so the first thing I can tell you is the idea of getting up and Performing something is not what I do in life I never get up and I say okay Brad put your hand here Brad make sure that you speak out there this way and that's uh that's to me what you would say what a robot does you'll frequently hear people say oh that actor looks like a robot and the reason that they say this is because it's almost like they have a chip in the back of their brain saying move hand out and it happens in a mill second acting is the ability to receive another person with your eyes and with your ears it's the ability to take something in and use it to cause you to do what you do because if you really think about it who's causing you to look at your computer right now this is going to sound ego maniacal but it's me I'm the one who's causing you to look at your computer and guess what you're causing me to look at you or the camera so everything outside of me is causing me to do what I do and I think once we understand that once we grasp that that acting is about what's outside of us not what we're actually doing uh uh performing once we understand that there's a freedom that happens I can remember when I finally grasped this concept there's this huge responsibility that went off of me having to perform and suddenly once I grasp the idea that acting is the ability to receive and take something in which causes me in turn to do something I felt this sort of Freedom so the question is going to be how do we actually get this behavior in our body so that when we let go and we receive each other something is going on so there's many people who will say to you uh uh they use different techniques and there's many uh schools of thought about how to uh get our body familiar with emotion or what's going on in our head our objective meaning what we're thinking about uh but there are many people out there who are acting and in order to actually perform they are using their own personal experiences in order to act so for example if I had to be angry in a scene I would start thinking about uh something that makes me Brad angry unfortunately due to uh your mental health and stability I don't believe that this is a very good way to work I remember uh one child I I was teaching said to me that her acting teacher told her in order to cry to think of her dog being injected with a thousand needles and you know me personally I can't even think about that as an adult I don't want to I want to have a way to work that's fun because if you really think about it if acting was supposed to be this how would it have lasted thousands of years it happened with the Greeks and then it it's it's gone for thousands of years and I can I can guarantee you that when these people were acting hundreds or thousands of years ago in order to act they were not thinking of some kind of personal experience of their own life in order to act so how do we do it well the person who taught me acting was a guy by the name of Don Richardson and he wrote this great book and it's called acting without Agony an alternative to the method and uh I loved the title because I uh at one point when I was acting found acting to no longer be fun it just wasn't fun for me anymore to become overly confusing complex and traumatic so Don Richardson what he did is he created this technique and this was not some sort of Fly by Night Professor this was a guy who was a very renowned film director and acting uh Guru in a sense he directed many of the shows that I watched when I was a kid he directed Lost in Space and get smart and one day at a time and Bonanza and so hearing that this guy was actually directing these shows and when I studied with him I found out not only was he directing these shows but frequently he was given actors who didn't know how to act so he had to teach them quickly right on set how to act so if he was using this technique which required me to think of some kind of personal experience how can you come up with that experience and know that it's going to be reliable you can't in my opinion so what Don did is he was a member of what was called the group Theater which was sort of the nucleus of theater many years ago and there were there were fellow students like Stella Adler and UDA hogin and and sford Meisner and Don Richardson was one of these people and the greatest thing about what Dawn did is he was the one that realized that in order to act we don't have to go through therapy so he kind of segwayed off onto his own path and decided that he was going to create a technique that was taught to him by a gentleman by the name of Charles jelinger and use the tools he got from jelinger to come up with a technique and use that was fun and jelinger also had this technique too by the way and he taught people like Kirk Douglas Don Richardson taught people like Grace Kelly amazing actors icons of acting so how do we do this well there are two main tools that we use when we act okay so the first thing that we got to do when we Act is we got to think about what's going on in our brain and the second thing is we got to think about what's going on in our body what's going on in our brain is called an objective what is an objective an objective is what a character needs and what a character wants so right now for example my objective is to teach you or to make you understand now the difference between life and acting is very interesting this is something that Don Richardson taught me is that in life if you watch people if I was to say just go watch some people on the C at a coffee shop uh they can think anything they want they can think about what they got to do later they can think about you know who they're talking to and what happens is if I start to watch these people that starts to get confusing because we don't know what story we're watching so what Don had said is when we're acting we got to pick one story and one story only and that's it this story for example is the story of the teacher teaching the pupils and that's it now in life I could come up here and maybe I'm teaching you and then maybe start thinking about what I got to do later and uh maybe I just sort of let my mind wander over here and think about that light now I mean if the audience was watching this they'd be completely confused because they think this teacher is horrible what's wrong with him and that's not the story the story is hopefully the teacher who's good teaching the students and the objective is what keeps us focused in the scene so for example like I said my objective is to teach you and the way an objective works is it's a controlled Obsession so an objective would be as I said to teach and how does it work well what we do is we pick this subjective for the scene we read the scene we interpret the scene and then we say okay what is this character what should this character be thinking about in the scene in order to make it work so as I said if this was a scene this my objective would be to teach you so the way we play the objective is we start thinking these words of the objective over and over and over in our brain and what happens is these words to teach you to teach you to teach you to teach you they start to sort of meld into not so much words anymore but just me doing it and that's what I'm doing now I'm not consciously thinking the words to teach you I'm just doing it how does that happen well the way that happens is based on the foundation of not only this acting technique but everything in life that involves any kind of performance which is muscle memory so let's talk about the second tool we talked first about objective that's a controlled Obsession that we're thinking over over and over in our brain the second part of the technique is called the emotion that's what we're feeling in our body okay now for example if I say to you uh let me just first write this down Okay so this would be called emotion okay so this is a pretty incredible thing that uh Don Richardson taught me that we if I say to somebody I need you to be angry in this scene we don't have to think of any personal experience in order to be angry I don't have to say okay I got to think about that time that that person uh stole my bike uh now there's so many reasons why this doesn't work I mean first of all I'm not playing Brad in the scene and there's no bike and nobody stole it so it's kind of like putting a a different piece of a puzzle into another puzzle and it doesn't fit now the audience frequently may not know what's going on when they watch the scene but I'm playing the scene of somebody stole my bike in a scene where I'm actually breaking up with my girlfriend and as if the audience is not going to follow this especially think about this concept Don Richardson even said to me one time he said many times actually that the audience doesn't listen to what you say they don't listen to the words it's all about the behavior underneath the scene so if the audience is not listening to what what you're saying and I think if you really don't believe me this is why movies like Transformers are Billion dooll Hits because it's big explosions and and fun lasers and all of this stuff uh or uh because people don't listen to the dialogue now if you actually listen to some of the dialogue I'm not sure you'd be so crazy about the film maybe depending on your taste but in order to actually pull off a scene successfully you have to have the correct Behavior so if we do not have the correct behavior and I'm playing this guy who's breaking up with his girlfriend and I'm thinking about the time in order to get into the scene correctly I'm thinking about that person who stole my bike so I break up with my girlfriend you know what honey this isn't working out okay all right now if I do it that way does it really look like I even give a crap about my girlfriend I'm treating my girlfriend like it's a bike that got stolen you don't think the audience is going to figure this out of course they do so one of two things is going to happen either a they're going to hate me because they're going to think I'm an insensitive person to my girlfriend because because in my head I'm thinking about you know that time that somebody told stole my bike or be they're going to think I'm a bad actor so how do we actually evoke emotion in our body so we can't do it by as I said effectively and reliably in a way by thinking of some personal history thing the amazing thing is that we can actually feel emotion by saying the name of it so for example if I say the word Joy I feel a little tingle that goes off in my chest and it makes me smile so go ahead and try that out there in cyber land just say the word joy and you'd be lying to me if you told me that you didn't feel a little tingle go off in your body all right so try saying this and there's the amazing thing about emotion is it's like a keyboard say the word anxiety anxiety I feel another little tingle go off in my chest or my stomach disbelief I feel something in the back of my brain now that's not going to be enough to carry me through a scene but it's the nucleus it's the kernel that the emotion starts from so we've already established that I can feel something from actually saying the name of the emotion and that's not as I said that's not going to be enough to carry me through the scene so how do we make the emotion big and intense like if if for example coming back to this thing where I'm breaking up with my girlfriend and let's say it's a woman that I've been living with for 10 years and I'm trying to say goodbye and I'm really nervous so how am I going to bring out the emotion necessary for the audience to actually believe that I care about this woman well if I just say the word anxiety I feel a little tingled but that's not going to be enough to sort of make the audience believe that I care about this woman so we have to tap into the second part of evoking emotion in our body now here's the interesting thing no matter what emotion that you're feeling if it's Joy or anger or disbelief physiologically we always have the same thing go on in our body our muscles start to tense up we get a little bit lightheaded our heart starts to race we sweat if you think about it think about the times that you were the most angry the most happy and the most nervous and if you think about what's I'm not talking about the feeling I'm talking about what's physiologically happening in your body it's always the same so what we do in order to evoke emotion in our body is by saying the name of the emotion anxiety and coupling that with a breathing exercise to get our body to a state when we're filled with a lot of emotion so that we are light-headed so that we are a little bit dizzy so that we are uh having our muscles tense up so how do we do that well the feeling that you actually have when you evoke emotion that physiological experience is going to be the same feeling that you have as when you exercise so what Don Richardson taught us is a way to evoke a tremendous amount of emotion by doing a breathing exercise now keep in mind this exercise is the preparation phase of acting I'm not asking you to do some weird breathing exercise in your you're scene when you actually execute it this is the same exact thing as me learning the forehand or how to hit in a boxing uh in a boxing ring so uh how do we do this so first for example I'm going to use the emotion anxiety so I say anxiety right here anxiety and I feel a little tingle in my stomach anxiety and what we do next is we take a big breath in and a big breath out and we say the word anxiety and we do that number number of times until we actually get a little bit laded and it's believe me people are going to think you're weird I mean that's that's just a fact but if you actually do it and I'm going to show you uh one of my students do this in a moment when you actually do this and you do this breathing exercise you will get to a state where you're very light-headed and a little bit uh sweaty and that's when you start your scene so then you start your scene lightheaded now if I'm breaking up with this girl who I've been dating for 10 years and living with if I'm not lightheaded there's something wrong with me I'm on valume or something so I have to have that light-headed quality in order for the because the audience knows what a real person is like they know what it's like to watch somebody break up or they've broken up with somebody before so if I'm flat if I'm devoid of intensity in my body the audience will not buy it I have to bring that to the table