Acting, and the art of playing against expectation

Acting is an art form that I am familiar with, but not very good at. I did theater acting in high school, along with everyone else and their mother, and that is about all he experience that I have in terms of doing it. That being said, it is something that, as a film maker, I surround myself with. As a result, when given the opportunity I love to learn as much as I can about it, so I can then better be able to direct the action in a film. I do this by either taking acting classes, talking with actors, or just sitting in on different types of acting classes or workshops.

One of the most interesting times that I sat in on a workshop was with an actor named Chazz Palminteri. He was teaching an acting class on how to audition. He said a lot of the very basic things about confidence and not caring what the casting people say or think, just giving the best performance you can give either way. The one thing that really struck me though, was when he had the actors play against their lines. This is when an actor reads the opposite emotion that you get from the lines. If the scene is a very sad scene, he told them to play it happily. Then, he told them to let the sadness seep in through the cracks. This created an incredibly powerful, and much more dynamic scene. All of a sudden, it became so much more sad watching an actor try and stay happy even through an incredibly sad moment.

This really made me think about film as an art form. One of the things that makes film, itself, so powerful is its subtleties. Much like when the emotion seeps through the cracks, when the metaphor seeps through the plot, those moments are what make the film so great. Any good film, if you ask me, should hinge on the plot to keep an audience interested, but hit hard with the things that they audience might not notice. While they might not explicitly see it, the fact that the filmmaker thought about those things will show, and people will be able to find the metaphor that they have hidden in the plot.