To read or not to read in Audition
When US casting director Tom McSweeney first visited our fair Australasian shores, he was amazed that actors were expected to memorise their lines for auditions. In LA, where he came from, reading, and reading at short notice, was the norm. Tom believes that, after a cursory read-through, a good actor can pick up a scene and make good sense of it in a reading. He put this assertion to a cast of NZ Equity members attending a recent weekend workshop, and then went on to prove his point in practice. It led Jennifer Ward-Leyland, president of NZ Equity, to suggest we institute a “revolution” of reading instead of memorising for auditions in New Zealand. All of the assembled actors were vocal in agreement
The last few summers I have been doing a number of tests for US pilots and in many of these I’ve been “reading” – that is, having the script in my hand. I have to say that after almost 20 years in a working environment where I learned lines for an audition, I prefer the cold-ish read. Not only have the results been satisfactory, I’ve found myself enjoying the audition more. I’m not worrying about lines – and I’m consequently more relaxed – but more unexpectedly I’ve found I hardly need to look at the script, even when I’ve only read the scene a handful of times. Just knowing you have your lines in your hand takes the pressure off and the lines tend to largely sink in on their own.
As they do it all the time American actors are rather good at the art of reading for audition, lifting the words off the page with a glance and working up a performance in short order. At any rate, the script is often out of shot and hardly detectable on film. The attitude implied by the practice is more improvisational; that the actors are there to give their take on the material, rather than a precise interpretation of it.
Perhaps our practice in Australia and New Zealand – of learning lines has evolved because on average we do less auditions and tests than an LA actor. Perhaps, because there are so many more actors in LA, their system has evolved to make the auditioning process faster and allow more actors to be seen. While learning lines is time consuming for the actor, from the casting director’s point of view it is a test, I suppose, of grace under pressure: can they keep their head, remember their lines and still deliver a result?
Against this the atmosphere on any set worth its salt is less reverent and looser about the whole lines “thingo” than in any audition room. We all know that the danger, when we hammer in lines, that we unwittingly cement in a way of saying them. This is the exact opposite of the flexibility and openness to change you want in an audition room or on set.
Yes, we have to know our lines. But in practice actors have their “sides” in their hands usually right through the initial read and blocking. This isn’t laziness, it’s because many good actors are still working out their performance at this stage. The whole scene doesn’t start to come together till the cameras roll, so it doesn’t have a chance to go stale. The knack of acting for camera, and particularly TV acting (where there are so many lines to learn), is to not learn the lines and performance too well, or be too secure. Rather, to be wholly in the moment, letting it all come together in the performance.
It seems to me that in audition the more relaxed LA style, which measures at least to some degree the improvisational quality of the actor, might be a better judge of performance for screen than our current “possum in the headlights” approach, which seems to be about testing memory as much as performance.
I suppose casting directors in New Zealand and Australia have come to expect line fluency from actors, given we have less tests to do than American actors. But it’s not just a time factor. Countless times on DVD extras I’ve seen top US actors testing with script in hand. It’s just a style that the Americans prefer (heck, like us, it’s probably just the way they have always done it). Anyway, it’s not like actors here aren’t busy just because we don’t test three times a day. We’re still rushing from voiceovers to auditions and back to rehearsal (or home again to change nappies in my case); doing all the things we need to do to survive as actors.
If we did change the way we do things in audition rooms we’d have to accept shorter notice for auditions as part of the deal; down from the current 72 hours to 24 perhaps, with the option to be sprung a different part to read for on the day. There would be much more flexibility in the whole casting process. Casting directors could see more actors, which, with shrinking casting budgets, could only be to their advantage.
While most of us would, I suspect, relish not having to expend time on line learning, for a job we probably won’t get, some of us might dislike having less time to prepare for an audition. Actors might find cold reading a challenge at first. And of course some actors – a surprising percentage of us are dyslexic, as it turns out – will have to carry on memorizing no matter what. This aside, you’d be hard put to convince some actors that too much time to prepare – and perhaps over-prepare – is a bad thing for TV and film acting. But having spent some time as a casting director and reader I can tell you: those loose, relaxed, off the cuff takes are always the ones on the money. Ask Harry Sinclair, NZ film director of Topless Women talk about their lives, Price of Milk and Toy Love (I appeared in the latter). He made a virtue out of improvisation by handing out the day’s scenes in the make-up chair. Initially, this scared me half to death. Yet somehow, by the time it came to the first set up, you had the lines in your head. And a less affected performance too.
Given that auditions are in essence a lottery, and that most of us have to do many of them to get one job, changing the rules might bring the benefit that we can focus more on simply enjoying the experience and spend our prep time bringing our interpretative skills to the party, rather than just drilling-in lines.
What would happen if we turned up to auditions with a hard copy of the audition scenes in our hand? Anyone for a quiet revolution?
This article first appeared in the MEAA magazine in 2011
That tricky darn emotion!
It’s true that often-times we feel the obligation to emote very strongly – and we must rise to the occasion if the script’s big print tells us something like: ‘Bill bursts into tears.’ But anything that over-stimulates the actor’s inner censor is bad news. And apart from this there is the fact that when an actor is enjoying an emotion through a scene they may feel great but the performance may well be rubbish. Feeling something is no guarantee of quality of result. Which is why we need directors – they get us back on track.
Even so, through years of correction, some actors will still persist in putting feeling first in their acting. It’s a tough trap to crawl out of. I’ll never forget Cecily Berry’s tirade to some hapless actor in a master-class guilty of this (in her view) cardinal sin. Something similar pops up in one of her books and it’s worth quoting in full: “You must get rid of all the rubbish! By that I mean you have to constantly pare away all unnecessary coloring and tension and the paraphernalia which you feel you need to convince an audience and which, in fact, gets in the way of direct communication. I am sure that one of the actor’s greatest concerns is the fear of not feeling enough and, therefore, of not being interesting enough. The greater the emotion in the part the more he tries to convince the audience of his feeling and so ceases to be specific. You know that this often occurs but it is difficult to trust yourself. You must believe you have a right to be there.”
In a class with American Broadway director Bob Benedetti he once demonstrated to us his take on the place of emotion. At the end of a scene he asked the actors – how did that feel? Great, said the actors. That, Bob pronounced, is the place of emotion in acting.
Sometimes I think you can take this stiff upper lip attitude to emotion a bit too far, as if feeling anything in acting might be some kind of failure. In fact emotion, real human ever changing emotion, is at the heart of what we do. The words in any scene are just our starting point for investigation, clues as to what the writer’s intent might be – a springboard to discovering the real life underneath the words, what the characters are really thinking and feeling – which is often at variance to what they are actually saying. This is what interests any viewer: not what we are saying, but what is REALLY going on. Yet the emotion has to happen as a result of the playing. Emotion needs to be put in its proper place, the place it holds in real life: as a by-product of the playing, the result of what we do – not the thing to go for in the playing itself.
The buzz that we can find in our acting is, like Benedetti says, not emotion as such, but feeling great because we are living in the moment. In performance, when we act well, we are fully alive. We are sensorially more activated than at any other time. Our left and right brains, our conscious and creative sides, are working together. As you play you are discovering insights and seeing moments unveil themselves in ways miraculously in line with the requirements of the scene – all the while meeting the necessary technical requirements, such as hitting your mark or staying in your light – all simultaneously. Actors that get hooked on that other fix – emotion – may not actually be fulfilling their (usually quite simple) obligations to the scene. They are certainly missing out on a better creative buzz than they could have imagined.