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More on the Art of Not Knowing

The First Time

The Art of Not Knowing means experiencing something as if for the first time. You may have memorized a scene and know what is going to happen, but you mustn’t know. You have to experience the scene’s events and dialogue as if for the first time. In a state of Not Knowing, your true emotional responses become stimulated by using the other actor as a catalyst.

I was working with a writer who wanted to see how a few scenes from his new comedy screenplay would work. Brena played the part of the widow who had just returned from a funeral after burying her husband. John played a young man who accompanies her home. The writer considered his play a comedy. He thought this was a really funny scene.

JEREMIAH: Yes, it is a comedy, but stop judging and trust your intuition. You didn’t expect to cry. Did you? Then trust yourself, let us see your pain.

JEREMIAH: Who says? Now let’s look at the scene dramatically. Your husband has just died. That’s a traumatic experience for any wife.

JEREMIAH: That’s correct. But intuitively something deeper is going on. The seduction is on the surface. Underneath is your character’s pain, your loneliness, and fear. Which is exactly what a woman who has been married for several years would feel being with a strange man. What’s going on in your character’s mind? Is she afraid? What is she thinking? “Does he think I’m attractive? Is he going to make the first move or should I? What if he rejects me? He’s handsome. I need someone.” Brena, keep going—trust yourself.

JEREMIAH: Just go with the laughter. Don’t judge.

Again, Brena’s subconscious is leading her in the right direction. The laughter is an escape from pain and depression.

JEREMIAH: Once you have read the material, your subconscious mind knows how you should feel. Your logical mind doesn’t care how you feel and it doesn’t have a clue, because it’s only concerned with logical results. Your subconscious gives creative answers that you don’t expect. Your subconscious—your intuition— gave you your tears. That’s the Art of Not Knowing, Brena. Remember, you just buried your husband. I think you were brilliant. Thank you.

JEREMIAH: So.

JEREMIAH: That’s a fact. But what we are interested in is your feeling for Harry, not what you think about the script. The writer does the thinking, you do the experiencing.

This is a perfect example of the Art of Not Knowing. It is the subconscious leading your performance. Scary isn’t it? That you can read a piece of material once and come up with a performance that surprises you. It’s because, one, you have been acting all your life, so you have a reservoir of emotions and experience stored away in your subconscious. And, two, the subconscious is much more creative than your logical brain. The only problem is access. Not Knowing is one way to touch your subconscious. Not Knowing puts you in danger, heightens your awareness, and stimulates your emotional reservoir. This is what happened to Brena. She let her intuition override her ideas, and the result was a brilliant performance. Her tears gave us insight into her relationship with her dead husband. The laughter on the line, “We just buried your husband,” allowed her to break the heaviness of the situation by laughing, which led her into the seduction of John. That’s the creative process. It happened without her thinking about it. It’s automatic and came from her subconscious, not the logical part of her brain. You could work for days trying to logically construct how to play the scene, yet still not arrive at an answer that will work as creatively as Brena’s did.

In the scene below imagine that you are Susan Sarandon. How would you prepare and what would you plan to do? In the movie White Palace, Susan Sarandon and James Spader are talking. Spader tells her his wife died. (Here and everywhere in this book, actions in parentheses are not script directions. They are what the actors actually did.)

If a lesser actor than Susan Sarandon were preparing for this scene, she would probably try ahead of time to imagine what it would be like to lose a son, and then, in the scene, try to experience the proper painful emotion and attitude of grief. Sarandon obviously did not plan what she should feel or should act. Without opinions and expectations, she took what was written in the script and turned it into a brilliant performance by dealing with the moment and letting her laughter come through. We see her pain, and we believe her. She lets her intuitive response inform her emotion and color her dialogue. Sarandon, being the great film actor that she is, probably hadn’t planned to laugh at that point. She probably did not know beforehand how she was going to react. Her response seemed intuitive, and she went with it.

Don’t Plan What You Expect to Experience

Discovery means becoming aware of something for the first time. The Art of Not Knowing is the art of rediscovery. Not Knowing keeps you from striving for a specific result. Sarandon could have gone directly for cliched sadness, which, happily, she did not. On every take and in every performance, make your experience as if it is happening for the first time.

First Reading of a Scene

On first reading a scene, absorb the material and don’t think up any ideas about how to perform it. When you read it for the first time, read it by rote with an empty mind, which will then open you to the possibility of a variety of experiences. When you completely eliminate preconceived thoughts and ideas, you will perform more effectively on film.

Bad Acting on Film Is the Triumph of Logic

The less you depend on ideas, the stronger your emotional experience. When your intuitive process takes over, it dictates the colors so rapidly that your painting (your performance) is complete before you have time to think or judge. It seems to have just happened. It is choiceless and effortless.

In a scene from the movie Threesome, Lara Flynn Boyle angrily confronts Josh Charles in the hallway. The actors do a good job of relating, not thinking.

Both the pain and the laugh drive her line, “I suspected it.” The laughter is an unexpected response that is real, adds creative color, and gives us insight into Lara’s character. Her acting is brilliant. She realizes that it is not her fault that he is homosexual. At the same time, the tears signify her loss of his love. Remember, the Art of Relating is the basis of film acting. Once you lock onto a result or an idea you’re in trouble, because then it is almost impossible to relate and be responsive to the other actor’s performance.

Forget about History

Only by looking at the world with a child’s eyes can you see what actually exists. To discover your acting partner, look at him as if for the first time, with your mind uncluttered by ideas and logic. The Art of Not Knowing means subconsciously absorbing information from the script and, at the same time, disregarding thoughts and ideas derived from your life. Forget about history, let your intuition tell you what to do, and discover the present moment through being aware of what is happening right here and right now.

Don’t Be Safe

Make every moment count as if it were your last. Not Knowing gives you lots of energy by heightening your awareness, which then adds excitement to your performance. Everything the other actor does is significant, no matter how small. Every twitch of the eyebrow, every movement of the lips, every change in the tone and timbre of the voice. Let whatever it is engender a response inside you. The more acute your awareness, the better your response— and the better you look on film.

Nothing stimulates your awareness like being in danger or jeopardy. Not Knowing does just that. Why do you suppose film editors love to find a scene in which you have “gone up” (forgotten your lines)? Editors like this kind of shot because when you forget your lines, you are no longer acting—you are in danger. You are real. If you don’t do something stupid like looking at the director, and saying, “I’m sorry, can we do that again?”, the editor will have a shot of you that she can use as a reaction shot in this or some other scene. You’d be surprised at how many close shots of actors who have “gone up” are used by editors for reaction shots. When you forget your lines, if you maintain your concentration on the other actor, you look believable and real because you are in danger and your situation is real.

Fear Is Your Friend

Say you are lost on a snowy dark night and you come to an old, spooky farmhouse. A sign says, “Trespassers will be shot.” No answer to your knock. Without shelter, you could freeze to death. It’s life and death. You break the window and crawl in. You try the light switch.

Which is more exciting? You flip the switch and the lights go on. Or, you flip the switch and nothing happens. The longer the lights are out, the keener your senses are to detect what might be there. Rats? Bats? An escaped psycho? A scared farmer with a shotgun? A dead body? It’s scary, but it’s exciting! You are in jeopardy, and because you’re in a state of Not Knowing, your alertness is excruciating.

Once the lights go on, your imagination quits working so hard. The more you know, the fewer feelings of jeopardy and fear you have. Remember, the less you know, the greater the chance for you to have an emotional experience and, consequently, the better your performance.

Every Scene Is Life or Death

Two students are doing a scene. Jesse plays the bartender. Devon plays the detective, who is about to accuse the bartender of complicity in a murder. After a few lines, we can see that the actors are relating but not putting themselves in jeopardy. They’re “phoning it in.”

JEREMIAH: Class, does anyone see anything wrong with this scene?

Several students speculate. Finally Michael speaks up.

JEREMIAH: Right! They don’t have anything at stake. You two guys are having a friendly conversation as if you were on a coffee break. Jesse, you wouldn’t want a detective accusing you of murder would you?

JEREMIAH: Devon, your job is to get a reaction out of Jesse. You are the catalyst in the scene.

JEREMIAH: You have to make every scene a life and death situation. If nothing’s at stake, your audience is bored. Any scene you do has to be the most important thing in your life at the time. Passionately accept the fact that you need information from this bartender. I don’t mean “act.” I mean believe. Accept the circumstances. The more meaningful the situation is to you, the greater the jeopardy. Focus on and respond to the way he reacts to your questions. You don’t know how he’s going to behave—that will keep you in the moment.

JEREMIAH: Devon and Jesse, Great! When you guys accepted the circumstances and put yourself in jeopardy, you created dramatic excitement, and the scene worked. At the end there, we were fascinated.

The Power of Not Knowing

An anthropologist once told me of the intuitive sense of the Eskimos in the days before we destroyed their traditional way of life. In 1922, director Robert Flaherty, the “father” of documentary filmmaking, was shooting Nanook of the North, a famous documentary about Eskimos. Flaherty’s camera malfunctioned several hundred miles from civilization, and a fourteen-year-old Eskimo boy who had never seen a camera fixed it for him. How could he do that? Here’s how:

1. The Eskimo boy was skilled in the Art of Not Knowing and had no preconceived ideas as to how mechanical things did or did not work.
2. He found cameras to be of great interest, which brought about intense concentration.
3. He was not afraid and was willing to take action.
4. The age-old ability of his people to survive successfully in the Arctic wilderness had given him an unshakable confidence in himself.
5. He understood simplicity, and his perceptions were uncomplicated.
6. He was intuitive.

Be an Eskimo

Great film actors all have the same abilities the Eskimos had. They operate from the state of Not Knowing. They enhance awareness through intense Concentration. And they Relate to what they receive from others. These are three of the Five Arts of film acting. They also overcome personal fear, are willing to take necessary action, and are intuitive. These are additional arts of acting.

Acting a Scene before Reading It

Some teachers try to induce a state of Not Knowing by prohibiting students from reading the scene before doing it in class. Occasionally, this results in brilliance. This approach will certainly cause you to respond spontaneously, but only by luck, not creativity. It is not the answer. You have no information. Not reading the script is unreliable. Your subconscious needs information before performance.

Memorizing and Not Knowing

When you read or memorize, put yourself in a state of Not Knowing. Let your subconscious assimilate the information without letting logical ideas lock you into results. Spontaneity is not necessarily creative, but creativity is almost always spontaneous—because creativity in acting comes from your intuition and from relating.

Reading a Scene for the First Time

Here is what I ask of my students before doing a scene in the workshop: read the script to yourself once only. This allows you to experience the material spontaneously. Without the facts, the creative process cannot always come up with answers that will work for you. Subconsciously absorb the information, but don’t start planning how you are going to act. For the Art of Not Knowing to take place, read the script by rote. Absorb and then forget what you have read. Rote reading keeps you from implanting ideas in your conscious mind. While you are reading the script for the first time, don’t put feeling or interpretation into the lines. But if you should have a feeling, acknowledge it and don’t fight it. Put the script down until the emotion subsides.

Here’s what may happen if you allow an emotion to develop fully during your first reading. If you become infused with sadness, you are having the experience before you start acting. Then when you work in class, the experience has changed. It is weaker or has vanished altogether. If you read comic material and laugh, it dissipates your potential acting experience.

In both situations, stop reading until the emotions dissipate. Then finish reading. It is exciting to read a script that engenders feelings. But protect the creative process by curtailing your emotions before your performance. When you are acting, disregard all your previous feelings so you can experience the dialogue as if for the first time.

Repeating an Emotional Experience

The craft of being a stage actor is learning how to repeat experiences night after night while remaining fresh and spontaneous. In film acting, it is necessary to give a good performance only once. On film, the scene becomes permanent. The director may shoot additional takes, but the good directors do not want repetition—they expect something different and hope for something better. In editing, the director and the editor choose the performance the audience will see in the completed film.

Experience every moment for the first time. Your emotion can even go in a different direction: you might cry on take One, cry and laugh on take Two, cry and get angry on take Three. This diversity gives the director and editor choices. Even when you are overwhelmed by an emotion such as sadness, the good director expects additional takes of your scene to vary. If you repeat each experience exactly the same way, the director and the audience see that your performance is being controlled by you instead of being controlled, as it should be, by both the situation and the other actors.

In Waking Ned Devine the actors are trying to manipulate the dead man’s face into a smile when his false teeth fall out and drop onto the bed. Both actors respond with unplanned laughter. Whether the teeth falling out was planned or unplanned—it could have been either—doesn’t make any difference. We see their reaction. Both actors deal with the situation brilliantly. It becomes a true and spontaneous moment.

Discover Facts by Concentrating on the Other Actor

As you play the scene, your job is to discover what the facts of the script mean by concentrating on your partner—the intonations of her voice, and her physical and emotional experiences. This is the Art of Concentration. When you discover the facts from your partner, you will then be relating and in the moment, and you will give a good performance.

An Emotion Can Become an Idea

Marsha, a good actress, is doing an emotional scene (written by Barbara Bowen) with Daniel, who plays her husband.

It is obvious to me that Marsha has obligated herself to the emotional content of the scene. She is feeling sad but isn’t experiencing her tears. Her idea is stifling her believability.

JEREMIAH: Marsha, this material is very leading, and instead of being open to an experience, you are anticipating tears.

JEREMIAH: Your expecting to cry turns into an idea, not an experience. I want you to do the last page again. This time I want you to laugh.

I ask her to laugh in contradiction to the experience she thinks should happen because I want her to separate the logic of the idea from her actual experience. She and Daniel do the scene again, forcing laughter through the entire scene.

JEREMIAH: Now do the scene from the top.

Keep Your Emotional Responses from Becoming Ideas

Say you are doing a scene in a film. You have an experience and cry on the first take. The director customarily shoots scenes more than once. Don’t expect to cry on every take. When you think, “I hope it happens … It’s close … I can feel the tears,” you lose contact with the other actor and become self-absorbed. When tears or any emotion become more important than the other actor, the emotion becomes an idea, not an experience, and it looks fake on film.

Judgments Ruin Your Acting

A judgment is a comment, spoken or unspoken, about yourself, the script, or other actors. When you first read a script, a light bulb may go on. You like or don’t like the dialogue. The words suggest an image, a situation, an emphasis. Anything you think, no matter how small, is an idea and a mental comment. You can’t completely avoid commenting, but you can reduce its effect on your performance. Acknowledge your comments, accept them, and let them pass. If you try to block them, they will only grow in importance.

Don’t Indulge in Self-Criticism

Wanting to be brilliant creates demands. Concentrate on the work, not the results. Be content that you are doing your best, and don’t be swayed by internal or external opinions. Stop considering your acting as good or bad. Is the glass half empty or half full? Remember, you decide how to look at the glass. Lose the concepts of good and bad, right and wrong.

A Genuine Experience

Anna, a student who had never acted before, was doing a scene with Fred, one of my experienced actors. She started off not looking at him. I had her focus her concentration on Fred, and I told her to forget about anything she thought she should do. Anna’s performance immediately improved. (The scene was written by Barbara Bowen.)

JEREMIAH: Great! (to class) How could Anna turn in a creative performance like that without knowing anything about how to act? First, she had no idea that she would have an experience in the scene—Not Knowing. Second, she Concentrated on and Related to Fred. The other thing she did was Accept him and the imaginary situation of being pregnant. And she accepted Fred’s response when he cried, which surprised and overwhelmed her. She responded to his emotion, which is Giving and Receiving. Through Not Knowing, she had a genuine experience.

Summary

1. Practice the Art of Not Knowing. Use the beginner’s mind to minimize all ideas from the script and personal ideas such as opinions, beliefs, generalizations or stereotyping, and judgments. Respond to the unexpected.
2. Before performance:
   1. Read the script once only. Absorb and forget.
   2. Do not comment on the script.
   3. Memorize the script by rote without having ideas or emotional experiences.
   4. Place no demands on your performance. Do not judge it as good or bad.
   5. Don’t let your emotions become ideas.
   6. Place your concentration on your partner.
   7. Look on every moment as if it were your last (jeopardy).

Actor Practice

We generally assume that by knowing the name of an object, we know that object. But knowing a name is not enough, because we only know something through actual experience. Not Knowing means experiencing all the many aspects of something with an open mind free of preconceptions.

1. Put four drinking glasses on a table. While you are out of the room, have a friend pour a different brand of cola soft drink in each glass. Then come back in the room and, by tasting, try to identify the brand of cola in each glass. You are now in a state of Not Knowing. There are no labels, just cola. What does each glass have in common? Use all your senses—taste, smell, feel, hearing. Are the bubbles different? Stickiness? Viscosity? What are the differences? Make your decisions based on your experience of each drink. Add a little jeopardy by knowing that you are to be executed at dawn if you do not identify the drinks correctly.
2. Fill a glass with water from the kitchen sink. Look at it. Is it clear or cloudy? Does it have anything in it like, dirt, particles, or bubbles? Is it warm or cold? Does it smell? How does it taste? It seems that only when water has a strange taste do we notice it. Now take a mouth full and move it around with your tongue. Is it wet? What is wet? A symbol meaning what? Not dry? What is dry? Language conveniently keeps us from discovering the experience.

   Now you are experiencing the water, not just drinking it. Become aware of water. In our fast-paced society we absorb with little or no experiencing. We need to slow down, stop, and start discovering the essence of everything. The Art of Not Knowing means to discover by using all your senses—taste, smell, touch, hearing, and seeing. It also means rediscovering and reexperiencing everything, not as an intellectual exercise, but as a reawakening of your senses to the magic of this world. That’s what great actors do.

3. Get videotapes of the films I have referred to—not only in this chapter, but in the whole book—and view them, especially the scenes I discuss.