11

The Senses

See through Untainted Eyes

As Abdullah Idrissi says, “The seller of horses who seeks success wears dark glasses and loose robes to conceal what his eyes and body are saying.” Since actors don’t usually wear dark glasses and loose robes, you can easily see what they say with their eyes and bodies. See your fellow actors undistorted by preconceived ideas, because preconceptions turn your attention to yourself and prevent you from performing well. See everyone and everything as if for the first time, with enchantment and through untainted eyes.

In this next workshop scene, Angie, who is bright and attractive with short red hair, is in my workshop for the first time. She has played a small role in a feature film and has been in two TV commercials. In this scene, she is interviewing for a job as an airline pilot trainee. James, the man interviewing her, is tall, easy-going, and relaxed, but the script says he is bored and tired. Angie accepts this idea and doesn’t see and hear that James’s eyes, voice, and body are telling her something completely different.

JEREMIAH: Angie, what is James feeling?

JEREMIAH: Not even close. (to the group) Angie is projecting an idea from the script onto James rather than seeing his real feelings. Angie, look at him. Is he feeling sadness, happiness, anger, fear, love?

JEREMIAH: Good, you see him. Now, respond to what you see.

JEREMIAH: That’s an idea. I don’t see a guy who’s bored. Look at him. You didn’t see or listen to what was right in front of you, so you dealt with him as if he were bored, and you gave a performance we didn’t believe. I don’t care what the script says, the only thing you have to deal with is James as he is at the moment. Now, do it again. Forget the ideas. Look at him. Deal with James as he is, not as you decided he would be.

When Angie did the scene again, dealing with James’s real feelings rather than with what she had decided they were, she gave us an interesting and believable performance. You cannot know what another human being is thinking, only what he is feeling. “Why” he feels as he does is not important. “Why” causes judgment. When you guess at or examine the reason behind an actor’s emotion, you become involved in thinking, not seeing or relating. The other actor’s reasons for being sad, angry, fearful, laughing, or loving have little or nothing to do with your response. His emotional state at the moment has everything to do with your response. You can see what another actor is feeling, but you’re not a mind reader, and you can’t know what he is thinking. Don’t even try. Just look and listen, and your responses will be appropriate.

Eyes and facial expressions give you insight into emotions. Right at the beginning of a scene, I try to get you to visually identify what the other actor is feeling, without interference from personal judgment or script interpretation. Bad acting happens when you project your ideas onto the other actor.

An actor’s eyes, facial expressions, and voice tell you the most about his emotions. His body language gives you a lot of information. What are his mannerisms? Everything he does is related in some way to his feelings. How does he touch himself? Is he tapping his finger, his foot? How does he cross his arms? Is his posture defensive or aggressive? How does he walk, talk, run, take a drink, eat, light a cigarette, read, write, open a door? His body language comes directly from his emotional state. But you have to see it.

Several popular books on “body language” try to show that a particular body state or movement indicates a specific mental, emotional, or psychological state. Avoid these “idea” books. They are superficial adulterations of the anthropologist Edward T. Hall’s scientific study of nonverbal communication, and they can lead you into what Stanislavsky called mechanical acting. In your work, reading body language is much more than just your mechanically correlating a body position with a state of mind. It is seeing and hearing everything the other actor does and says, and being open to what he is feeling relative to you and to the given circumstances. Acting is not—and neither is life—a list in which you match one term against another to come up with the proper way to conduct yourself.

The Abilities

Seeing, listening, and touching stimulate intuitive responses when you take in what the other actor says and does. Although hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting tell you a lot about another person, your eyes reveal the most. You can grasp a huge amount of information in one glance. So don’t cripple your keen visual sense by categorizing and stereotyping and deciding ahead of time how you are going to respond. See everything as a child does, with simplicity, and discover the world as it truly is, not as you expected it or planned it to be.

In the next scene, Ellen, an attractive, athletic girl with the self-assurance of a good athlete, plays an ice skating instructor who is giving skating lessons to John, a handsome and rugged novice skater.

JEREMIAH: Stay in the scene, John. Don’t look at me. Look at her.

JEREMIAH: Why she’s crying is not important. What’s important is that she is crying. Don’t try to figure out why. Just see her tears and deal with that. Ellen, your intuitive response was marvelous when you told him about the skater’s fall.

JEREMIAH: We’re all sorry, Ellen. No, come to workshop. It’s a safe place to let out emotions. (to the group) Here in the workshop and on film, we wouldn’t know why Ellen is crying. We assume it’s because of her empathy for the skater who got hurt. But we don’t know what she’s thinking when she’s crying. We can see what she’s feeling. She’s sad. Deal with the sadness, John. Don’t take yourself out of a scene by trying to figure out why she’s sad.

Don’t take your gift of sight for granted. When you see clearly, your acting will become more intuitive. Remember, become enchanted with and enjoy the unique qualities every human being has to offer.

The Maestro’s Ears

Great actors are sensitive to the slightest variation in the other actor’s tone. Train yourself to hear every line as if you are hearing it for the very first time. The maestro of a symphony orchestra can detect a single incorrect note played in a hundred-piece orchestra. Develop your hearing so you can detect the emotional meaning—not rational meaning—behind every vocal intonation and nuance. How do you develop your hearing? By practicing the Art of Concentration, through focused concentration on the other actor. The other actor’s tonal variations and his way of speaking reveal his emotional state. Using this information, your intuition will give you the right choices for your responses.

How to Listen

Why do we stop listening to our girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, wives, parents, friends, children? Why do we constantly talk about our problems but feel that nobody is paying attention? Probably because they aren’t. Everyone is too busy, overworked, and self-absorbed. Many of us have forgotten the art of listening. We are so assaulted by information, language, and advertisements that we tune out. We are not only oblivious to the meaning of the words, we are oblivious to the emotions behind them.

Hear everything. True listening improves your awareness. If you were to participate in a mixing session for a movie, you would see how many sounds go into a single scene, sounds you hear all the time but of which you’re not consciously aware. It’s not unusual for a scene to have twenty or more sound tracks, with a single different sound on each track—dialogue, footsteps, car alarms, clothing rustling, laughter, music, people talking, doors opening and closing, dogs barking, traffic noise, sounds of nature—all taking place at the same time. When all the sounds are mixed together at the proper volume, the result is plain old real-life sound. In an ordinary room, listen for the sounds that most people would never hear simply because they are not listening.

Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen master, gives perfect advice for actors: try to stop thinking when you listen to someone. Forget what you want to say, and just listen, because if you have an idea and are trying to respond to what someone says, you won’t hear everything. Your understanding will be one-sided. When you listen, be completely involved. Usually when you listen to a person say something, you hear it as a kind of echo of yourself. You are actually listening to your own opinion. If the statement agrees with your opinion, you accept it. But if it does not, you will reject it, and you may not even really hear it. Do not be caught by this or by taking what the person says only as a statement without understanding the spirit behind the words.

Just listen. When you listen to the other actor, forget all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions. What is right and wrong is mostly irrelevant. The meaning of the words is never as important as the emotion behind them. Listen to how the other actor feels about what she says. Don’t judge! Even when the literal meaning of the words contradicts her feelings, go with the feelings. Your experience will come from listening to her experience and seeing her emotions. You want your subconscious mind to assimilate this input and then react emotionally and intuitively.

In the following scene, Janet, tall and sun-tanned, is open and aware. Rob, a beginning actor, is pleasant and good-looking. He is seriously concerned with the directions in the script and what they tell him to do.

JEREMIAH: Rob, what did she just do?

JEREMIAH: I mean, she just did something. Do you know what she did?

JEREMIAH: She laughed. You didn’t hear her, and you didn’t see her. You weren’t doing a scene with her, you were doing a scene with the script. I want you to look at Janet when she’s talking. Don’t take your eyes off of her. Listen to the sound of her voice. Try to imitate her tone of voice. If she laughs, I want you to laugh. If she raises her voice, raise yours. If she gets angry, you get angry. I want you to do everything exactly like she does. Look at your script only when you need your next line.

I whisper in Janet’s ear that I want her to yell on the first line, laugh on the second, and be loving on the third. Then repeat that pattern until the end of the scene. I ask for this to force Rob into concentrating on her. He has to concentrate on her in order to be able to mimic her. They continue.

JEREMIAH: Don’t look at me. Look at her! You can’t tell what she’s doing when you look at me. Imitate what she’s doing. Janet, start it again.

JEREMIAH: (to the group) See how his performance immediately changed? I told him to mimic her exactly, so he had no choice. He had to concentrate on her. (to Rob) You concentrated on Janet, so you reacted to her, not the page. Even though you were shouting, we actually believed you. Did you feel the difference?

JEREMIAH: Sure it’s scary. That’s because you were alive. To mimic her exactly, you had to concentrate on her. You were forced to hear what she was doing—was she soft, loud, sad, fearful, intimate? Was she stuttering or stammering? Did she pause, giggle, laugh? You didn’t have time to worry about keeping your eyes on the page. So you really concentrated on her. And you were scared because you didn’t know what might happen. That’s what life is—that’s what acting is—you take everything as it comes and deal with it, and it’s scary. If you act according to what she does, you’re relating; if you don’t, you’re in your head. Stay out of your head, and react honestly to what you see and hear.

The Sense of Touch

Touching is using some part of your body to contact, stimulate, reassure, or get a response from someone else. If you touch the other actor, the scene you are doing will be improved. You may touch another person in many ways—your hand on an arm, fingertips to the face, a pat on the back, a handshake, a kick under the table, a nudge with your shoulder, cheek to cheek, a hug, a shove, a slap, a kiss, holding a hand, using your body as a weapon, a caress, a blow with your fist, and so on. Every one of these concentrates your attention and says something. Touch is an important element of practicing the Art of Giving and Receiving.

The information of touch comes mainly from the hands. Everyone you meet shakes your hand or touches you in his own unique way that reveals something about himself. Is he afraid or confident? If it’s a handshake, is it limp, calming, friendly, damp, strong, painful, clinging? If it’s a touch on your arm, your body, your face, what does it tell you? Become aware of what a touch tells you.

Your touch makes an intimate connection between you and whom you touch, and conveys some part, or even all, of your emotional state. Your touch gives the moment its own reality and your acting becomes more grounded. Your touch also helps both you and the person touched to sense what the other is feeling. In my workshop, I use touch in these ways: to relax, to stimulate love, to provoke anger, and to stimulate laughter.

Touching to Relax

If you don’t know how to control personal fear in a scene, it will show. Touching acts as an escape valve to alleviate fear. If your partner is frightened, touching him helps calm him down—and it helps you too. When you respond to an actor’s touch, you automatically activate a process of giving and receiving. This next scene shows one way an actor can help another with a touch. Alvin, a beginning actor, is big and strong but tries to hide his intimidation at acting before a group. Casie is a pleasant young woman who has already played a role in a TV movie.

JEREMIAH: Casie, what is Alvin feeling?

JEREMIAH: I don’t see love.

JEREMIAH: Yes, good! Now if Alvin were two years old, what would you do?

JEREMIAH: Two-year-olds aren’t great at verbal communication. What else could you do?

JEREMIAH: So give him a hug. And take it from the top.

JEREMIAH: (to the group) See that? When Casie gives Alvin a hug, he relaxes. The hug made her real to him. She’s now a person, not a character in the script, and he can trust her. A hug is a strong way to connect emotionally with another person. See how Alvin’s work immediately improved?

Touching to Stimulate Love

In the film A Map of the World, Julianne Moore, who has recently lost a child in the film, is baby-sitting David Strathairn’s children. The children are asleep and Straitharn and Moore are sitting on the floor.

Touching visually lets us know that both characters are lonely and attracted to each other. It allows the actors to express love and affection on screen without dialogue.

Emotions follow physical action. Touching, as in this scene, can stimulate genuine feelings and create intimacy—caring, concern, even love. A hand stroking a cheek, or a kiss, can look sexual without necessarily being sexual, because intimacy is not the same as sexuality. My workshop exercises are designed to achieve intimacy and stimulate genuine emotions. These emotions sometimes look sexual, but they are not.

Touching to Provoke Anger

As an actor, you need to be able to feel anger immediately and completely. Anger is a feeling that many women suppress, just as men traditionally suppress their tears. In my workshop, a quick way for my students to get in touch with anger is through physically poking and pushing. Objectionable physical contact forces you to deal with anger.

JEREMIAH: Michael, we can see that you’re nervous. What I want you to do is poke Billy’s shoulder with your finger. (Jeremiah holds up his index finger.) And Billy, you poke him back.

JEREMIAH: Come on! Poke each other. Keep poking and read your lines.

JEREMIAH: (to the group) See, it takes about a page before Michael’s voice drops; that’s when he feels real anger and forgets about being nervous. From poking, Michael’s concentration becomes focused, his emotions become honest. He gets angry—and believable. (to Michael) Michael that was excellent. No one would ever suspect this is your first workshop. (to the group) See how this simple physical action stimulated his anger?

In my workshops, I use a certain amount of planned physicality to stimulate students into learning how anger develops. But eventually, you gain confidence in your ability to generate anger, and it will become instinctively available, without physical action.

Touching to Stimulate Laughter

Tickling can stimulate laughter. I sometimes use tickling, as in the following scene, to get an actor out of his head and into the experience.

JEREMIAH: Joan, you started to smile. Did you think what Billy said was funny?

JEREMIAH: Instinctively, you had the impulse to smile. A big part of good acting is acknowledging your impulses. Any impulse is genuine feeling, so let it out. I want you to do the scene again. This time I want both of you to laugh. Laugh through the whole scene while you say your lines. If you can’t really laugh, force your laughter.

Joan tries to laugh as she does the scene again, but because she has a fixed idea about the scene, she can’t let go. Finally, I whisper to one of the women in the workshop to kneel down behind Joan’s chair and tickle her. She breaks into laughter. Then I have her go to the beginning of the scene and do it over. This time, she lets go of any ideas as to what her character would or would not do, and she laughs at what strikes her as funny.

JEREMIAH: Tickling you forced you to let go of your ideas and participate with Billy in the scene. A director wouldn’t do this when shooting a film, but here in the workshop, I do it to help you break through your preconceived idea. Your intuition was listening to him, and you had the impulse to laugh. But your logic stifled your impulse.

JEREMIAH: That’s a judgment. But acting is having experiences and then letting out your impulses. With impulses, acting has no right or wrong. Impulses make you interesting to an audience. When you do the scene, forget about judgment. When you look at your tape later, look at how interesting you are. On film, what you think is an inappropriate reaction, if it’s honest, works better than anything you can plan. That’s why engineers, scientists, and accountants rarely make good actors. Trust your instincts and impulses—they will make you a brilliant actor.

Smell and Taste

In acting, we generally don’t have the opportunities to experience smell and taste as we do the other senses. Odors do stimulate and can help you into a state of pleasure (perfume) or an unpleasant state (pungent odor). Odors strongly evoke memories. If you are sensitive to odors, you can color your performance by letting a scent affect you emotionally. One student, after a steamy scene, said that her partner’s cologne reminded her of her ex-boyfriend. I think five of the actors in the workshop later bought that exact cologne.

Summary

1. Look at everything through child eyes, undistorted by preconceived ideas. The primary way to have experiences is through the sense of sight. Look at the other actor. Is he laughing, sad, angry, fearful, or loving? When you can answer that, you are in the moment. Seeing with clarity is the key to the Art of Relating.
2. Don’t let preconceived ideas or judgments prevent you from using your senses of sight, touch, hearing, and smell.
3. You can only see what someone is feeling. You cannot know what someone is thinking.
4. Seeing and hearing tell you the most about a person’s emotional state.
   1. Look in your partners’ eyes for their emotional state.
   2. Look at their body language.
   3. Listen to the tone and emotion behind the dialogue.
5. Life around us consists of sounds that we ordinarily tune out. Concentrated listening makes us aware of all these sounds.
6. Touching another actor helps to dispel fear, creates intimacy, and often makes a scene go better.
7. Emotions follow physical action.
8. Acting is having experiences, and then letting out impulses. Impulses make actors interesting to an audience.
9. Smell and taste are less important than the other senses, but they sometimes do indicate and stimulate emotions.

Actor Practice

1. Look at the model in a full-page magazine ad for thirty seconds. Try to recognize what he or she is feeling.
2. Close the magazine and write down a description of the model: what the model was wearing and everything that was in the picture, such as props, printing, and background.
3. When you watch movies, try to guess what each actor is feeling. This is relatively easy on the big screen, but not in real life or when you are acting. To be a great film actor, you have to develop the ability to see what the other actors feel.
4. To enhance your ability to listen, close your eyes and listen to the sounds around you. Then write a list of what you have heard. Do this every day for a week in the same location and see if you can increase the number of sounds you hear.
5. Before you start a scene, close your eyes, take a deep breath, and listen to the sounds of the workshop. Can you hear yourself breathe? Can you hear your partner breathe?
6. Listen to the change of tone in your partner’s voice. Does he speak in a monotone? Does he emphasize certain words? Is he using his real voice?
7. Look at the tape of your scene and see if you are really listening to the other actor. When were you most interesting? When you were listening or talking? It should be both.
8. Touching relaxes you and connects you to the other actor. It can arouse love, provoke anger, and stimulate laughter.
   1. Watch how actors on screen use touch.
   2. Become aware of how people respond to your touch.
   3. Become aware of how you respond to a touch when someone shakes your hand, holds your hand, kisses you, hugs you, or touches you in any way.