Why is Method Acting so Controversial?

foreign [Music] living on the street and Diving deep and really getting close to some of the folks that I met there that who are living similar lives to Harry colfar and the topic of method acting is discussed it is usually in the context of actors behaving badly on set refusing to break character for long periods of time and resorting to seemingly extreme tactics when taking on a role in The New Yorker Story the intensity of Strong's acting choices were called into question specifically one about his request to be tear gassed while filming a scene in Aaron sorkin's trial of the Chicago seven was it true that uh that Aaron said no to your immersive uh style of wanting to be to your guest as uh Jerry on the on Michigan Avenue it is expected the actors provide viewers with an honest and truthful performance that the line between themselves and the characters they are portraying be indistinguishable so we too can be momentarily lulled into the storyline set before us thank you foreign yeah it ain't gonna be me it is only once we get small glimpses into their processes their systems their methods that we begin to question the very performances that we demand of them is that your job is an actor okay what is that job in your opinion but what exactly is method acting or the method what techniques exemplify this acting style why has it become so controversial and why in recent years have audiences seemingly become more interested in an actor's process just as much if not more so than their performance I worry about what Jeremy is putting himself through on a daily basis when we work to fully understand the history behind the method and the system is evolved into today it is important to first look at the system of acting developed by Constantine stanislavskyness [Music] following a crisis in which stanislavski himself gave a poor performance during a play he sought to develop what he called a system which had as its purpose to have a kind of truthful playing out of the situation up until this point the silent film medium demanded the actor's performances be accompanied by mechanical cliches exaggerated gesturing intense melodrama and a greater focus on externalization of the role rather than inner experiencing of it this is what stanislavski sought to change through his Moscow Art Theater he was able to put this system into practice documenting what techniques worked and what failed during this period two of stanislavski's students made their way to the United States setting up the American laboratory theater and began teaching hundreds of American actors directors and playwrights in an early version of stanislavski's system I was a student at the laboratory theater and Harold Clemen invited me to come to a meeting and I came and I was hooked he said please follow me and I had the tendency to follow a woman and so I followed Harold plumen into the group theater by 1931 Harold klerman Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg had set up their own theater Collective the group Theater which would transform the teachings of stanislavski's system into a new American method of acting that would have a significant influence on the acting style of the mid to late 20th century and so from morning till night we were working the work was of course mainly on the play but also on training these actors in the method that Lee Strasbourg had devised from stanislavski Lee thought that he was he was instilling his own system and he was seeing the Forefront of all that new way of looking at acting and I guess he was I believe the method is the only basic means for solving what I consider to be the actors problem drawing happily from slavsky's early version of the system strasbourg's method relied on an actor's ability to access their own emotions through sense memory exercises you have that naturally but when you did it here you went so much with the personal thing that you lost some of the things that they had that she has I'm sure you all know what since memories are since memories are just really uh hearing something that isn't there seeing something that is there smelling something doing something that you that you know that you've experienced so the only way you can do that is to stop thinking about what it was get in this relaxed State and then go through your senses what was I wearing but not what was I wearing can I feel what I was wearing that day can I hear anything that was happening that day not what was happening because that's the conscious thing that's going to shut you off but by going through your senses your smells your seeing your hearing your touch something is going to hit and it's going to bring back the emotion time went by certain members of the group began struggling with strasbourg's teaching Style maybe I'm going further and I don't see it many of the actors resisted digging into their own emotional past said again to look inside and I was a sensitive person I didn't want to think of when was I moved by my my sister when she vomited in 1934 Stella Adler troubled by strasbourg's emphasis on emotional memory traveled to Paris to study with stanislavski himself we work for weeks on clarifying what Mr stanislauske understood was being uh made into a kind of mystery in America I don't think he wanted that it was during this trip that she learned how stanislavski's stance on actors using emotional memory had changed she says that stanislavski has told her that this was something we abandoned years ago he had written about it and actually taught it for a bit but then he gave it up upon her return to the United States Adler revealed what she had learned to a less than enthused Strasburg and she came back totally and he said stanislavski is wrong I tried all the work and rightly or wrongly whether it's stanislavsky or not that works the actors began to think of him not as someone who was always right which is the way it started but as someone who is not always right it is this event that would Mark the ultimate demise of the group theater and divide between the method of acting taught by Strasbourg and those taught by such greats as Adler and Samford Meisner frankly I don't know who was right and who was wrong I think whatever works is right whatever doesn't is wrong but they never did solve their disagreements and so some people I think tended to take Stella's experience as the right one what stanislavski had told her and others stuck to uh Lee's point of view for the next three decades Strasbourg would teach a style of acting that would produce some of America's most iconic actors who would Elevate his style of teaching from a method to the method [Music] however detractors would come to see this method as unusual emotionally damaging and self-indulgent it's not personal sunny Strictly Business yeah I'm in no way method whatever that means I think that is actually total [ __ ] I always say about people who do method acting you only ever see people doing the method when they're playing an [ __ ] I think that there's this idea that's perpetuated of just like staying in the reality of it you don't go to work with Daniel Day-Lewis you go to work with whoever his character is to me Dan Day Lewis got one out of 55 he decided to retire because he couldn't go on doing that every day I have heard that you spent six months training to do your Italian accent in House of Gucci and then you actually practiced it like lived it out for six months following that is that true people are like why did you keep your accent the whole time I'm like can you imagine going in and out of that [ __ ] rather than aligning with the style of acting Strasbourg taught today method acting has come to be synonymous with extreme bodily Transformations you can't act and make sure that you have to become emaciated extensive research for a role and going to exhaustive links to live the life of the character from De Niro spending Weeks driving a taxi around New York City for his role in Taxi Driver I mean he went and actually worked as a cabin didn't you no or gaining 60 pounds to play boxer Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull to Meryl Streep learning how to speak Polish and German for her role in Sophie's choice I learned to speak Polish then the diphthongs and the sounds of that language would be in my mouth to Daniel Day Lewis truly living as his character in The Last of the mohegans if you split your wood where the grain is open see we've got some split see how we split it over there the method today has become synonymous with great physical transformation and in turn has almost become a dirty word Laden with controversy stigma and criticism um I kind of shy away from the term method actor because it I think is taken on negative connotations how do you ever talk about that thing without making it sound kind of grotesquely self-important Jeremy he's a little more it's a little more complex because a lot of people just immediately say he's method and uh he would say that he's not but I'm not for all intents and purposes I feel like he kind of is I don't really know what method acting is what it means yeah to be honest I'm kind of bothered by the misconception I'm kind of bothered by this idea of like methodox [ __ ] [ __ ] it's like no I don't think you know what method acting is if you're calling it [ __ ] or or you're just or you just worked with someone who claims to be a method actor increasingly The public's fascination with sensationalizing the behind the scenes processes of actors has them seeking out stories that become less about understanding why actors may go to Great physical and mental extremes to get where they need to go and more about declaring their processes to be pretentious silly or damaging you know I don't think I sound like him still but I I guess I must because I hear it a lot um rather than seek a true understanding of what method acting really is viewers become more concerned with the actors processes even more so than their performances let me get this straight you had the option to eat a gelatin bison liver and decided to go for the real thing I'm rumors of on and offset Antics become more important than the work the actors are creating it's also interesting how this stuff all takes on a life of its own uh but I I never gave Margot Robbie a dead rat that's just that's not true you know in [Music] driving here yeah there's this feeling of like am I going in front of a firing squad you know the depth of anyone's appreciation as an artist for what their work is and how they get to where they want to get is you know it's it's their [ __ ] thing there's nothing but judgmental shallow people out there who are looking to start [ __ ] uh over things they don't understand you know like it's like like I said before it's like if it's not mathematics then it's all [ __ ] poetry and you got to figure out which of those things is going to guide you to get you where you gotta go but the legacy of method acting is still all around us and the instances where actors utilize it in healthy productive and meaningful ways abound we hardly talked because we're in character all the time so once we once I'd done that work I was kind of trying to be him all the time so we go Trends now but yeah we were friends at the weekend it was very weird from coaches like Kim Gillingham whose work with Sandra Oh Jane Campion Benedict Cumberbatch and Bill Pullman Blends aspects of strasbourg's method with jungian dream analysis I'd like to thank my mentor Kim Gillingham I worked with this woman called Kim Gillingham who's um yeah he encouraged me to have these dreams I had the dreams I wrote them down I met with her and she's sort of got me to lie down soothing music and everything it was really just facilitating the conversation I do the same work but with someone named Greta Seacat who Jesse and I work with I have a woman that I work with we do a lot of DreamWork explain to me how that works you write yourself a personal note and then whatever you dream and if you don't you just keep doing it until you dream and then you use whatever you've dreamed for your character to actors like Laura Dern Kirsten Dunst Ryan Gosling and Andrew Garfield whose work with Sandra and Greta ccat again Blends these approaches her name is um her name is Greta Sica and her mother is Sandra Sica who studied with Lee Strasberg back in the 80s I started studying with I was introduced to her through a mutual friend yeah just found it fortuitously and like I do a lot of weird ritual stuff and dream work and like um lots of unlocking unconscious yeah you know archetypal kind of images and the psyche I met Sandra ccat and started working with her at 17. and she luckily let me learn from her and start taking class with her and so it became my family in me learning how is there a path to empathy for ourselves and everybody else going through the Journey of story and also finding it healing and incredible and a gift versus torment based rarely are the situations where actors stay in character maintain an accent transform themselves physically or immerse themselves deeply in the world of their character and simultaneously maintain great working relationships with their cast and crew mentioned in interviews or headlines my technique's really weird and it's sort of the same for every character but I discover different things in the process I can't talk about that a little bit you know there's a theory where you can sort of trick your mind and body into having experienced something so I go back and I kind of rebuild the life for my character but what's great is I don't own any of it so I can go home to my daughter and feel really separate and when I haven't done that work when I've worked on sets where I haven't really done that kind of work I end up uh damaging my psyche a little bit instead it becomes more about highlighting the few instances where actors went too far into a role negatively affecting the cast and crew or themselves the truth is actors may use many different techniques When approaching a role and this can change from Project to project one thing that's always helped me is really never judging other people there's always going to be something that they'll land on in the end and often we all just have to go through a bunch of silly stuff first deciphering what techniques an actor used to prepare for a role misses the point entirely whether they use the method in the more classical sense of emotional memory or what we've come to describe as the method today matters much less than the fact that they're using these techniques however silly or extreme they may appear to do their job they're just using whatever tools they have at their disposal to give the most truthful performance and as viewers all that we ask is that they make us believe in what they are doing if you are a writer who is dealing directly with actors the best advice I can give you is respect what they're doing even if you think it looks silly or sounds silly or sounds pretentious or confusing or pointless it doesn't matter respect what they're doing because it's what they need to do to get where they need to go

Channel: From The Frame

Views: 169,517

Keywords: #videoessay, #methodacting, #acting

Id: hMm9tb_DIYw

Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2023