Know the objective. Talk to the director and make sure you’re clear about what the character’s goal is in each scene. What does he want and what is he doing to attain it? Know where the character is coming from in the previous scene and where he is going in the next scene. If you don’t know, then ASK!
Before movies became an entertainment mainstay, actors worked on stage, where performances involved reciting lines of dialog, using very “external techniques.” Gestures were broad and sweeping, performances never explored the true emotions of the character, and the actors played characters no deeper than the dialog written on the page. This all changed when Konstantin Stanislavsky, born in 1863 in Russia, developed an acting method that, for the fi rst time, took actors beyond the page and provided them with tools to explore the real emotional subtext of their characters. By exploring how to control and manipulate seemingly intangible human traits such as feelings and emotions, he devised one of the most infl uential techniques of modern acting.
In the “Stanislavsky system,” actors must develop and feel every emotion their character is feeling. Unlike previous methods in which actors simply “acted” the emotions, in Stanislavsky’s approach, actors actually “feel” the emotions, creating organic life within moments, psychological realism, and emotional authenticity. The result is a true, multilayered performance through which the actor can introduce subtext and behavioral subtleties that take the character to a new layer of realism.
One of the cornerstones of this technique is the “magic ‘if’,” where actors ask themselves, “what if I was in the same situation as my character?” Actors often remember similar situations that occurred in their own lives and refer to that moment when playing a similar moment as their character. What Stanislavsky wanted was for actors to create a real moment in time—not an acted moment, but a truly emotionally felt moment that would be seen by the audience or captured on film. This approach is considered the foundation of modern television, stage, and movie acting. Stanislavsky’s technique evolved into what is considered “method acting” today.
