Читать книгу Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art - Gene Wilder - Страница 19

Apart from fame and fortune and all the whipped cream that goes with them, which very few actors ever achieve – what do actors really want, artistically? To be great actors? Yes, but you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word “great” out of it – it just gets you into trouble. I think to be believed – onstage or on-screen – is the one hope that all actors share. Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn’t yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?

I’d been studying with Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen for three years now – two of them while I was still in the army – but I felt that there was something basic missing, something less intellectual than what they offered. I wanted to know how to reach that area of the subconscious that I had reached, by accident, in Death of a Salesman and The Crucible.

Stanislavsky called two of his main tools Actions and Objectives, and that’s what I was being taught – that the character you’re playing must want something (an Objective) and then he needed Actions to accomplish his Objective. Just as an example, let’s suppose that I’m really smitten with the beautiful Frenchwoman who lives upstairs and that I desperately want her to love me. To achieve my Objective, I might:

1 Try to nonchalantly hold her hand when we meet on the street.

2 Say something in French as we pass each other on the stairs.

3 Affect a limp as we meet on the sidewalk, in hopes that she’ll now look at me in a special way.

4 Invite her to dinner in my apartment, but before she arrives, arrange piles of her favorite flower in every place where she might sit.

I was exhausting myself with Actions and Objectives, and I didn’t know if the problem lay in my shortcomings or the process itself. Twenty seconds before I was about to do a scene in class, I would still be searching for my Objective, thinking that if only I could find the right one, it would solve all my acting problems. I even started thinking that the greater my Objective, the greater my acting would be.

One of my closest friends was – and still is – Charles Grodin. He had recently started studying with Lee Strasberg. When we were both on unemployment, Chuck and I used to meet on summer evenings, drink our Pepsis, and walk along the East River, talking about life and love – but mostly about acting. One night I asked Chuck what Strasberg said about Actions and Objectives. He said he’d never heard him mention those words. A month later I began studying with Lee Strasberg in his private class.