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Chapter 3

Mistake #3: Filibusterers

Kurt Vonnegut? I was going to direct a Kurt Vonnegut short story? Great! But by this point, I’d only been directing for a couple of years.

How could I screw this one up? I was sure I could find a way.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Epicac is about a giant computer that falls in love with a beautiful female programmer and destroys itself when it realizes it can’t do anything about it. Funny and sad at the same time, it starred Bill Bixby and Julie Sommars.

One day on the set of the ginormous computer, Bill Bixby (playing the head programmer) asked me to explain a simple line of dialogue to him. I stood there and talked, and talked, and talked, with logical ideas, quotations from Plato, analogies from my own life. When I stopped to take a breath, he looked at me, not unkindly, and said, “I have no idea what you just said.”

I think I turned eight shades of crimson for being such a Chatty Cathy. After that, I started watching good directors much more carefully and listening to how they spoke with their cast. One thing was really clear. The good ones — not just the great ones, but the good ones, too — know to keep it short and to the point.

Why? To avoid being embarrassed by Bill Bixby?

No.

Taylor Hackford: You can easily over-talk to actors. When you try to intellectualize too much, they can go, “Why are you talking so much? What do you really mean?”

Keep it short. Give them something they can use while acting the scene. They need to hear it expressed as an action verb. That is something they can act, something they can do. “Persuade, seduce, attack, destroy” — these are all action verbs, actable verbs.

Steven Soderbergh: Don’t tell actors what to think. Tell them what to do. Give them things to do. Less and less I’m telling them what to think, because I don’t want them thinking. I want them doing. I want them behaving. So I think it’s more helpful. Instead of saying, “You know, he’s a guy who in school took these kinds of classes,” it’s better to say to the actor, “Don’t walk like an athlete. You walk like an athlete. You walk like somebody who has an athletic background. That’s not that guy. Find another way to carry yourself because you look too physically comfortable.”

In Bill Bixby‘s scene, the computer wasn’t behaving right. All of his dialogue, which was very technical, had to do with fixing what was wrong with the machine. If the objective was “I want to find a solution,” what he needed was a verb that actively drove what he was doing in the scene. It could have been fix it, debug it, curse it, attack it, or engineer it. Any of those verbs would have been better than the vomitorium of irrelevant words I spewed on him. Maybe they were nice ideas, maybe they were terrible. One thing is for sure: Not only were they obtuse and unclear, they were also all intellectual and not emotional. And intellectual is not playable or actable… even if you’re Mr. Spock, Data, Hal, or Joshua. You have to find a verb that will give life to what a character is playing.

James Woods: Whenever I have a problem with an actor, I say to them, “Tell me the story again. What’s happening in this scene? Tell me the story of just this scene.” The actor says, “Well, I feel that she’s been abused by her step-father… ” Oh, please! Don’t give me all that politically correct crap. I just had lunch. Just tell me what’s happening in the scene right now.

“Well, I’m coming in to get the money from the guy. He’s not going to give it to me. So I’m going to try to have sex with him to get it.” Aha! So you’re seducing him to get the money, right? So seduce him already! What’s the problem?

As we directors gab on and on, we don’t even notice the polite actor’s eyes glazing over. The impolite actor has pulled out their iPhone under the table and is checking their email, texting their agent, and playing Angry Birds. When you’re done, the actor waits for the camera to roll and does exactly what they were doing before.

Elia Kazan: Many directors talk a lot and show off, and then the actors think, “How the hell am I ever going to get that?” You can’t unload the whole problem of their part on them. You never feed them more than they can eat and digest. And never talk about the significance of the movie. When you start talking too much, it’s usually because you’re floundering around and don’t know yourself.¹

I was lucky enough to sit in on a rehearsal of The Seagull by Anton Chekhov that my talented professor at the Yale School of Drama, Nikos Psacharopoulos, was directing. I wanted to hear what he would say to the actors, what pearls of wisdom, what gems, would emerge from the master’s mouth.

At the end of a scene, he stopped the cast and asked them to do it over again. He pointed to the ingenue and said, “This time, when you enter, carry the flowers in your other hand.”

… That was it?

Carry the flowers in the other hand?!?

WTF! I asked him later what he meant by that direction. He said that the flowers had nothing to do with it; the actors just needed to do it again, and they would find the right path all by themselves. The flowers were just an excuse. The trust he had for his cast to be able to decipher the problem on their own was not just Pollyannaish, though. It was based on the surety that if they figured it out by themselves, they would grasp it forever. It would be theirs; they would own it.

Donald Petrie: I had heard that Gene Hackman punched out directors. I’d heard on The Royal Tenenbaums, he wouldn’t do anything that the director asked. I had zero problem with him on Welcome to Mooseport. I just realized very quickly he doesn’t suffer fools. Don’t try to direct him. He does his homework. He knows what he’s doing. More often than not, directors try to direct too much.

The moral is really simple… and really hard to follow: Directors talk too much. We love to explain, expound, and extol to our captive cast. We spend our days explaining what we want to our designers and crews, DPs and ADs. We’re working our way to a vision, and we just have to explain it, over and over again. But in reality, we should only explain what pertains to the job at hand. We don’t need to go into the macrocosmic view of the script, and actors don’t want to hear it. Say as little as you can, and when you do speak, keep it focused on:

a. What the character is trying to do in the scene; and

b. How the character feels about what they’re trying to do.

Sydney Pollack: An actor will say something, and I will say, “What does that mean to you?” They say, “What do you mean?” “You just said I’m never going to speak to you again. What does that mean to you? Are you sorry you said it? Are you thrilled? Have you been wanting to say it for two years? I can’t tell what it means to you. I hear the words, but I don’t understand what it means. The only thing that I understand is behavior.” Too many directors just explain intellectually what a scene is about.

Don’t stuff their ears with palaver about what happened in a past life, how this is an allegory for the evolution of the universe, how their mother had ingrown toenails that made her grouchy. Remind them what they’re playing and get out of their way.

Sports coaches have this down to a science. We can learn from their manual. They are very specific with their directions. The tennis pro working on your serve doesn’t go into the physics of the ball and racket or the history of the game. They keep it simple. You want to hit the ball into the opposite court? Their direction: Toss the ball more to your left. Simple. Direct.

Always remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

James Woods: It’s like in golf. Never tell somebody what not to do in the swing. “Don’t look up.” Well, you can’t do a negative. Tell them what to do. “Get over to the left side with the club.” That’ll take care of the other problem. So always find something positive. If an actor’s stuck, don’t dwell on the problem. Give them something else to do.

Here’s a little example. I was doing a scene once, and a coffee table was in front of me. Somebody said, “Oh, you’re having a little trouble getting up around that coffee table. We’ll just move it.” I said, “No. The coffee table is a real obstacle in a scene. If it’s a real obstacle, something interesting will happen in my explosive moment with him.” We rolled on the scene, and when we got to that blowup part, the coffee table was in my way. I kicked the stupid thing over and went and throttled the guy. All of a sudden, that became a captivating, explosive moment because there’s nothing worse on film than tedium, and nothing better on film than excitement.

SUMMARY

1. Directors talk too much. Don’t overexplain, or the actor may drown in your “helpful” words.

2. Give an actor behaviors and actions for their character, not intellectual ideas.

3. Ask the actor:

What does their character want in the scene?

How does the character feel about what they want?

4. Encourage the actors to figure things out by themselves. When they make discoveries themselves, they will possess those ideas totally — more so than if you had given them the very same idea yourself.

5. Never tell someone what not to do. Give the actor an action to do.

6. Above all, KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.

¹ Young, Kazan, 134.