Go to the link below to see what the State of California feels about Casting Director workshops:
http://www.actorsite.com/guidelines.html
How to learn to be the best actor you can be.
March 19th, 2008Tip for the day to develop an acting career:
In order to learn any skill, we need to set aside what we already believe in order to be able to learn what we don’t know how to do.
“What get us into trouble is not what we don’t know.
It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Mark Twain
In our classes, put aside your ideas about how to do good acting work or what you believe good acting is, to learn how to do your best professional-level acting work.
Quote from Tom Landry, famous, winning, Dallas Cowboys football coach:
“A coach is someone who gets you to do what you don’t want to do, so
you can be who you want to be.”
Best wishes,
David Kagen
David Kagen’s School of Film Acting
Check out our website at www.davidkagen.com or call us at
(818) 752-9678
OUR ACTING TECHNIQUE
February 27th, 2008Here’s the 4 basic skills we’re teaching:
1) cold reading skills so that you can look at their partner almost all the
time and not worry about being able to easily and quickly pick up words off the page
2) emotional openness and spontaneity
3) getting your emotions from you partner and the imaginary circumstances, not from your idea of how you should be reacting
4) developing the habit of initiating your own openness, spontaneity and
risk-taking as a habit whenever and wherever you act.
You need to be able to do all of the above at the same time at least 90% of
the time to meet the professional standard and be competitive in the
business.
It all starts with emotional openness.
The choices you make for your performance of any scene are arrived at through doing your scene over and over again with an open heart and mind.
Those choices you finally decide to include in your performance are the end result of what you learn through the emotional experiences you have each time you rehearse your scene. You arrive at your final set of choices by going through a process of allowing yourself to fully experience and fully express your instinctive emotional responses to each moment of a scene, without worrying about right and wrong.
There is no purely intellectual process which will lead to your best and unique performance of a scene. Your talent comes from your instincts.
We’re all emotionally controlled and guarded in some ways. Being
emotionally controlled and guarded is the opposite of being instinctive and
spontaneous so it’s bad for your acting.
Everything we do is to get people out of their own way by not being in
emotional control and guarded, so that they can let their instincts take
over and be truly spontaneous.
By being instinctive and truly spontaneous moment by moment, each actor will be able discover his instinctive responses to each and every moment in the scene, during each run-through and thereby discover his best and unique performance of each moment of each scene he performs.
Copyright 2006 David Kagen
All rights reserved
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Excellence in On-Camera Acting [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
The following is an excerpt from Marlon Brando’s autobiography, BRANDO Songs My Mother Taught Me:
“On the day Gadg (Elia Kazan) showed me the complete picture (of ON THE WATERFRONT), I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the screening room. I thought i was a huge failure, and walked out with out a word to him. I was simply embarrassed for myself.”
Marlon Brando went on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in ON THE WATERFRONT. It turned out to be one of his finest film performances.
Please think about this when you are so sure your acting “sucks.” Our own feelings about how we are doing in a performance are unreliable. That’s hard to deal with while you’re performing, as well as afterward. You’ve just got to keep hanging in there and keep giving/committing 100% regardless of your personal feelings, and let others be the judge.
This is what we help people learn by practicing in our Los Angeles On-Camera acting classes.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
Aristotle
Copyright David Kagen 2006
All rights reserved
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Meisner’s ON ACTING Study Guide [Acting in Film and Television] – david@davidkagen.com
Wednesday, August 9th, 2006
Find each of the following principles in the Sanford Meisner’s book, ON ACTING, and study them over and over again. These are the core skills Meisner discusses that we teach:
1) Meisner quotes George Bernard Shaw who said…Self-betrayal, magnified to suit the optics of the theater, is the whole art of acting. By “self-betrayal,” Shaw meant the pure, unselfconscious revelation of the gifted actor’s most inner and most private being to the people in his audience. (This is at the heart of all good acting. You’re supposed to reveal the most personal, private feelings you have in the course of doing a scene. That’s the hardest part.)
2) Your talent comes from your instincts; from your instinctive emotional responses to your partners emotions and your instinctive emotional responses to the imaginary circumstances
Most of us have ways we control our feelings and ways we control how other people see us. All that control is the opposite of being spontaneous and instinctive when you act and is therefore terrible for your acting. Your controls prevent you from being deeply emotional and expressing the deepest human aspects of yourself in a scene. In order to be a good actor you have to want to reveal yourself emotionally, not hide your true feelings and not fake feelings in your scenes. Never say,”that’s as far as I’m going to go emotionally.”
3) Acting is living truthfully in the imaginary circumstances.
4) The foundation of acting is the reality of doing.
5) Getting your attention off yourself is the big battle won.
6) An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words.
7) Let the words be the canoe that rides on the river of your emotions.
Act before you think.
9) The pinch and the ouch – that acting requires your immediate visceral response to everything that happens.
10) Acting is reacting – reacting to your partner in each and every moment.
11) Act impulse to impulse, not cue to cue.
12) Try to be as mindless as possible when you act.
13) Don’t change until something happens to make you change.
14) Don’t hold onto your preparation/ideas about any scene.
15) There’s no character; it’s always you in the scene. It’s a part of you that is the “character.”
16) Your emotional reactions in scenes should come out of you like “Elenora Duse’s blush;” from the heart, not the head.
17) Always assume you’re getting something from you partner. There’s no such thing as your partner not giving you anything. There is no such thing as nothing.
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At our school we are going to the heart of the matter with regard to acting. Learn what we’re teaching and you can work, and do good work, in the film and television business. Though you do need some experience acting on your feet, the getting-up-on-your-feet part is usually very simple for the camera and doesn’t take much to pick up; not anything close to what it takes to learn how to be instinctive and bare your soul.
The following email from one of our students who was in HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG with Ben Kingsley sums up what we’re trying to get across:
So the main thing I learned on the set of House of Sand and Fog or I should say had been reinforced that I have heard you ask of us in class is not try to perform the final product. That it is really a discovery, that everyone is searching for. You the actor, the other actors, the director and even sometimes the DP depending on the shot. You might have some vague idea as a jumping off point but its really about letting go of those ideas to let the discoveries birth. And the ideas are not really “ideas” about how the scene should go but more how you the actor/character feels something. How the Imaginary circumstances affect you. And even after you have rehearsed or even shot a few takes it is still about LETTING GO and really trying to let even more discoveries happen. It never stops.
The other high point was watching Ben Kingsly, Jennifer Connelly, and Ron Eldard work with this Director who I respect very much. The director really put the work and the art first. This made him a bit hard to deal with at some points, but it was great to see everyone just put the ego’s aside and just continue to collaborate. It wasn’t to hurt anyone’s feelings it was a commitment to getting the best work. I loved that.
Copyright 2006 by David Kagen
All rights reserved
Acting and Being Receptive
February 27th, 2008Some experiences in life can be mastered and directed, as in performing a task or going on a trip. We can have other experiences only by being receptive. They come our way, as in the growing of a friendship or the unpredictable events on a trip.
To be receptive, we must not be so busy with what we can control that we fail to notice all the experiences which are there for us. Our senses need to be open to see what is around us and hear what is in the air. We must breathe in the beauty and pain of life. When there is a message in our experience, let us read it and not demand it fit our narrow, logical minds.
Anonymous
To discover how to do a scene well in our acting classes in Los Angeles, and find your “choices,” you need to be receptive. Don’t monitor yourself and don’t control your behavior.
Treat a scene and treat acting as though you are dancing to a song you love to dance to.
Copyright 2007 David Kagen
All rights reserved
Letting go of the story or looking good when you act.
February 27th, 2008This is from one of my current students.
Recently in class I started making some significant progress. David asked me to explain what I was suddenly connecting with that I wasn’t before. Here’s what I came up with, maybe it will strike a cord someone else as well.
Before I arrived at David’s acting classes in Los Angeles I believed acting was an accumulation of skill sets; character analysis, beat-by-beat
breakdowns, objectives, historical context, the moment before, etc David showed me, on the contrary, those are great concepts to vault from when I was first dipping my toes in the creative pool, but they can only lead to finite, text driven performances (i.e. line readings). If I wanted to break-through and begin taking my acting to the next level, however, then those intellectual concepts were training wheels that I needed to rid myself of. David convinced me it isn’t about the story, he’s even gone as far to say, “There is no story.” My scene partner and I will tell our own story by being emotionally connected to one another and the words will their impact all on their own. The skill set I have been holding onto so tightly is limiting and could only take me so far. It didn’t teach me to swim in my own creativity, it only gave me a life-preserver so I didn’t drown.
The big “Aha!“ for me was this shift in perspective. It isn’t about
accumulating skills that build upon one another that make a
performance rich and complex, but rather emptying out the
emotional/intellectual junk that stands in my way. Oddly enough, this process is much like coming of age was described in one of my favorite books:
‘Milestones passed.’…It was funny, but the more things I did…the
emptier I felt. Like you started out full and kept throwing things
overboard instead of the other way around. It wasn’t how I thought it would work. (Pete Fromm, As Cool As I Am, p125)
Since I began leashing my intellectual understanding and started
achieving some emotional clarity, I’ve been asking myself, what do I do now? Exactly that: do! With the aid of the cold reading exercise, David helped me see my need to be comfortable with the story before I would commit emotionally, was like standing on the edge of the pool and taking a temperature instead of jumping in and finding out. I need to quit worrying about the result and commit to ‘doing’ from the get-go regardless of whether my instincts make sense. I have to stop
trying to be good and start being instinctual. For me, this has been the scariest step, probably why I haven‘t gone there until recently. If I risk following my instincts irreverent of the result, I may fail; I may reveal something humiliating; or worse, I may belie my emotional security. But as we all know from watching our tapes, even failure and humiliation are more alive than line readings. So I’ve stopped waiting, stopped guessing, stopped worrying. Hey, sometimes the water is freezing and painful, but it is certainly more fun to just leap.
The final realization I attribute to my recent progress that I wish to share, is that I am seeing how much my need for validation, my need to be please, and my drive to be good, has blocked my development as an actor. The drive cultured by my need for validation is a great way to stay disciplined, but it has served as a major stumbling block throughout my development, because it brings in the third-eye: critical self-awareness, worry and self-doubt. To combat these desires (admittedly, I will probably never rid myself of them), I’ve quit crafting performances to save face. Furthermore, I can’t be hard on myself for making mistakes. After all, I can’t know what acting is until I know what it isn’t. It is just part of the process and I can’t beat myself up for progress exploring different avenues. Now I try to just sit down, breath deep, and trust that if I listen the other person my own authentic creative forces will come to my aid. And every time I do that, whether in class, sports or life, I feel myself grow.
Ben Maixner
Copyright 2007 David Kagen All rights reserved
How you translate words on the written page to talking the way you really talk
February 27th, 2008Many actors say their lines in the same way they “look” in the script.
Visually, when you look at your lines as printed on a page of your script, it will appear to you that you should say every speech without pauses and always stop at the periods unless otherwise written. And, that your “character” knows exactly how he wants to respond to everything the other person says and does.
That’s not the way it is for us in life.
Recently I was watching DON JUAN DE MARCO with Marlon Brando and Johnny Depp with the English subtitles on. I strongly suggest you do this.
What you’ll see, is how Marlon Brando breaks up his lines into thoughts based on his emotions and not on the rules of English grammar. He might turn a statement into a question or vice versa.
That’s what we all need to do… to talk the way we really talk, bunching ideas together based on our emotions and not as dictated by the written form of English (or any language.) The way we speak is very different than the way our native languages are written. The written form is much more formal, and the spoken language is more informal.
As actors we need to learn to “translate” the written form of a script into real talking and reacting, while saying the text the writer gave us to say.
Best wishes,
David Kagen
Copyright David Kagen 2007
All rights reserved
Concept acting, script analysis, and playing a “character” vs. revealing your personal feelings in your acting.
February 27th, 2008The following is an excerpt from an email to a student who was struggling to act from his instincts:
I can empathize with your concern that you’ll never be able to overcome the blocks you’ve described in your email, but you haven’t really been in the class long enough to know that. Remember, this a long-term process. It’s not instant. It takes most students at least a year or two to really be able to do it consistanly in their work.
What I see your real obstacle/problem is, is the wall you’ve built up around yourself which keeps all of your personal feelings hidden. We talked about this 2 weeks ago when you revealed that your mother died a couple years ago and you still haven’t dealt with those feelings. You told me that you have kept yourself emotionally insulated from others for a long time and that’s probalby why you are emotionally detached from your scene partner. At that time, I made suggestions about what each of us needs to do to get through our key blocks to being sensitive and expressive as actors. Perhaps you might look at that tape again and listen to my comments once again. Also, it’s probably a good time for you to watch and listen to your interview tape again.
If you’ve read the Meisner book, you now know that there is no “character;” that it’s YOU in the scene, reacting instinctively and revealing your most private, personal feelings. “Self-betrayal.”
That’s the core challenge for almost everyone. And few actors are willing to take it on. It’s too scary and uncomfortable. Most of us would rather do a performance that’s comfortable, controlled, and hide our true selves and true feelings, even though it’s not satisfying for the actor or the audience.
You must not rely on understanding the plot of the scene when you perform it in front of the class. Otherwise, you’ll be predictable in your acting work, as you are now, and not revealing anything really personal and interesting.
When actors don’t reveal their emotions on a regular basis, they resort to doing their idea of a scene, which doesn’t get them anywhere worthwhile in the profession.
Copyright David Kagen 2007
All rights reserved
Expressing emotions you feel are wrong or improper to express
February 27th, 2008Many times scenes require us to express emotions we feel are wrong or improper to express, or that we simply don’t want to express.
However, being a good and successful professional actor requires us to be able to express all emotions FULLY and FREELY regardless of our personal opinions.
Best wishes,
David Kagen
www.davidkagen.com
Copyright 2007
All rights reserved
It’s not in the story!
February 27th, 2008When you go to a movie or play, the story may be very interesting.
Too many inexperienced actors focus only on “acting” the story as expressed in the dialogue.
However, what’s really compelling to the audience is how the each person in the story DEALS with their situation. That’s not fully expressed in the dialogue. That’s in YOU. Your behavior. And it’s what you’re hired to express in your performance. Anyone can act dialogue.
Not everyone can be compelling unless they bring all of themselves to each and every moment in their scenes. That is personal and unique to each of you, and it’s why you love certain performances and remember them for years.
I asked Tim Glenn, a writer and actor who teaches at our school, to give his perspective about this issue. I think it’s very helpful
“Writers concern themselves with the whole story and the characters and their relationships. As an actor you are concerned with your character’s journey; his experience as he experiences the events of the drama. Your job is to take it deeper, to take on the mantle of the imaginary person, who is you. So the more freedom you allow yourself in experiencing what the writer has imagined for you and what the other actors are doing to you, the more you will fulfill the potential in the character. Since you are the character, and all the character will ever be, never rest in you quest to be affected and effective as deeply as possible.
Another truth; in film and tv you are providing the raw material for an industrial product. So telling the story is not as important as most people think. Find something fresh and different in each scene, in each moment and the editor will love you and favor you whenever possible as they assemble the film. Be shut down and the same and mild and the editor will cut to more interesting and alive actors.”
TG
Best wishes,
David Kagen
Copyright 2007 David Kagen
All rights reserved
Get emotionally alive before you act!
February 27th, 2008It’s very important to get emotionally alive before you act.
To discover how to do that, you need to experiment with inventing and doing different exercises to feel what you’re feeling before you begin your class each week. Find what works for you!
One suggestion is to bring a notebook to class and write down exactly what you’re feeling before the start of each class.
For example, write “I feel _____,” and fill in the blank without censoring what you write. Do this exercise for at least 15 minutes before each class.
Your goal is to let your feelings bubble up to the surface, feel exactly what you’re feeling deep down, and to let your feelings take you over physically and emotionally. Don’t write what you “think.” Write what you “feel.” Don’t be cerebral. What you write is for your eyes only, so be ruthlessly honest. That’s the only way to benefit from the exercise and get underneath your social mask.
In addition, you can listen to music at home and let it get to you emotionally. Or watch a documentary about something important to you and let yourself get emotionally and passionately involved.
Discover what you do that causes and allows your emotions to come to the surface. Do you relax certain muscles? Do you breathe in to your emotions? What exactly do you do when you let your feelings take you over?
The goal is to overcome whatever emotional detachment you customarily practice in your everyday life. And, oddly enough, it takes a lot of practice.
There’s no one way to do this. And, even though there are times to cover up your emotions to some extent, it is important that you do something to break your habitual detachment from your emotions. Otherwise, you’ll be detached when you act and your scene partner and the imaginary circumstances won’t be able to affect you instinctively and spontaneously.
Your goal in your acting is to NOT be detached, but to express your instinctive, spontaneous responses to everything that your scene partner says and does!
Copyright 2007 David Kagen
All rights reserved