A Quote by Elia Kazan
Take it from a director: if you get an actor that Sandy Meisner has trained, you've been blessed.
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Sandy Meisner would say it takes 20 years to make an actor. Some people it takes five, some people 30. And you have to have patience and forgiveness for yourself. It's hard when you see people at your age or younger becoming successful.
I love the variety of films. In theater, you go into a room and the director runs the room, so you all work to his or her method. On film, if an actor or an actress is in for a day or two, the director has to get out of that actor what they need, so they have to change and adapt to that actor's technique.
I studied with Sandy Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse. I was in the last class to study with him before he had his larynx removed, so I actually remember the sound of his voice. He was an incredible teacher.
I'm formally trained, I don't know what classically trained really means. I've worked with Sanford Meisner. And I've worked at Circle Rep with Marshall W. Mason and Lanford Wilson and some really good people. I was lucky. I had a lot of really good influences.
A bad audition is usually the director's fault, not the actor's. It's up to the director to get the atmosphere right to get the best out of your auditionees.
However good a communicator a director is, unless they've been actors, it's just not the same as the shorthand you get with someone who's been an actor.
I've never trained as an actor. I've always thought I'm not a good actor. I've been told I'm not a good actor by a lot of people.
I've trained primarily in Meisner Technique, and I've done a little bit of Groundlings and Upright Citizens Brigade just to get my feet wet in the improv world because I think that's really important. But most of the teachers I've worked with, I've gotten, like, references through agents or managers, and they're sort of independent.
I don't think it's necessary to be an actor to get great performances out of an actor. But I do think it helps me as a director because I know what I like as an actor, and I try to get that to the actors who I'm working with.
As someone who's never been musically trained, I am sort of used to being in a position where I have to kind of do things on the fly because I wasn't trained as an actor, either, and I've very much learned on the job.
An actor puts himself in the hands of a director. And the director's first responsibility, obviously, is to tell the story, but the smallest thing that's not true reads on the screen. So if a director sees that an actor is not believable, he needs to help him become believable.
When there's an actor involved, the actor's talking to the director or the director's talking to the actor. But when there are not those two people interacting, it's all one person in your own mind, you have to be so extra-clear about what you need.
I am not trained to be a director or an actor. I have learnt everything by watching other people work and studying their work.
I don't really enjoy working in TV, to be completely honest, even though it's incredibly lucrative, I'm just terrified of not being satiated in a myriad of different ways. It's amazing that I get to create every day, as an actor, or a director, or a writer, and I get to do it in a variety of different genres and worlds and characterizations. I think that's the great privilege of what we do, we get to make believe. I get to go to so many different places, try on different occupations, take on different points of view. That's what's always been sort of alluring.
What I really plan to do is take the best scripts I get and consider them seriously. I can actually work as an actor and prepare a film as a director.
My strongest quality as an actor is taking direction. I will give my performance as a template and if the director gives any instruction, I take that information, process it and morph it into the next take. I love the feeling I get when nailing a scene through direction.
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