“I love acting.  It is so much more real than life.”
--Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

“We're actors - we're the opposite of people.”
--Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I was once photographed at an extremely dramatic occasion in my life. A host of emotions were roiling inside me, but when I saw the picture later on, there was… absolutely nothing there.  I might as well have been thinking about lunch or what was on TV that night.

Now imagine if Marlon Brando had been portraying the character of me in a film, living through that very instant. His expression wouldn’t have been banal like mine, it would have been extremely moving. Because Marlon Brando was one of the most remarkable and charismatic men who ever lived, he would have been able to imbue the fictional character of me into something profoundly greater than the less than the fireworks-free real-life me.

But the way I looked at that moment was the truth. What Brando would have done wouldn’t have been the unadorned truth but rather an elevated representation of “truth” that surpassed the ordinariness of what actually happened. In other words: it would have been art. The plain truth is usually boring, or if it happens to be exciting, it’s exciting in a clichéd way that wouldn’t get good reviews for its “screenplay.”  To portray life in all its complexity, art must fly above it,  like a bird. If you get too high, you lose it; if you’re too earthbound you’ll never get there.  Hence many actors study their craft in a class rather than standing on the street corner.  Which isn’t to say that actors they can’t and don’t do both, just that there is an understanding that acting is different from real-life, and you need a coach to help you fine-tune the distance that must exist between life and its poetic imitation.  

Which leads to the two big questions, so often posed: Can acting truly be taught? Or can it only be developed? 

Often when you watch a film you will see people who have spent a lifetime studying acting at the highest level working alongside someone who just got lucky. But some people who are highly trained are painful to watch and some, like Gabourey Sidibe of “Precious,” can give an inspired performance, despite having next to no training.   Can Cate Blanchett (one of my very favorite actresses) ever give me an experience like that any more?   Blanchett has been brilliant so many times that I assume greatness from her. That’s my fault, but that’s the way it is.  I don’t think it’s possible for me to experience her in the way I am hyper-alert to what Sidibe does. 

It was Louise Brooks who said that acting was one of the most difficult arts to explain. We all "know" it when we see it, but how can we describe it?  And what is there to describe?

When our defenses are battered by something fresh and unexpected, we forget that anything called “acting” exists.   We plummet into something like love.  It is anti-logical.  Critics can search through the Thesaurus trying to tame that feeling but it’s futile.  You can’t suture ineffable joy with words, critical theories or competitive awards. The power and wonder of acting lies in its unquantifiable beauty.   It’s something that the actors don’t necessarily need to know how they do, and its something that we shouldn't attempt to measure, because in doing so we lessen our own pleasure.  When we seek to reveal a magician’s tricks, we deprive ourselves of magic. 

River Phoenix once told me that he was sure there were a lot of people out there in the world who felt the same way he did. When he acted, he said he was trying to form a connection to these strangers he saw as friends.   And he knew that if he sent that message out there with a pure heart,  they would receive it.

“The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy.”
--from A.O. Scott’s review of “Paranormal Activity” in The New York Times

What are the criteria that critics and audiences use to praise actors’ performances?   When we notice that someone is giving a good performance while we are watching a movie, is this necessarily a good thing?  If we are multi-tasking, and calculating Oscar odds mid-story, does that mean we are not fully immersed in the experience and are removed from it?

So what is the purpose of film acting?  

I was a huge fan of the movie “Once,” and so I recommended it to an acquaintance, as something she might like.  She hated it.  As she was a serious student of acting, she found the performance of Markéta Irglová portraying Markéta Irglová to be so inadequate that she couldn’t enjoy the film.  I conceded that perhaps someone else could have played the role of Markéta Irglová much better than Markéta Irglová did, perhaps a trained actress or someone who was naturally more relaxed in front of the camera. But her character had a lot to be tense and uncomfortable about, and so I interpreted the behavior as being the character’s, not  an inexperienced real-life person struggling to act.--and anyway I was too moved by the entirety of the experience of watching the film to be distracted about whether Irglová deserved a Golden Globe or would make a good Lady Macbeth.  She broke my heart within this story and it didn’t matter to me if she ever got in front of a camera again.

Was Philip Seymour Hoffman brilliant in “Twister”?   Or maybe the right question is should he have been?  He had a dinky role, and he came in was nondescript and pretty forgettable and got paid.  He wasn’t “Philip Seymour Hoffman” yet.  Would he have been as creepily unsettling in “Happiness” if he already had his Oscar for “Capote”?  

Harrison Ford has often told a story about when he was a contract player playing a tiny role in “Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round.”  A producer told him that when Tony Curtis played a bit part like that he made you know that he was a star. And Ford said, “I thought I was supposed to be a waiter.”

It is a good thing that we try to recognize, appreciate, encourage and reward talent of all kinds. And actors deserve it, whether they have trained their whole lives, or just have an extraordinary natural gift.  They give us so much. But there are times when we just need an actor to be a waiter. 

Which brings me to “Paranormal Activity,” a movie I admire.  I generally agree with A.O. Scott, but I think he missed something important about the film in his casual put-down of the actors (above). I get the point that he thinks the film isn’t very good, but it is attracting huge audiences, and that’s intriguing. Why is that happening?

I believe the most important reason is that the film convinces audiences that the characters are real.  I have no idea if this is due to the talent or lack of talent of the director, Oren Peli, and his actors, Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat,  whether they did this purposefully, or whether they were trying for something else and achieved this effect entirely by chance. The result is the same:  the film makes a direct connection with its audience. Perhaps it has to do with the character’s essential ordinariness.

From the audience’s point of view, Featherson and Sloat aren’t perceived as unknown actors—they are seen as  “Katie” and “Micah,” real live people.  You can say that the audiences are dumb to believe this, and you can say that I am dumb to believe this, but that’s one of the main reasons I go to movies, to get hooked by stories, however preposterous.  And that’s why I was frightened, and that’s why the people in the theatre around me were watching while holding their hands in front of their eyes. 

“The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy.”   That’s it exactly!  Nobody is noticing any acting going on at all.   Sometimes you just need a waiter.  For a film like this it’s better to have Katie and Micah playing these roles than to have stars.  And this was the conclusion that Paramount came to when they abandoned their plans for a remake with “names.”

So what is the best acting in film?  Sometimes it’s the kind of thing you want to give an Oscar to. 

And sometimes you only know it when you don’t see it.

You feel so good

You grind out an at-bat
against one of the best closers in the game
and you get a favorable count
and you get a pitch in your wheelhouse
and obviously
you don’t want to miss it

and the fun part is
I was just thinking
base hit
hit the ball hard
somewhere

--Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez

The voice on the phone was oddly familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Who is this?”

“I’m the guy who changed your life.”

“No, seriously. Who is this?”

“Seymour Cassel.”

Well he played a role. But the guy who changed my life was named John Cassavetes.

I was a very pretentious, insufferable teenager. I loved Bob Dylan and played in a string of rock bands. I would devour writers—I read every word that Tolstoy wrote. I flirted with “radical” politics. But my big passion was the theatre, in particular Eugène Ionesco, Alfred Jarry, Jean Genet, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett. I wanted to be an actor and a playwright. I wrote horrible poetry and Theatre of the Absurd plays and still shudder at the memory my performance of “Krapp’s Last Tape.” My love was for Art-With-A-Capital-A,; movies were just TV distractions or handy venues for making out with my girlfriend in the back row.

I grew up in Monona, Wisconsin, a suburb of Madison, site of the State Capitol and the University of Wisconsin campus. Hanging out by myself in downtown Madison one Saturday, I happened to pass by the Majestic theatre, our local arthouse/grindhouse theatre. It was fun to look at the cheesy exploitation movies that often played there, but this week the window of the theatre was plastered with reviews for a movie called “Faces.” They weren’t blurbs, but in-depth essays. It was as if the film’s director, John Cassavetes, could be mentioned in the same sentence with the novelists and playwrights I admired. It was ridiculous, but I was intrigued. I decided to go in and see what all the fuss was about.

It was black and white. It was about unhappy adults behaving badly. It didn’t possess much of a plot, more like situations: a man (John Marley) breaks up with his wife (Lynn Carlin) and spends the night with a prostitute (Gena Rowlands); his wife’s friends come over to support her and she ends up meeting a free-spirited guy (Cassel) and taking him home. There was a lot of talking, a lot of it uncomfortable and very sad. These were very, very sad and lonely people, aside from Seymour Cassel’s character who provided glorious energy and high-spirits.

It didn’t seem to be written and the actors—if they were in fact actors—didn’t seem to be acting. Was Allen Funt hidden behind the wall with his “Candid Camera?” I didn’t know what it was or what I thought about it. But it had my attention. And then it ended. I didn’t know if it was a really sad ending or a sad ending that might have some hope in it, even if that hope meant that you accepted that life sucked instead of trying to run away from it.

When I left the theatre I had to walk around for a few hours to shake it off. I realized that the artlessness of the movie was in fact where its art was located. Once I understood that, I started thinking about the over-the-top Theatre of the Absurd acting styles I was so enamored of. I loved acting where everyone in your zip code knew you were acting and how fantastic you were.

I kept acting and I did have a lot of conversations with my high school director and advisor, Donald Robinson, about “Faces” and other movies, in particular “Five Easy Pieces.” I suppose I could have set my sights on becoming another kind of actor, a more realistic one, but as time passed I became focused on movies themselves. I skipped school every afternoon and went to film classes at the UW campus. At night, I went to the university film clubs. I saw Bergman, Fellini, Godard, De Sica, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Satajit Ray, Antonioni, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles. I kept a notebook on every film I saw. I also starting driving around town with my Dad’s Super-8 camera, stopping to record anything that caught my interest.

One day I set up my tripod at a big hippie party that was going on in Mifflin Street. All these long haired tie-died t-shirt wearing people were dancing with wild abandon to the sounds of a local garage band. A big breasted girl got up on top of a truck, took her shirt off and started flopping around. This was meant to show that we were all innocent and free and nudity didn’t matter. She drew a big crowd of leering guys, including 16-year-old me. I didn’t have the guts to film her though. After a while I noticed there was a pair of dogs fucking nearby. I set up my tripod behind the dogs and composed an image with the dogs in the left foreground and the debauched hippie revelry on the right. After getting about thirty seconds of pure gold, I looked up from my eyepiece to see this college girl standing above me, smiling sweetly. Without a word, she kneeled down, took my head in her hands and kissed me—a real kiss, on the mouth and everything. Then she got up and walked away. As I watched her disappear, I realized I had made her day.

But I hadn’t been attempting to use my composition as satire--I totally bought into the hippie ethos. I just thought dogs fucking was hilarious. But whether I meant to or not, I had created a cinematic metaphor, and not unimportantly, one that a pretty girl who was older than me liked a lot.

The passion for movies that Cassavetes had set in motion was picking up momentum.

Addendum: Why did Cassel call? I told my “Faces” story to Alexandre Rockwell, when I was trying to work on his film “In the Soup,” which starred Cassel and Steve Buscemi. Rockwell told Cassel, who ambushed me. I didn’t get the job, by the way.