Here, Kazan discusses his early days as an actor. He became convinced that he could solve the problems of plays way better than the directors he worked for. He ended up being right. Nobody was better at interpreting the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller than Elia Kazan.
In the following excerpt, Kazan makes the statement about acting which is repeated ad infinitum by acting teachers, actors, directors, playwrights, and any time you see any really riveting acting, there is a whiff of Kazan’s definition in it.
And his definition is, of course, extremely simple: “Acting is turning psychological events into behavior.”
It was all about BEHAVIOR to Kazan. You can’t just sit and have an interior intense moment. It has to be SEEN. This was one of the cornerstones of his argument with Lee Strasberg’s teachings, which tended toward the emotion-driven only.
You could probably come up with 5,000 examples from movies of this.
The way Bogie barks at Sam: “PLAY IT”, with his head turning jerkily to the side a bit. Something is going on there, psychologically, with him. Bogie makes sure that we SEE it. His torment is not just torment – it is turned into physical behavior.
This may sounds like it’s simple and easy, but it’s not, and that’s why so few actors are truly good. Additionally, since so many actors now expect to only do television and movies, where they can rely on closeups, this emphasis on “behavior” is not as pronounced. It is why so many TV actors suck when they decide to “try out” Broadway. They have relied on closeups for way too long, and are not used to turning emotions/psychology into behavior that an audience, that someone in the back row, can SEE.
Excerpt from Elia Kazan: A Life
I believed that I could take the kind of art Osgood Perkins exemplified — externally clear action, controlled every minute at every turn, with gestures spare yet eloquent — and blend that with the kind of acting the Group was built on: intense and truly emotional, rooted in the subconscious, therefore often surprising and shocking in its revelations. I could bring these two opposite and often conflicting traditions together, as they should be brought together.
Acting is more than a parade of emotionalism, and it’s more than gesturing appropriately and manipulating the voice. It is also more than a series of deft and clever bits of stage ‘business’. It is — or should be — a human life on stage, that is to say, behavior. Total, complex, and complete.
Nor is direction what the Group directors seemed to think it is, a matter of coaching actors. It is turning psychological events into behavior, inner events into visible, external patterns of life on stage…
A deaf man should be able to tell from what he sees before him on stage the human event in all its complexities and subtleties.
That’s fascinating. I read in a piece by Stephen Hunter that American actors tend to work from the inside out, British actors from the outside in (he was writing about one of the recent Star Wars movies, explaining why the British actors’ performances were so much better than the Americans’ — when the dialogue’s that bad, there nothing inner for an actor to work with).
Also, there’s a joke to be made here about the acting in porn films, but I can’t quite find it.
Found it:
“Your post helps me understand why even in porn there are some actresses who stand out from their peers. It’s the subtle way they manage to express sexual desire — with just a sideways glance, perhaps, or a blow job.”