Entry from Journal
April 25, 1940
Every [movie] studio has its own style in writing. A Warner Brothers picture always has an interesting linear quality about it, but is always dead in parts. The picture I saw last night, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, In some ways it is such an ordinary picture that one is apt to overlook the remarkable assembly and compression of the machinery, for it is a piece of machinery, dead all over, inhuman, but machinelike in its precision and use of parts. Characters never have any doubts which pull them two ways — they are one thing, one color, good or bad, moving only in one direction, on one dimension. In a word, they are not dialectic — they are without those contradictions which are in themselves the source of the deepest human drama.
But I most not forget the superb old German actor, [Albert] Basserman, who played Koch, the great German scientist, in this picture. He had only several small scenes in the picture, but he immediately made every American or English actor in the cast look like a boy. How he did this I am unable to say, perhaps with great repose, a WHOLE grasp of the character, really talking to the other characters instead of acting talking. He was well aware of the meaning of every situation in which he found himself and it was to that meaning he gave himself, never to something abstract, never to, for instance, nobility in general. In a word, he acted, he was active, he understood, he dealt with!
You can tell the actors who give themselves over to something “abstract”. They are bad actors. Or maybe they are good actors who have been given bad direction, which happens to everyone.
Directors say stupid shit sometimes.
Like: “In this scene, I want you to be the pared-down essence of love and grace.”
What?
But what am I DOING?
Anything abstract like that is usually a director’s concept. And actors cannot act director’s concepts. Stop. Don’t tell me that shit. Tell me what you want me to DO and if you don’t KNOW what you want me to do, then get out of my way – let me do MY job, which is to figure out what I should be DOING in every scene, and I’ll let you do your job, which is to somehow get across the “pared-down essence of love and grace” through the production values.
If you have no idea what the hell I am talking about, please feel free to ask.
The great pianist Artur Schnabel once said that he never read American reviews because a European reviewer might say, “Schnabel played the second movement of the sonata too fast,” and Schnabel would think about it and finally decide that, indeed, perhaps he did play the movement too fast. However, his American critics would say things like, “Schnabel does not put enough moonshine in his playing,” and he would not know what they were talking about.