Excerpt from Michael Caine’s awesome book Michael Caine – Acting in Film: An Actor’s Take on Movie Making 
The close-up camera won’t mysteriously transform a drab moment into something spectacular unless the actor has found something spectacular in the moment. In fact it will do just the opposite: the close-up camera will seek out the tiniest uncertainty and magnify it …
If your concentration is total and your performance is truthful, you can lean back and the camera will catch you every time; it will never let you fall. It’s watching you. It’s your friend. Remember, it loves you. It listens to and records everything you do, no matter how minutely you do it. If theatre acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.
“If theatre acting is an operation with a scalpel, movie acting is an operation with a laser.”
Probably his most famous line, from the books and the series as well. It’s beautifully put. Practically a mantra.
I’ve wondered at times, though, if he isn’t relying on a moment in the arc of film acting. Just as some of the work in those “hard-hitting” dramas of the 50’s now looks woefully static and overblown (even though it was great at the time), I wonder if Caine is more caught up in the detailing of the long morph from stage to screen than he is in organic screen product. Our current generation of actors grew up surrounded by film in a way that the prior generation did not; Caine was a great innovator, no doubt about that, but I’m not sure his notion of precision and control takes into account the easy grace of kids who grew up staring at the screen and expecting it to stare back at them.
Well, Caine comes from the theatre tradition too – and there barely is a theatre tradition anymore in America, which is a bummer.
I think people with theatre training are far superior actors than those who just have done movies. I just do. Far more intersting to watch, and their work is way more specific. Because they’re used to having to do the work themselves – and not just relying so much on the camera.
I totally agree with you. When I was more of a regular at Shakespeare in the Park, one of my favorite parts of the show was watching the famous movie actors flounder.
I’m also old-school, and I hold with the snooty clique that says nearly any good stage actor can, with a few rough passes, work out the rules of the camera. Whereas most film actors are hopeless on stage, and their nuance and moments are useless when it comes to drawing a character from start to finish across the path of a play. Plus they mostly have no voices, all breathy squeaks and gritty, resonant whispers.
Alicia Silverstone (who I think is adorable on film) is a great example. I saw her in The Graduate and … she just didn’t commute.
Kathleen Turner, on the other hand, has stage training. It shows. She was awesome.
The show sucked – but Turner was great. I really want to see Virginia Woolf, by the way – I think she was born to play that part!
did u read the fab review of Turner in the Times? hooray!