Stanislavski: An Actor Prepares

Stanislavski is not something you should study if you are into cartoony animation only. If you are happy doing funny drawings, and zany cartoons without a lot of depth, you can learn enough about personality from other sources.

If you have ambitions of trying match swords with the greatest personality animation created, I think it's a must read. Here's my excerpts from the first of five Stanislavski books I have.

An Actor Prepares:

To arouse a desire to create is difficult; to kill that desire is extremely easy. If I interfere with my own work, it is my own affair, but what right have I to hold up the work of a whole group?

When the subconscious, when intuition, enters into our work we must know how not to interfere.

You may play well or you may play badly the important thing is that you should play truly...

...plan your role consciously at first, then play it truthfully...it cause your subconscious to work and induces outbursts of inspiration.

An actor is under the obligation to live his part inwardly, and then to give to his experience and external embodiment.

You must be very careful in the use of a mirror. It teaches an actor to watch the outside rather than the inside of his soul, both in himself and in his part.

...never allow yourself externally to portray anything that you have not inwardly experiences and which is not even interesting to you.

A role which is built of truth will grow, whereas one built on stereotype will shrivel.

Whatever happens on the stage must be for a purpose. Even keeping your seat must be for a purpose, a specific purpose, not merely the general purpose of being in the sight of the audience. One must earn one's right to be sitting there.

...showing yourself off takes you out of the realm of living art.

Frequently physical immobility is the direct result of inner intensity, and it's is these inner activities that are far more important artistically.

On the stage there cannot be, under any circumstances, action which is directed immediately at the arousing of a feeling for its own sake.

...all action in the theatre must have an inner justification, be logical, coherent, and real...if acts as a lever to lift us out of the world of actuality into the realm of imagination.

Once you have established this contact between your life and your part, you will find that inner push or stimulus. Add a whole series of contingencies based on your own experience in life, and you will see how easy it will be for you sincerely to believe in the possibility of what you are called upon to do on stage.

If you speak any lines, or do anything, mechanically, without fully realizing who you are, where you came from, why, what you want, where you are going, and what you will do when you get there, you will be acting without imagination. That time, whether it be short of long, will be unreal, and you will be nothing more than a wound-up machine, an automation.

...an actor must have a point of attention, and this point of attention must not be in the auditorium.

Talent without work is nothing more than raw unfinished material.

Nothing in life is more beautiful than nature, and it should be the object of constant observation.

Search out both beauty and its opposite, and define them, learn to know and to see them. Otherwise your conception of beauty will be incomplete, saccharine, prettified, sentimental.

I am not a census taker, who is responsible or collecting exact facts. I am an artist who must have material that will stir my emotions.

An actor must learn to recognize quality, to avoid the useless, and to choose essentially right objectives. (p. 118 list)

Everything that happens on the stage must be convincing to the actor himself, to his associates and the spectators. Each and every moment must be saturated with a belief in the truthfulness of the emotion felt, and in the action carried out, by the actor.

...an audience wished, above all, to believe everything that happens on the stage.

Now do you see to what extent of realistic detail you must go in order to convince our physical natures of the truth of what you are doing on the stage?

Wherever you have truth and belief, you have feeling and experience.

...in real life also many of the great moments of emotion are signalized by some ordinary, small, natural movement.

Arrive gradually, logically, by carrying out correctly your sequence of external physical actions, and by believing in them.

...when you are called upon to experience a tragedy do not think about your emotions at all. Think about what you have to do.

A host of lowly truths is dearer than fictions which lift us higher that ourselves.
-Pushkin

The people who talk most about exalted things are the very ones, for the most part, who have no attributes to raise them to high levels. They talk about art and creation with false emotions, in an indistinct and involved way. True artists, on the contrary, speak in simple and comprehensible terms. Think about this and also about the fact that, in certain roles, you could become a fine actor and a useful contributor to art.

Through conscious means we reach the subconscious.

Never lose yourself on the stage. Always act in your own person, as an artist. You can never get away from yourself. The moment you lose yourself on the stage mark the departure from truly living your part and the beginning of exaggerated false acting. Therefore, no matter how much you act, how many parts you take, you should never allow yourself any exception to the rule of using your own feelings. To break that rule is the equivalent of killing the person you are portraying, because you deprive him of a palpitating, living, human soul, which is the real source of life for a part.

An actor should use his art and his technique to discover, by natural means, those elements which it is necessary for him to develop for his part. In this way the soul of the person he portrays will be a combination of the living elements of his own being.

Never begin with results. They will appear in time as the logical outcome of what has gone before.

You should remember that you must constantly be adding to your store. For this purpose you draw, of course, principally upon you own impressions, feelings, and experiences. You also acquire material from life around you, real and imaginary, from reminiscences, books, art, science, knowledge of all kinds, from journeys, museums and above all from communication with other human beings. Do you realize, now that you know what is required of an actor, why a real artist must lead a full, interesting, beautiful, varied, exacting and inspiring life?

Feel your part and instantly all your inner chords will harmonize, your whole bodily apparatus of expression will begin to function.

To grasp the spiritual delicacy of a complex soul it is not enough to use one's mind or any one "element" by itself, It requires an artist's whole power and talent, as well as the harmonious co-operation of his inner forces, with those of the author.

The main theme must be firmly fixed in an actor's mind throughout the performance.

...the main line of action and the main theme are organically part of the play and they cannot be disregarded without detriment to the play itself.

Above all preserve your super-objective and through line of action. Be wary of all extraneous tendencies and purposed foreign to the main theme.

Every action meets with a reaction which in turn intensifies the first.

...the three most important features in our creative process:

(1) Inner grasp
(2) The through line of action
(3) The super-objective

(Page 282, bottom half)

...put your thought on what arouses you inner motive forces, what makes for your inner creative mood. Think of your super-objective and the through line of action that leads to it. In short, have in your mind everything that can be consciously controlled and that will lead you to the subconscious. That is the best possible preparation for inspiration.

My main objection, however, is to putting an actor in an impossible position. He must not be forcibly fed on other people's ideas, conceptions, emotion memories or feelings. Each person has to live through his own experiences. It is important that they be individual to him and analogous to those of the person he is to portray. An actor cannot be fattened like a capon. His own appetite must be tempted. When that is aroused he will demand the material he needs for simple actions; he will then absorb what is given him and make it his own. The director's job is to get the actor to ask and look for the details that will put life into his part.

An artist must have full use of his own spiritual, human material because that is the only stuff from which he can fashion a living soul for his part. Even if his contribution is slight, it is the better because it is his own.

Every real artist should make it his object, which he is on the stage, to centre his entire creative concentration on just the super-objective and through line of action, in their broadest and deepest meaning. If they are right all the rest will be brought about subconsciously, miraculously, by nature. This will happen on condition recreates his work, each time he repeats his part, with sincerity, truth and directness. It is only on that condition that he will be able to free his art from mechanical and stereotyped acting, from "tricks" and all forms of artificiality. If he accomplishes this he will have real people and real life all around him on the stage, and living art which has been purified from all debasing elements.

Excerpts: Bambi vs Godzilla by David Mamet

This is probably the most brutally honest perspective of the film industry I've ever read. I will undoubtedly read this book time and time again, but when I don't have the time, I will refer to this page for my exerpts below.

Speaking on the truth in Dramas:
The audience has a right to these dramas, and filmmaker and the studios have a responsibility to attempt them.

*Page 78 subtext

The Three Magic Questions:
1. Who want what from whom?
2. What happens if they don't get it?
3. Why now?

Stay with the money. The audience came because you advertised the star. Shoot the star.

Burn the first reel. Almost any film can be improved by throwing out the first ten minutes.

If you think that perhaps you should cut, cut.

If you laughed at the dailies, you aren't going to laugh at the picture.

If you can't figure out what the scene is about, it's probably unecessary. If it is necessary, it's necessary only once.

The scene that works great on paper will prove a disaster.

If enough people tell you you're dead, lie down.

Individually they're idiots. Collectively, they're a genius. Anyone who speaks of the audience's understanding as diminished has never had to make a living by appealing to them.

When your plan of battle is proceeding perfectly, you have just walked into an ambush.

Life, in the art of drama or of the carver, cannot be aped, and the attempt to remove the element of chance must doom the project absolutely. For another name for "chance" is "mystery" and another name is art.

On the other hand, there are films of which we, quite literally, applaude the grosses, while the films themselves are unwatchable (e.g., Titanic).

Now, the more the audience is told about the hero - the more their legitimate, indeed, induced desire is gratified - the less they care.

As we enter the cinema, we relax our guard. We do so necessarily, because to resist, to insist on reality in the drama, is to rob ourselves of joy. For who would sit through a cartoon thinking constantly, "Wait a second, elephants can't fly!"

A traditional recipe for genius: inspiration, a plan, not enough time.

These men, and their performances, are characterized by the absence of the desire to please. On screen, they don't have anything to prove, an so we are extraordinarily drawn to them. They are not "sensitive"; they are not antiheroes; they are, to use a historic term, "he-men." How refreshing.

For if a regular person wandering in a mall somewhere may be shanghaied into watching a test screening, and if his opinion, and the opinions of his like, are the basis upon which executives determine how to place their bets, why not eliminate the executives entirely and proceed directly to the mall wanderer? Which is effectively what has happended in the casting session.

Feel free to treat everyone like scum, for if they desire something from you, they'll just have to put up with it, and should they rise to wealth and power, any past civility shown toward them will either be forgotten or remembered as some aberrant and contemptible display of weakness.

Stanislavsky wrote that the last ninety seconds are the most important in the play.

Excerpts: The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim

I wouldn't recommend this book unless you are comfortable with a lot of pyschobable. This book is FULL of pyschobable: Oedipus complexes, sexual insecurities, etc.

Basically this book is a high-minded discussion of the effects of fairy tales (and therefore most animation) on children. It discusses fairy tales from a story aspect, which is what interested me in the first place (that and the fact that Mamet recommends the book in his, "On Directing Film.") While I did pick up a lot of good information, which I've listed below, the book is very long, and very dry. Just stick to my notes, all the good stuff, that which is applicable to film-making and animation, is listed below.

"Safe" stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.

We grow, we find meaning in life, and security in ourselves by having understood and solved personal problems on our own, not by having them explained to us by others.

Fairy tales enrich the child's life and give it an enchanted quality just because he does not quite know how the stories have worked their wonder on him.

The fairy tale is therapeutic because the patient finds his own solutions, through contemplating what the story seems to imply about him and his inner conflicts at this moment in life.

The fairy tale offers fantasy materials which suggest to the child in symbolic form what the battle to achieve self-realization is all about, and it guarantees a happy ending.

Myths project an ideal personality acting on the basis of superego demons, while fairy tales depict an ego integration which allows for appropriate satisfaction of id desires. This difference accounts for the contrast between the pervasive pessimism of myths and the essential optimism of fairy tales.

The more secure a man is within himself, the more he can afford to accept an explanation which says his world is of minor significance in the cosmos.

On the other hand, the more insecure a man is in himself and his place in the immediate world, the more he withdraws into himself because of fear, or else moves outward to conquer for conquest's sake.

This is why many fairy tales begin with the hero being depreciated and considered stupid. These are the child's feelings about himself, which are projected not so much onto the world at large as onto his parents and older siblings.

Cleverness may be a gift of nature; it is intellect independant of character. Wisdom is the consequence of inner depth, of meaningfull experiences which have enriched one's life: a reflection of a rich and well-integrated personality.

The adult's sense of active participation in telling the story makes a vital contribution to, and greatly enriches, the child's experience of it.

The world becomes alive only to the person who herself awakens to it.

Only after one has attained inner harmony within oneself can one hope to find it in relations with others.

Excerpts: On Directing Film by David Mamet

David Mamet's books are always entertaining reads. David Mamet is to live-action screen/play writing what John K is the animation: The wise-ass old curmudgeon with a chip on his shoulder and a knack for expressing his opinions in a way that makes you laugh AND think...because he's usually right. I recommend anything he writes. You don't have to agree with him on everything, but at least let him affect you. I have more exerpts from more of his books coming up soon. Click the book or title to be redirected to Amazon where you can buy this book.

A good writer gets better only by learning to cut, to remove the ornamental, the descriptive, the narrative, and especially the deeply felt and meaningful. What remains? The story remains. What is the story? The story is the essential progression of incidents that occur to the hero in pursuit of his one goal

Let the cut tell the story. Because otherwise you have not got dramactic action, you have narration.

If you find that a point cannot be made without narration, it is virtually certain that the point in unimportant to the story (which is to say, to the audience): the audience requires not information but drama.

Only the mind that has been taken off itself and put on a task is allowed true creativity.

It is the objective of the protagonist to keep us in our seats

How do we keep their attention? By withholding all information except that information the absense of which would make the story incomprehensible.

You tell the story. Don't let the protagonist tell the story. You tell the story; you direct it. We don't have to follow the protagonist around. We don't have to establish his "character." We don't need to have anybody's "back story."

The more we "inflect" or "load" the shot, the less powerfull the cut is going to be.

Make each part do its job, and the original purpose of the totality will be achieved - as if by magic.

If the job is the objective, then when that job is given or when that job is absolutely denied, the scene will be over.

The less the hero is inflected, indentified, and characterized, the more we will endow him with our own internal meaning - the more we will indentify with him.

When the hero either gets a retraction or finds that he cannot have a retraction or will be restored. The story will be over.

Everytime you make a choice as a director, it must be based on whether the thing in question is essential to the story telling.

It's the nature of human perception to go to the most interesting thing.

You tax the audience every time you don't move onto the next essential step of the progression as quickly as possible.

It is the nature of human perception to connect unrelated images into story, because we need to make the world make sense.

To get into the scene late, and to get out early is to demonstrate respect for your audience

If a person's objective is truly - and you don't have to do it humbly, because you'll get humble soon enough - to understand the nature of the medium, that objective will be communicated to the audience.

If you're honest in making a movie, you'll find that it's often fighting back against you.

The acting should be a performance of simple physical action. Period. Go to the door, try the door, sit down. He doesn't have to walk down the hall respectfully. This is the greatest lesson anyone can ever teach you about acting. Perform the physical motions called for by the script as simply as possible.

Cartoons are very good to watch - are much better to watch, for people who want to direct, than movies.

Every time you show the audience something that is "real," they think one of two things: (1) "oh, dash it all, that's fake" or (2) "oh my God, that's real!" Each one of these takes the audience away from the story you are telling, and neither one is better than the other.

We don't have to know it's a slaughterhouse. We have to know it's where he wants to go.

Stick to the channel. The channel is the superobjective of the hero, and the marker buoys are the smaller objectives of each beat, and the smallest unit of all, which is the shot. The shots are all you have.

The task of any artist is not to learn many, many techniques but to learn the most simple technique perfectly. In doing so, Stanislavsky told us, the difficult will become easy, and the easy habitual, so that the habitual may become beautiful.

It's not up to you to decide whether the movie is good or bad; it's only up to you to do your job as well as you can, and when you're done, then you can go home. This is exactly the same principle of the throughline. Understand your specific task, work until it's done, and then stop.

Excerpts: The Portable Film School by D.B Gilles

So here's another book post. This time it's D.B Gilles, "The Portable Film School," which sounds like a Film School For Dummies calibre of book, but is actually quite fresh and informative. I was able to pull a number of nuggets out of this one. Most of what I got out of this one was a list of other books to read (which I'm excited about), and movies to watch (which I'm really excited about).

So without further adieu, here are my notes/excerpts:

The bittnerness of studying is preferable to the bitterness of ignorance

"...write about what you've experienced, but make sure you take the emotional essence and not the actual experience or you'll be making a documentary, not an engaging film."

The hero must fail before he succeeds.

In real life people may not change, but in art they must.

Talent is not a function of money

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." - Jack London

Get the script as tight as can be

You'll have a gut sense that no more constructive work can be done.

A lot can be done with a little money

"If an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, "It's in the script." If he says, "What's my motivation?" I say, "You salary." -Alfred Hitchcock


Some actors give great auditions and go steadily downhill after that.

"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of you life" -Lawrence Kasdan

"Write the story, take out all the good lines, and see if it works." -Ernest Hemingway

Editing is where the filmaker is most vulnerable to showing whether or not he has taste and talent

"I am a bear of very little brain, and long words bother me." - Winnie The Pooh

"Every line of dialogue should either reveal character, advance the story, or get a laugh." - Augustus Thomas

"What a character is grows out of what he has been and done." - Kenneth Thorpe Rowe

Tell nothing. Show everything.

Character should speak in what appears to be their natural everyday language. What they say must be carefully designed to move the story forward

Characters who are comprised of various aspects of real people are often the best. There are few figures in real life that can be transplanted bodily to a screenplay and yet remain believable and effective.

A compelling, complicated, three-dimensional main character with shadings, contours, and internal conflicts will hold an audience's attention. But only for so long. There must be a story.


We don't have to know everything about a character, especially the main character, right away.

An overwritten scene is like a conversation with a stranger that goes on too long.

Save the best detail for last. Always aim for the unexpected surprise, the huge revelation, the big finish.

"Strong reasons make strong actions." - Shakespeare

The more you rewrite, the more you get in touch with your characters and the story you want to tell

Bad things do happen to good people and within a good person's crisis there is drama and because you're a screenwriter it's to you to find the story

Keep your eyes wide open before you decide to marry someone and keep your eyes half-closed after you've gotten married

You're either sailing full speed ahead or drifting. People who don't have a plan get in the way of people who do.

Excerpts from Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

I've been doing A LOT of reading lately. I've mostly been reading about filmmaking. I'm starting to feel the drawing itch come back, so I'll probably read less, and starting sketching more in the coming weeks. I figured it would be a good idea to post my notes from the books I've read. This way I can access them from anywhere should I need to refer to them. And as a bonus, anyone that reads this can benefit from them!

Here's my notes from Sidney Lumet's book. This is an incredible book, click the image and go buy it now. Sidney is the director behind such amazing films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, 12 Angry Men (The original), Find Me Guilty, Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (I LOVE this one!), Gloria, The Verdict (Paul Newman is my hero), and so many more. He's one of those directors that doesn't really make a bad film. Anyway, here's my notes...

When I read a book like this, I usually attack it with a highlighter. All the little tidbits of information that are important to me at the moment, I highlight. It could be the name of a film that I haven't seen yet, or a simple thing I should look out for the next time I see a movie again. Naturally, I also highlight great quotes, and useful, thought-provoking statements. Enjoy


There are no minor decisions in moviemaking. Each decision will either contribute to a good piece of work or bring the whole movie crashing down around my head many months later.

We're not out for consensus here. We're out for communication. And sometimes we even get consensus. And that's thrilling.

I think inevitability is the key. In a well made drama, I want to feel: "Of course - that's where it was headed all along." And yet the inevitability mustn't eliminate surprise.

The script must keep you off balance. Keep you surprised, entertained, involved, and yet, when the denouement is reached, still give a sense that the story HAD to turn out that way.

Normally I'm not concerned about audience reaction. But when you touch on sex and death, two aspect of life that hit a deep core, there's no way of knowing what an audience will do.

A character should be clear from his present actions.

If the writer has to state the reasons, something's wrong in the way the character is written. Dialogue is like anything else in movies. It can be a crutch, or when used well, it can enhance, deepen, and reveal.

The way you tell a story should relate somehow to what that story is. Because that's what style is: the way you tell a particular story.

Improvisation can be an effective tool in rehearsal as a way of finding what you're really like when, for example, you're angry. Knowing your feelings let you know when those feelings are real as opposed to when you're simulating them.

No lens truly sees what the human eye sees, but the lenses that come closest are the midrange lenses, from 28 mm to 40 mm. The longer the lens, the closer the object seems, both to the camera, and to one another.

If I wanted to get rid of as much background as possible, I'd use a long lens.

When I need a long lens but want to keep the image sharper, we'll pour in more light

Good camera work is not pretty pictures. It should augment and reveal the theme as fully as the actors and directors do.

Blue or red may mean totally different things to you and me. But as long as my interpretation of a color is consistent, eventually you'll become aware (subconciously, I hope) of how I'm using that color, and what I'm using it for.

When this magic happens, the best thing you can do is get out of the way of the picture. Let IT tell YOU how to do it from now on.

I guess I'm talking abour self-deception. In any creative effort, I think that's absolutely necessary. Creative work is hard, and some sort of self-deception in necessary simply in order to begin. To start, you have to believe that it's going to turn out well. And so often it doesn't.

Don't let the difficulty of actually achieveing a shot make you think that the shot is good.

Don't let a technical failure destroy the shot for you.

You have to keep your eye on the dramatic impact of the shot. Is there life there? That's what matters.

When in doubt, look at it again a day or two later.

A good place to make an audio cut is on a plosive, a P or a B. An S works well.

Edit it for story, but as part of the form of melodrama, edit is as surprisingly, as unexpectedly, as you can. Try to keep the audience off balance, though not to a point where the story gets lost.

To me, there are to main elements to editing: Juxtaposing images and creating tempo.

If a picture is edited in the same tempo for its entire length, it will feel much longer. It doesn't matter if five cuts per minute or five cuts every ten minutes are being used. If the same pace is maintained throughout, it will start to feel slower and slower. In other words, it's the change in tempo we feel, not the tempo itself.

In movies where I'm not using tempo for characterization, I am very careful to continually change the pace of the movie in the editing.

I think of the tempo change over the arc of the whole picture. Melodramas usually accelerate...But in many pictures, towards the ends, I've wanted to slow things down, to give the audience, as well as the movie, time to breathe.

There are no small decisions in moviemaking. Nowhere does this apply more than in editing.

Movies are very powerfull. You'd better have a lot to say if you want to run over two hours.

Overlength is one of the things that most often results in the destruction of the movie in the cutting room.

Almost every picture is improved by a good musical score. To start with, music is a quick way to reach people emotionally.

The only movie score I've heard, that can stand on its own as a piece of music is Prokofiev's, "Battle on the Ice" from Alexander Nevsky

I like to make sure that every music cure has enough time to say and do what it's supposed to say and do.

Short melodramatic bursts or segues from one scene to another simply fill the air with useless sound and therefore reduce the effectiveness of the music when it's really needed.

Apocalypse Now, which has the most imaginative and dramatic use of sound effects of any movie I've seen.

Howard Shore's superb scoring for the Silence of the Lambs.

Everything becomes creative if the person doing the job is.

Without ancillary rights, most pictures would lose money. Commercial success has no relation to a good or bad picture. Good pictures become hits. Good pictures become flops. Bad pictures make money, bad pictures lose money. The fact is that NO ONE REALLY KNOWS. Through some incredible talent, Walt Disney knew. Today Steven Spielberg seems to.

And that's what so much of making movies is about: fighting.