This point comes up every time I work with an actor. I spent 20 years of my life as an actor trying to sort this out. And another 20 years as a director and coach. Let’s start with the question – ‘What is a character?’ – a character is a person from real-life or fiction […]
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Breathing for Confidence It’s really important to stay on relaxed breathing when nerves set in at the audition or performance. If you go into upper chest breathing, you get an imbalance of oxygen and carbon dioxide which makes you feel dizzy, nervous, sound unconfident and stops you thinking clearly. That’s why it’s called a ‘fight […]
The business of acting doesn’t lend itself comfortably to words or explanations. Acting is doing. I worked with a very famous, very cruel director once when I was an actor. But he did have one saying of great wisdom. ‘Don’t talk about it. Do it,’ he’d snarl. But of course, us actors love talking – […]
‘Let’s never betray the magic of our dreams…’ (Ingmar Bergman European Film Awards 1988) ‘Founded in 1988, the European Film Academy now unites 2,700 European film professionals with the common aim of promoting Europe’s film culture.’ (http://www.europeanfilmacademy.org/) I encourage all filmmakers to join! (P.S. The cut-down ceremony will be shown on Sky Arts1 Thurs. 6th […]
Yes – we all get frown lines eventually. And it is normal to frown. But frowning is a solo activity – by that I mean that it is when we engage with ourselves and not with other people. We frown when we are thinking, remembering in order to be precise, concentrating, squinting to see clearly, […]
Words are enormous! In life, we dig into our storehouse of memory, choose our words carefully, censor them, find new ones, then add another. We weigh our thoughts up against a visual, kinaesthetic or auditory memory, remember how we felt about it, and finally invest the words to describe it with enough vigour for the […]
Directors and Actors Sharing a Language Directors are busy, harassed, stressed-out people. The buck stops here. This is true for all directors, but especially so for screen directors. They may have to get 30 minutes of screen time in the day. Or maybe only a minute and a half, but it involves a helicopter shot […]
Had great conversation with @fearlessactress about acting etc. She is setting up feature ‘It’s a Good Day to Die’. http://bit.ly/womendir
This is a link to the publisher’s blurb on my new book plus a clip and excerpt from jeremy Iron’s foreword. The DVD is real time clips from many, many workshops featuring 68 actors and showing what I talk about in the book! http://nickhernbooks.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/ (My first book ;Acting for Film: Truth 24 Times a Second’ […]
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