Acting for a Lens

The best known piece of advice about film acting is usually credited to Spencer Tracy: know your lines and don't bump into the furniture. It is also credited to Noël Coward and to several others, and nobody has produced a source that settles it. It survives because it is funny and because it is about half true. Film acting does involve a great deal of not bumping into things. It is also a different art from acting on stage, in ways that took the industry some time to understand.

The earliest film actors were stage actors, and they acted for the back row. The camera usually stayed at a distance, framing the whole body, and performers used large, readable gestures. As directors began moving the camera closer, the scale of a performance had to change with it. D. W. Griffith, who claimed in a famous trade advertisement to have introduced the close-up and much else, certainly helped popularise it, though others had used it before him. What the close-up revealed was that a face, enlarged to the size of a house, could show a thought before the actor had decided to express it.

That is the central fact of screen acting. The camera magnifies, and it is merciless about anything indicated rather than meant. A frown sized for a theatre becomes a grimace. A gesture that would carry to the gallery looks, on a cinema screen, like a person shouting in a small room. The skill is not simply doing less but trusting that the thought will read, which takes nerve.

Michael Caine, who learned his trade in repertory theatre and then spent decades in front of cameras, put his practical lessons into a short book, Acting in Film, published in 1990 from a masterclass he gave for television. Some of its advice is surprisingly specific. Do not blink in close-up, because frequent blinking reads as weakness. When looking at the other actor, choose one of their eyes, the one nearer the camera, so your own face stays open to the lens. Rehearse until the lines are so thoroughly absorbed that you can appear to be finding them for the first time, because the camera catches the moment an actor reaches for a line.

Then there are the disciplines no theatre requires. An actor must hit a mark, a strip of tape on the floor where focus and light have been set, without glancing down to find it. Every action must match across takes, because the editor may cut from a wide shot to a close-up taken an hour later: if the glass was in the right hand in one, it must be in the right hand in the other. The same scene is usually shot several times from different positions, so a performance has to be repeatable without going stale.

Films are also shot out of order. Schedules are built around locations, weather and the availability of actors, not around the story. An actor may play the last scene in the first week and the first scene in the last, and must arrive at each one knowing precisely where the character has been and where they are going. On a modern effects picture they may play it opposite nothing at all: a tennis ball on a stick, a green screen, a crew member reading the lines of a creature that will be added later. Several distinguished actors have spoken candidly about how lonely and disorienting this can be.

What ties all of this together is that a film performance is not given once. It is assembled. The editor chooses from dozens of fragments, and the director may combine a look from one take with a line from another. The actor's job is to supply fragments that can be joined, each one alive, each one consistent with the others.

That is why the furniture joke endures. It is not really about furniture. It is about the humility of a medium in which the actor is one contributor among many, and the performance the audience sees is partly made after the actor has gone home.