It’s been a while so I thought an update was well overdue. The script is still in the writing process, so nothing new on that front. Granted I’m perfectly fine with this, because I know the stronger the script is when we enter production the better the film will be in the end. What I’m really compelled to share right now is the experience I’ve been going through as an actor.

When we first started pre-production about a year and a half ago I never thought I would truly care about the acting side of filmmaking. After all the director is in charge of telling a visual story. Let the actors do their thing and I’ll do mine. Even with this naive view, I was curious to find out how a director could learn the language so at the very least I didn’t sound like a complete idiot on set. I had read several acting books and had taken a class in film school, all of these mainly geared at directors, but I wanted to actually see things first hand. I decided to sit in on a couple of acting classes and quickly realized how much actors bring to the production and how easy of a job it’s not.

After a couple of visits to the Truthful Acting studios our casting director Marco DiGeorge asked if I’d like to participate in the new curriculum him and Robb Maus were going to start to teach. I was a little reluctant at first, but decided to give it a shot.  It’s been close to a year now that I’ve been studying the Sanford Meisner approach to acting under their guidance and my life has never been the same since. Many of the schools of thought, and indeed  the way I’d been shown in school, approach acting in an intellectually way. The actors enter in a scene and they must contrive  or manipulate a way to feel mad, sad, happy or whatever. Through Mesiner I’ve learned that acting isn’t about knowing how a scene should be played, but instead that scene needs to be lived, that the actor must be in constant respond to the circumstances and his or her fellow actors, not as if it were really happening, but because it is really happening. Acting is living truthfully in an imaginary circumstance and each actor will have their own truth and must honor that truth. Otherwise the scene and ultimately the film will be dishonest and cliche.

Over the past year I’ve seen first hand how an actor can achieve this depth of personal truth and it has been quit a mind altering experience. The reason for this is because it is vary rare that we are indeed truthful to ourselves. We might think we are, but in realty we spend the majority of our day hiding our real feelings. We hide them from ourselves and we hide them from the people around us. We’re always cautious of what others might think if they knew what was truly going on in our heads. We’re afraid of looking stupid. We’re afraid of looking prideful. But through this work I’ve learned how to let go of these fears and grow not just as an artist, but also as a person. I’ve experience the gambit of emotions from happiness to sadness, to fear and frustration, love and hate. Many times experiencing not one of these feelings but multiple ones within moments from each other.

In the last few weeks our work has driven us to extreme depths and I’ve felt things I didn’t know I could feel. At least not to this degree and with such consistency. This isn’t some that resides only in a classroom, but carries out with you into the real world as well. You start to feel yourself as a person change and it’s both an exciting yet terrifying thing.

-Will

For anyone interested in learning a little about Sanford Meisner here is a link to a documentary. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNuFSrsYfpM