Name: Good Acting vs GREAT Acting
Uploaded: 2024-05-29T17:03:51.000Z
Duration: 12 min 43 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Past simple

I think it's a very subjective thing, right?

What differentiates good acting from great acting?

I think it is interesting because I think if you don't understand acting, then you also think that you kind of just turn up and just do it.

There's so much work you do beforehand so that you can arrive on set, you're so prepared that you can deliver that work in a very short space of time.

The very subjective nature of this question makes it hard to pin down why certain performances make you feel emotionally moved, while others feel, well, stilted.

But I think people don't understand that preparation can take up to four, five, sometimes even six months.

The building the psychology and getting ready for the piece itself.

Actually getting to act is such a minuscule part of the experience that you have to love it that much.

I spent a lot of time on 47th Street, so I spent a lot of time with a lot of gamblers who had bad problems and lost a lot of things and lost their lives because of it.

I walked away thinking I knew everything.

Right now, it's a year later, I'm like, I forgot so much.

When I prep, I do timelines and backstories, and I work with a dialect coach and a movement coach and an acting coach.

And I just, yeah, I need to do a lot before I show up to set so I can throw it all out the window when I get on set.

Is a great actor just someone who can cry on cue?

My kids always say, I've never seen you cry.

I want to see what you look like when you cry.

You've had to cry in a movie, though, haven't you?

I've done like five times where I had to go full-on crying, and it's not easy for me.

It's always like stifling for an actor when it's written in the scene, like they begin to cry or they cry.

And then you're like, yeah, this is the scene where I'm gonna like, I'm gonna lose it, like snot's gonna come out of my nose, I'm gonna freak out.

I'm not some, I'm not like a tear performer.

I spent my life growing up like trying to make myself cry.

I kind of give myself a little bit of a safety net when I say to the director beforehand, I'll be like, yeah, I might cry.

So you can only control your intention and your degree of engagement.

In fact, when you're free of the idea of the result, sometimes the engagement can run so much deeper.

Focusing on being sad or angry often leads to indicating that emotion, and aiming for a result leads to a performance that feels forced.

There was a scene in The Master I shot with Joaquin.

I had in my head how the scene was going to go.

I was supposed to wake him up, and he wasn't waking up.

Because I was like, no, here's how the scene goes.

And I learned a lesson from that, though.

I mean, eventually we got there, but I had in my head how the scene was going to go.

Acting is active, and therefore an actor's focus is often on an actable objective or goal rather than an emotion.

If you can walk into an actor and say, just crowd the other guy.

That's such an active thing that the actor can do.

You don't want to give, like, I mean, you can give faster, slower, but that's usually not useful.

Things like, and the goal in this scene is, make yourself understood or something like that.

Because then you get to see their wheels turn about, how do they do that?

And there is often a temptation to believe a great actor is someone who censors themselves, aiming for subtlety and the most emotional of scenes.

I said, I'm going to do my work as an actress, and I'm going to make it real small, Denzel.

And I said, well, I'm doing a small for the screen.

He said, well, do what you think is too big.

And he said, I don't think that's too big.

Great performances don't hinge on an actor choosing when to hesitate, stutter, wink, or grimace, but rather being in the moment.

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Good Acting vs GREAT Acting

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