 What are you doing? Thinking about... Hello Dittie Dittie Dittie Cuts Continues Hello Hello D Enjoy gosh Wow today we're doing a video why is your missile to have red berries and not white Uh, this is called the Anatomy of a Great Actor. Uh, yes. Well? Uh, oh. I believe this is actually the same channel we did of the Gangs of Blossyford. Uh, we're actually talking about the craft, not the actual physicality of the person's body. I suppose. You want to read this? Yes. No. This one. Acting is one of the most integral part of cinematic storytelling. That's true. Yep, yes it is. This video explores the craft of acting, what qualifies, no, what qualities define a great actor. Much has been said about how cinema is the medium for the director, but if director plays the god, then the actors are the one fighting it out in the trenches to the bitter sweet end. Interesting. This video essay may not resonate with popular beliefs, but showcases the importance of minute details of the artistry that is acting. Cool. Okay. So we're talking about, you know, talking about acting and stuff like that. Nothing tickles my fancy more. Don't talk about your fancy here, please. To talk about, I, there's truly nothing, I can, I mean, there are a few things that are like uncomfortable, but nothing more than I like talking about and studying and acting. Um, and once again, this is the same, I believe, the same channel that did, you tell me if I'm wrong, that did the Gangs of Blossyford behind the scenes kind of thing that we saw. Yeah, a lot of people apparently like this channel, so it's very underrated channel. So, here we go. What cinema is movies, you don't have to, um, doesn't necessarily move the camera, uh, the human face, the story being told by a person in the frame is the key thing, just completely. And if it isn't there for me, I mean, for me, it doesn't work. That's the case with most people like it. The technicality, like camera movements, sound design and editing are all out there. But they're all used in respect to the performance of an actor. Directors funnel their narratives through actors, but acting in cinema can be a little tricky because you act for the camera, not for the real audience. However, in Hindi mainstream cinema, doing more is considered as the right way of acting and the popularity of this method has led to a lot of actors being hailed as great actors when they are at the most good or average or Hindi garbage. Over the course of 100 years, the nature of film acting changed significantly. Acting in the 20s and the 30s in the jungle store was about glamour. Acting during the war, the war affected acting in film. And then people became about strength. And then the anti-heroic period became about having the private woman in public. And then now we've arrived at another place where great acting is to be physically fit. However, certain characteristics remain constant throughout this period. First of which is believability. An actor can use a lot of crutches to oversell certain emotions, like freezing facial muscles to sell the act of crying or flaring nostrils to show anger. These are the moments when actors want you to believe what they are doing. But great actors make you believe in the emotions they portray. They do that by putting a lot of effort into building the character by way of using their own personality into the personality of the character. Because ultimately, the primary objective is to recreate private moments in public. You recreate private behavior in front of a crew of 100 people. I mean, really recreate it. Really lose your mind. Really break your heart. Really do this. Make it happen in films. But being believable is not enough. The next important thing is being unpredictable. Audiences are smart when it comes to predicting characters out there. Even if an actor builds the character, the chances of her becoming predictable are quite high. These are the moments when audiences say that the acting was flat. What they really mean is that the actor fails to surprise them. Great actors build a great sense of mystery around them. So even when you know and understand the character, you never get an idea how they are going to react to certain situations. You tell me? Throughout the Godfather part one and two, Michael never acts out any violence himself. Therefore, this moment comes across as a great surprise. Improvved. So the moment is when an introverted and seemingly innocent Hanna actively justifies her action of letting people die. We couldn't just let them escape. We couldn't. We were responsible for them. Of course, this all stems from great writing. Thank you. But it is up to an actor to elevate written words into something that is quite hypothetical. Here's an excerpt from There Will Be Grudge for comparison. It's lost but now I'm found. I have abandoned my child. Yeah, this is so good. I've abandoned my child. I've abandoned my boy. Performances of this caliber can happen only when an actor allows herself to be affected by the material from inside out. When she allows herself to be vulnerable in front of the character. Take a minute. Bad actors guard themselves with an amount of invincibility. I love the actor. He pulls up at the different times. Or sell their eccentricities in the name of acting. It always keeps them as a distant performer. Great actors will always share parts of themselves they keep hidden from the world. True. With each new character, they put a different version of themselves in that character. Yes. It can be mean, lonely, scared, sorrowful, or devastating. None of the great moments occur on their own. Great acting is a teamwork. And for the teamwork to produce great results, an actor needs to be ridiculously good at listening. How important is listening? That is the most important thing of all. That's everything. It's essential. I would put that very high on the list of things. It certainly most important thing is in acting. I think the listening is the first thing you come with. If you can't listen, then you can't do it. An actor who knows how to listen is an actor that is a director you can cut to anytime. How do you do it? And she said, well, I just listen. And you listen. Once you listen, it's like a tendency. To me, listening is being able to be changed by the other person. It's not hearing them. It's not waiting for your cue. It's not when are they going to stop. So I can talk. It's letting them in. Listening is important because at the heart of hearts, great acting is great reacting. Disagree. And to react with right expression and natural timing, you need to listen. I mean really listen. And when it's done properly, you get moments like these. Listen to me. What have you done to him? Your business is in trouble now. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Why are you sitting like this? What? This in fact is the perfect scene to understand the difference between great acting and soulless acting. Here, Awad and Siddhas look like waiting to share their lines with same expression and same intensity. Whereas Rajat Kapoor and Atna Patta seem to react to every line spontaneously and differently, gradually intensifying the scene. They are not just saying dialogues. They are actually having a verbal fight and they mean every single word. But delivering dialogue is one of the many things an actor has to do. In fact, for average actors, saying dialogue in a stylistic manner is a job well done. Whereas for great actors, saying their lines is incidental. The real deal is the way they use their entire body. Now, there is a misconception that has grown over the years that extreme physical transformation has become a parameter for great acting. Gaining or losing weight or adopting different actions are all important, no doubt. But ultimately, they are external factors. Sometimes they are minor details and sometimes an ornament. The secret lies in how actors use their entire body to build their performance. How do they move within a frame or with respect to the camera? How do they vary the timbre of their voice for different characters? These decisions add a great deal of depth to their performance. If there will be blood, Daniel Day-Lewis uses aggressive posture and spring in his movement to portray dominance. Whereas in Lincoln, his large shoulders and slow movement portrays the weight of responsibility. Notice his voice in both the films. Now! With the fate of human dignity in our hands! If you're going to work in the creative field of any kind, you give yourself over to that. In The Aviator, Kate Blanchard uses a high-pitched voice to match Hepburn's stand-up. But as in Carol, her graceful voice expresses authority. And this is just a ridiculous level of brilliant. One of the greatest shape-shifters of- Oh fuck. I miss him so much. Now consider all these parameters. Belivability, unpredictability, vulnerability, ability to listen and react, and the use of body. So versatile. Now can you apply all of them in the same scene? Of course you can. In this scene, shape wants to invite Fernandez to his wedding as his guardian. But he hesitates as their relationship hasn't even reached the level of friendship. So he sets up entire context before reaching the point. It is believable because that's the way people approach conversation with power hierarchy. In addition, Shakespeare's serious approach to the conversation contrasts his over-enthusiastic personality portrayed in the film till this point. Which is quite surprising. His vulnerability is also at display as he indirectly talks about his loneliness, which is accentuated by the way he continuously looks down and displayed. But if you're thinking about looking down at the plane... And all this while, Fernandez listens to him carefully, gets affected by his words, and accepts the invitation. Now that is great acting. Another important criterion to define a great actor was noted by Stella Agnes. To paraphrase her, the greatest talent of an actor lies in her choices. That, I think, stands above everything. Every single acting technique and its implementation depends on the choice an actor makes. It is the primary reason behind actors getting trapped in a loop of self-aware redundancy and actors constantly pushing their limits through a variety of characters. It is the difference between actors continuously playing it safe by selecting characters with moral high ground and actors who continuously play a risky character through a moral gray area. Talent for making right choices, daring and risky choices is what helps an actor build not just a great filmography but a legacy through their movie. Are you sure about that? So the next time you watch an actor perform, don't accept anything that is not believable and truthful because the primary job of an actor is to hold the mirror up to society. In that process, if they entertain you, that's fine. If it earns them a lot of money, that's fine. But they should, under all circumstances, hold the mirror up to society. Through their portrayal of characters, we the audience examine our own life. So it is an actor's responsibility to be truthful. They owe it to the script and to the audience. And for those of you who are at an early stage of the acting career, here's a bit of advice. Live in front of people. Live in front of people. Let them see the good, the bad, the ugly, the weak, the strong, the conflicted, the terrible. One of the things about acting that gives me the greatest satisfaction is the opportunity for that emotional exercise. Thank you so much. Before we get into the video, I want to say a little tweet I saw the other day. Somebody asked him, he said, do you believe your character in whatever most current one Star Wars was? Do you believe he was a forest ghost? And he said, I don't know what the fuck a forest ghost is and I don't give a shit. I love that it's just become a grumpy old man. Overall, I think it was a very good video in terms of what it was saying. Obviously, there's a lot of debate between certain points he was making. Overall, I think he was making the correct points. But there's obvious, acting is a very broad subject in terms of, like, when he brought up Ranveer in terms of using extrinsic, what is the word, extravagancies or whatever. And I think he was in Ranleela. That's what that film called for. So sometimes, obviously, being a Nawazidin-level believable, like, in your face is not always required. No, the script doesn't call for it. Is it always appreciated? Yes. And is that obviously as an actor, what you should be to do is try to be believable in the moment? Yes. But I think it depends. I don't give a crap if everyone's believable in space balls. Yeah. And you can't tell me Jim Carrey is not a great actor in great example in every film. I don't need him to be believable in Liar to Liar. I need him to be Jim Carrey. Yeah, right. And it'd be funny, same with Will Ferrell. So, obviously, this was more focusing on the very dramatic, denuded Lewis style of acting, which I think for the most part, yes, I agree with most of it. There's obviously some debate with certain things he said, but I think it was overall a good video. I think it was overall a good video. It had a mix of some things that are spot on and some other things that are dangerously off in terms of if you're an actor and you're applying some of those things, I made the mistake early on in working out, out, outward in instead of inward out as an actor. So, for example, I remember watching myself in, there was this old show called The Judge where they take legal cases that they re-enact. And I played this guy who's on trial, a young guy being accused of having murdered his family, and you're not supposed to know that he did it until the very, very end. And I remember one of the things I wanted to do was take on an affectation that Jack Nicholson had in One Flew of the Cuckoo's Nest. You hear what I said? They take on. And I remember watching myself at one moment and there's a moment where, in the script, they're talking and I'm listening to the defense and I knew the camera was on me. I did this as I was, as the scene was happening, I'm listening and I went, you know why I did that? Why I opened my mouth? Because Jack did that in a scene in One Flew of the Cuckoo's Nest. Absolutely 100% wrong rationale behind why you should do something. Yeah, because that was unbelievable. That was me putting on an affectation in order to try to exude something from another actor versus being that guy on trial listening and everything that I did came from that moment I think that's what the video's most like trying to say though is that because that's why he brought up your fun and wasn't in Bunker's Tripathi and obviously all the other great American and British actors brought up as well. Even when you point out the brilliance of what Daniel Day-Lewis can do with the transformations in his voice, I promise you his goal wasn't to think I'm going to make a character with a great voice. I wasn't thinking that one bit. I promise you he was thinking who is this person? How do I find myself in them? What do they sound like? And everything about it. Because I know the first thing he worked on with Lincoln was the voice and he sent a piece of it. He read, he spent a year in prep just reading and he sent the voice template to Steven Spielberg on a cassette that said for a year or years only. And he said this is where I think and it was all built on what he heard people wrote about Lincoln's voice. It was never once how can I make an affectation on this character. It was how can I become this character and do justice. So that's where all that stuff about being believable, being truthful. One thing he didn't talk about, which Irfan is the quintessential master at, is the two alongside believability is effortless and ease. And you can't fake that. You either are going to be at ease and effortless or you're not. And it's freaking crazy difficult. No one does it better than Irfan. No one does it better than Irfan. Kankaj is pretty close. He's a pretty effortless actor himself. Very effortless actor. But yeah, no one I've ever seen is just as, they don't even look like they're trying. Because they're not. Yeah. Because they are just that. It narrows there, Al Pacino is there. There's a lot of work I've seen a lot of people do that have that level of effortless and ease. Dustin Hoffman and finding yourself in the role. There's so many actors to be caught up in what a trainer of mine used to call just the tools. And she was probably the best acting trainer that I had had at the time, was Christy Martin. Because I would do something that students and other people would be like, wow. And she'd say do it again. And this time don't use your tools. I don't want to see you use your tools because you know it's going to work. And you can pull the wool over their eyes. You're not going to fool me, Rick, do it again. And the whole class would be like, wow, that was brilliant. And she was like, bullshit, do it again. That's the kind of acting coach you need. Absolutely. So yeah, overall a very good video. It brought up, it's actually quite funny the way they edited it. And every time we talked about like a bad actor, it was like someone called. So clearly this guy has opinions. Strong opinions. I don't know that if we'll agree with Amir with what he was, he brought up Amir at a certain time where he was almost talking like a down a little bit. Right, as if all of the other choices he ever makes for the moral high ground. That's not the vibe I've gotten. No, because you can be accused for the same thing that Tom Hanks always chooses characters that take the moral high ground. And because there are roles that are attractive to some actors more than others. And they don't do it because it's what they're expected of. It's because that's the kind of role that they're attracted to. And you see a particular niche for them. It's like you tend to be attracted, like Anurag tends to be attracted to doing dark film. And he has said, just that's what I do. That's what I like doing. Yeah, same. So let us know any other videos like this that we should react to. I do love them. More of them. We've interviewed a bunch of the actors. They said we're the great actors of India. Sadly we wouldn't be able to get the interview here upon. And I know, and I'm getting, for Christmas, but it's taking a while to get to me is that book on the Indian Method acting book. Oh, cool, cool. Yeah, it's on the way. I can't wait to read that. That would be great. Let us know more videos in the comments below.