“What On-Camera Directors Mean When They Say…” by Jean Schiffman
This article is from The Actors Resource Backstage.
Film and TV directors are notorious for not speaking the actor’s language. Actors fresh out of drama school or with a stage background or with very little acting experience can be baffled by the directions they’re getting. Worse, they can be led astray — into indicating and/or result-oriented work.
“Film schools tend to short directors on acting training,” explains Eric Kline, who runs the Tony Barr Film Actors Workshop in Los Angeles and has consulted on about 25 episodics. “They teach them camera angles, lighting. They spend a lot of time looking at old Hitchcock films and may have inherited some of Hitchcock’s disease: ‘Actors are like cattle.’ So they never develop the vocabulary to communicate with actors at all and resort to obtuse, subjective, overly technical, misleading, or just plain weird orders, such as ‘More magenta!’” How is a perplexed actor to decipher what the director wants?
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