Sunday, March 14, 2010

I wasn't completely sure what to expect as I waited for Jeffrey Tambor's acting workshop session to begin, but I had heard nothing but overwhelmingly positive things about sessions from previous years.

As it turned out, the praise bestowed on his workshop was much deserved. This year, Tambor ran the workshop around two actors, Chris Doubek and Heather Kafka, from the SXSW film Lovers of Hate.

Immediately, it was clear that Tambor's workshop was free from pretentiousness. I loved his philosophy about getting the best performance from actors. "You can't fix a scene unless you fuck it up first."

So that's exactly what he did. He had the actors perform a scene from their movie, then encouraged them to re-create the same scene, purposefully over-act, run through a gamut of emotions, and even had them sing their lines as if they were in an opera.

The key to have your actors to loosen up and run through their scenes in outrageous ways, Tambor said, is to make them feel safe. It's the director's job, he said, to tell the actors, "You're safe to fall. You're protected."

Once they're safe, actors can feel free to play. "Keep playing, keep playing," Tambor repeated throughout the panel. He said it's important to access the three-year-olds inside your actors, and make them play.

However, he cautioned that it's important for these playful sessions to never be done in front of the crew. The crew can make actors feel exposed, vulnerable, and closed from things they'd otherwise try in private. Once the actors are "hot" and once the scene is at a level the director and actors are happy with, it can be performed in front of a crew.

Directors shouldn't be afraid to have their actors access dark places in their personalities or pasts, he said. "No actor has been hurt by going to the dark places." In fact, he said, they usually love it.

The best advice he said he had for directors was "Just be a human." Understanding and relating to actors as human beings is the quickest way to earn their trust and make them feel safe enough to perform at their peak.

So much of the art and craft can easily get lost, especially in studio productions with lots of money at stake. Tambor made a very clear distinction between an amateur, which he considers himself, and a professional: "Amateur means 'lover'. Professionals want to get paid." The best actors, he said, are amateurs in the strictest sense.

To the actors in the audience, he suggested they always say "Thank you," when a director gives notes, whether they like them or not.

It was fascinating to watch Tambor work and share stories and advice from his seemingly limitless collection. He made two actors, who were thrown into a brightly-lit room filled with strangers, relax and open up to emotions and approaches for a scene that they hadn't explored.

He has such a pleasant and easy way of speaking, and he makes the core of acting, and the core of what we do every day, staggeringly obvious: It is all about human interaction. Once you strip away the pretense and artificial hierarchies of the world, it's nothing more than humans interacting with each other.

I left the session feeling a bit lighter, and the people in the corridors of the Austin Convention Center didn't seem like such strangers anymore.