What I learned from acting – I’m No Actor

Good day to you all and welcome to today’s blog post. I’m usually talking about the practicalities of low budget filmmaking. But here I’ll talk a bit about my acting experience and how it helped me as a director.

I was once invited to play the character of a father in a no-budget short film. The script was pretty bad, but we managed to get it into a reasonable state before filming.

Filming was a disaster. The director turned out to be the most indecisive person in the world and I pretty much had to direct myself (and the camera person). Actually, I had a good idea of what I was getting into. But, as an aspiring director, I wanted to experience what it felt like to be an actor. Here’s how my acting turned out…

I really felt insecure the whole time. But I tried to shut the fear out of my mind. I tried to relax and let things come naturally. I thought I was doing ok, but I didn’t look at any of the footage so I didn’t know. But it felt ok.

There was just one time. I was delivering this line where I was supposed to be angry with my son. But I just couldn’t get it (nothing from the ‘director’, so just going on my feeling). Halfway through one line I was delivering it so badly, I stopped and shouted “CUT!”

So the film wrapped. Then one day I was invited to check the footage with the editor. I was eager to see if I had delivered at least a passable performance. And the result was – no. I was awful. Except for one line, which stood out to me as the only convincing line I had spoken in the whole film.

And you can guess which line it was, can’t you?

That’s right. The only line which during filming I knew for certain was terrible, turned out to be the only decent one. And I didn’t even finish it…

So, what was going on? The realisation I had was this: all those feelings I had boiling inside me – that I was delivering a line really badly – were actually the forces creating a good performance. I was feeling real emotions (of anger and frustration at my lack of acting ability), feelings so strong they took over. My attempt to pretend I was angry collapsed and was replaced by actual anger. And this made the delivery seem real. Well, because it kinda was.

I’m not saying I had discovered anything new. But it was new to me at the time. Perhaps acting isn’t about control, it’s about losing control. Or about controlling your ability to lose control (allow emotions to surface). Of course, there’s various methods for actors to use to help with this.

Certainly, it was an invaluable experience which stayed with me. I learned why a director who can help the actors is useful. That might sound obvious, but not all successful directors bother. Ridley Scott once told a new cast member on the set of Gladiator, “If you’re cast in a Ridley Scott movie, you don’t need directing.”

I learned why directing an actor with the instruction “Be more angry” isn’t going to help. Unless you’re playing a mind game where you want to annoy the actor by being a bad director, causing the actor to display genuine anger…

That’s my insight for the day. Hope it’s useful. It would be great to hear your experiences, so please share.

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