Wednesday, April 2, 2014

CHARACTER BUILDING





When he came to watch me work, Wade said it was amazing because you couldn’t tell where instinct left off and technique began.  I couldn’t either, and Alex said it didn’t matter.  Wade thinks Alex has a very commonplace mind, which is the result of confining himself to the movies and never getting a whiff of the keen stimulating air of the theater.  




When you work in the theater, even in a flop, you realize all over again that an actor can be the prisoner of his mechanical responses.  Anyway, my instinct makes me do a lot of things that Stanislavski teaches, and they’re right.  Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve studied in my own way, and I really knuckled down when I made all those recordings on the pier, thinking about the songs and the feelings they gave me, etc.




However, Wade points out that even if you start with a rare natural gift, the world will corrupt it.  You have to be a very special kind of person to stand up to the world and say no.  Even though I said no to the last scene of Song and Dance and I don’t intend to sing unless I believe it, according to Wade the whole experience is insidious and the world tricks you into believing your own lies.  That’s what happens when I go cute.
   




Gavin Lambert, Inside Daisy Clover, New York, Viking Press, 1963.

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