Acting For Writers

I recently stumbled into the opportunity to act in a local production of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. There’s a lot I could say about the experience, particularly the joy that comes from getting together with other creative people and making something, but I want to hone in on what I learned, as a writer, from this experience acting.

Writer, Your Words Will Be Taken As Gospel

Actors will struggle to make sure to do your words justice if particular lines speak to them. They will wrestle with inflection, motivation, and the precise order of words.

And, in conversation with each other, they will praise the writing. They will adore it and speak lovingly of it, even as it gives them such grief to master it.

Actors will dig for answers. If you haven’t spelled out a detail to the character’s life that they think is essential to the performance, they will look for clues in what you’ve provided on the page and extrapolate. Reward their curiosity by suggesting a rich, inner life for each and every character and they’ll repay you many times over.

Writer, Your Words Will Be Ignored

I had a role where there were many stage directions to sigh. I ignored them all. Where the scene direction didn’t fit the stage or the performers or the moment, it was ignored.

One particular moment that stood out to me: The direction accompanying my line said that I should look to the heavens in despair. I looked down instead. There was no deep motivation behind my action. It was just more comfortable and natural to my sense of the character.

Those lines that the actor feels are sacred? That’s part of the character. They have to live and breathe as this person for the performance, so everything they do needs to make sense while in character. Anything they trip over either needs to be interrogated until it makes sense, or it’s thrown out. If it’s a moment that’s inessential to the story, it’s more likely to be thrown out.

Writer, Your Words Will Become Inside Jokes

The number of people who take part in any production, be it for stage or screen, are going to hear and see the same things multiple times. And there will be moments when they’re not actively working. These people have one definite thing in common: The production they’re working on at the moment.

Lines from the production will creep into everyday vocabulary. Words you intended for a specific purpose for your characters will come out of the mouths of any number of people, turned into a micro-meme. And this will lead the people working on the show to interact and find what else they have in common. Your words are a catalyst for events outside of the dramatic scenario.

Writer, Your Characters Are Waiting For You

In the best of circumstances (and it felt this production was particularly fortunate in this circumstance), there are clear connections between actor and character. There are aspects of themselves they can bring into the fiction, and places where there’s a bleed between the story and reality.

And in the best of circumstances, the actors will feel grateful to the writer for giving them the opportunity to explore and share that portion of themselves through the conduit of the story.

If your story isn’t finished; if you haven’t gotten it out into the world, know that there are people impatiently waiting for someone to tell their story. Don’t leave them hanging.

Write Down Your Bad Ideas

I had a bad idea this morning over breakfast. A ridiculous bad idea that started out from a fun high-concept premise, but that I found to have a variety of potential plot holes and red flags.

I added it to my idea notebook anyway.

Bad ideas can become good ideas over time. You may eventually come across solutions to the problems you see in the idea and want to run with it. Or, part of this idea might fit better with something else you come up with. A bad idea can still be stripped for parts.

But some bad ideas will stay bad ideas. There’s nothing wrong with that. By writing it down, you already know you’ve had that bad idea before. You can see the problems you had with it. The idea gets out of your head and into a more tangible place where you can look it over a little more objectively.

It’s good to make reasoned judgements about what stories to take from idea to execution, but that same filter can stifle your creativity if you apply it too early in the process. Keep that idea notebook (or app) handy. Fill it up. Get everything out of your head, no matter if you know for certain you can use it.

All your characters are going to die

Just maybe not during your story.

How do they feel about that? Do they think about it at all? Is it a constant fear? Is it something they acknowledge but don’t strongly internalize?

What do they think death is? Do they see it as an end? A beginning? A transition in a cycle?

Where do they define death? Is it clinical, or is there some kind of loss that to them seems close enough to count as death?

What they think of death, or if they think of death, has a profound impact on how a character makes decisions. This isn’t just about stories that deal with death outright. Just because a character isn’t racing to complete a bucket list or facing imminent annihilation from an alien horde doesn’t mean their feelings on death don’t play in to how they live.

Almost There

How would you change the way you behaved if you thought your goals were within reach?

Would you get frustrated at fewer things? Would you be more mindful of your time? Would you be more eager to take action?

You could replace “I’ll get to that later.” with “I’ll make time for that today.” You could replace “I’ll never get this done.” with “What’s next?”

There’s a time and place for critical assessment of your work. It doesn’t need to be how you start your day.

So why not behave as if you’re almost where you want to be? Why not start each day choosing to believe you are closing that distance?

Pacific Rim and Picking Protagonists

One thing I keep reading and hearing in the discussion of Pacific Rim is this phrase: “Raleigh Becket, the protagonist.” I take issue with that description.

Raleigh is to Pacific Rim as Nick Carraway is to The Great Gatsby: He’s a point-of-view character and a catalyst. The voiceover used at the beginning of the film is from Raleigh. He welcomes us in to the world of the film and the initial events in the film’s present tense feature him. While not every scene comes from his perspective, much of the film involves his presence. However, by many measures of how a protagonist is defined, Raleigh doesn’t fit the bill.

The character with the greatest growth and development during the course of the story is Mako Mori. Mako goes from Stacker Pentecost’s ward and assistant to a full-fledged jaeger pilot. She steps out from Stacker’s shadow and reveals herself to be a capable fighter and strong-willed individual.

Consider the focus the film puts on revealing Mako, both visually and in her character. When we first meet her, she is hidden under a coat and large umbrella, distinguished by the two blue streaks in her hair. We only begin to understand who she is in these scenes as she tells Raleigh that she doubts he’s the pilot for this job. Later, during the drift compatibility test, she removes her uniform shirt and shoes. She is more visually exposed, and through her actions, we also see further aspects of her character expressed: The tactician and physical combatant. We see more of the internal fire pushing her to get inside the jaeger. Finally, during the test, we go inside her own memories. We see, mediated through Raleigh’s experience in the drift, the small child in that blue coat who ran from a massive kaiju having lost her family. The film slowly pulls back the layers of Mako, revealing them to the audience, making the development and exploration of her character necessary work toward getting her in a jaeger and achieving the goal of finally defeating the kaiju.

Mako and Stacker are two characters who must come to difficult decisions over the course of the film. Raleigh has no questions about what he needs to do from the moment Stacker comes to take him away from the wall. Mako’s development as a hero is stifled by her conflict with Stacker, and how Stacker needs to learn to respect Mako as an adult/a pilot/an autonomous person who can live without his protection.

Raleigh is a catalyst for this conflict, pushing it toward resolution. Raleigh may push for Mako to be given a chance, or for Stacker to change his mind, but his words are not the most important actions. Mako’s years of training make her capable of proving her drift compatibility with Raleigh, and her efforts as a teammate with him make Gipsy Danger a key part in the final battles against the kaiju. Raleigh doesn’t make Stacker’s mind up for him, but he doesn’t allow Stacker to close the discussion. Stacker’s choices about what actions he will take are his own, and the result of his long relationship with Mako.

Consider the other side of this argument. What does support Raleigh as a protagonist? At the beginning he’s a former jaeger pilot whose brother was killed while they were linked together. He’s suffering from that trauma and tries to disappear, going off to work alone on construction of the Alaskan wall. However, all it takes is one quick speech from Marshall Pentecost to get him back in the game. Yes, Raleigh does need to learn to trust a new co-pilot and learn to let somebody else into his head, but these challenges don’t receive as much focus and screen time as the conflicts surrounding Pentecost finally letting Mako out of his protection, or Mako’s fulfilling her vengeance against the kaiju and realizing her potential as a jaeger pilot.

Furthermore, this film acts in the mold of a decentralized war film/team-up film than a single “hero’s journey” style story. While Mako’s conflict provides a spine for the story to follow once we’ve been introduced to the characters, she isn’t the only one involved in this fight. While Raleigh may make the final, decisive actions of the battle, the themes of the film center around the idea of cooperation being stronger than individual effort. Raleigh closing the rift couldn’t have happened without the sacrifice of Stacker and Chuck, the intelligence gathered by Newton and Gottleib, or his partnership with Mako.

This film weaves the theme of cooperation over isolation into almost every major beat. For example:

  • Jaegers need two, mentally linked pilots.
  • Newton’s attempt to drift with a kaiju required him to team up with Gottleib, putting aside their individual differences to better carry the neural load.
  • Kaiju are more deadly because of their hive mind. Each new one has learned from the experiences of the kaiju before it.
  • When Raleigh is working on the wall, the stakes for the workers are on an individual basis instead of focused on a greater victory for all. Instead of the foreman talking about how this wall will protect people, he says that if they do this work, they can earn individual ration cards for themselves. And soon after, we see how weak these walls are.

These are all aspects of a deeply embedded theme that makes picking out a single protagonist difficult at best and missing the point at its most extreme. This is not Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, etc. This is a movie about teamwork. This is a movie about how great victories aren’t accomplished alone. Identifying Raleigh as the (sole) protagonist misses out on this complexity.