[HN Gopher] How actors remember their lines
___________________________________________________________________
How actors remember their lines
Author : pepys
Score : 483 points
Date : 2024-05-30 05:21 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
| ugh123 wrote:
| Loved this quote from Michael Caine
|
| >You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You
| take it off the other actor's face. Otherwise, for your next
| line, you're not listening and not free to respond naturally, to
| act spontaneously.
| echelon wrote:
| The Meisner repetition technique is such a powerful method of
| teaching this.
|
| The technique has two or more actors repeating the same lines
| back and forth at each other, based on simple observation and
| repetition. But what's really being said and communicated is
| the subtext of how the actors sense and feel - not the words at
| all.
|
| Saying "you're wearing a blue shirt" might encode the thought
| "I don't like the tone of your voice" or "you've got a nice
| smile." And the other actor is meant to read that off of you
| and respond in kind.
| noufalibrahim wrote:
| This is very interesting. Some lines which I remember from
| movies, I rarely do so because of the words. It's almost
| always because of the way it was delivered and the emotion or
| "vibe" that it put out.
| eszed wrote:
| Oh, God. I can't stand Meisner work! I had to do a fair bit
| of it in graduate school, and it never, ever clicked with me.
| I could see it working for other actors, so I don't discount
| it, but I find it tedious in the extreme. Can you tell me a
| bit more about what you get out of it? What's your internal
| experience of the repetition exercises?
| echelon wrote:
| > What's your internal experience of the repetition
| exercises?
|
| It's a lot like improv in that you establish an unspoken
| protocol for exchanging lots of side channel information.
|
| But unlike reading between the "yes, and" subtext to build
| a narrative world and rules, you're taking in raw, full
| sensory emotion in an intimate way by completely dropping
| your own filters. Brains melded, firewall open. You have to
| say what you see, what you understand, and what you feel.
| And you have to tell the truth and not lie to yourself and
| your partner.
|
| It's as uncomfortable as staring into their eyes, until it
| stops being uncomfortable. And you don't even have to be
| looking at one another. You can hear it in their breathing
| and the cracking of their voice. You know exactly how you
| feel about everything with exacting precision. You're
| uncomfortable and vulnerable and excited and anxious, and
| you let them know.
|
| Meisner removes all the social filters of the adult brain.
| All the platitudes and the scar tissue of decades of
| interacting with people in society. You stop judging and
| worrying and just say and do what you feel. And you hear it
| from them too, and you believe them because they're being
| honest with both you and themselves.
|
| You know if they're lying, because you've trained and can
| sense it. And you'll call them out on it. They'll do the
| same to you when you attempt to hide. They'll really dig
| in. Once you're under that spotlight, there is no hiding.
| You can go wherever you choose to go. It feels raw and
| weird and more intimate than being with a lover.
|
| With practice, "you're wearing a blue shirt" becomes "I
| don't like how you look at him and smile, but when you look
| at me you frown". And everyone cries and yells and things
| get thrown.
|
| On the spectrum of our robotic "how are you? / I'm fine,
| and you?" programming and a raw and intense fight with a
| lover, Meisner is the latter. Except you get to be that
| authentic for the entire range of human emotions: good,
| bad, happy, sad. A door to everything you could potentially
| feel.
|
| It's animalistic and completely cerebral. And it's real and
| you live it. Sometimes you come away shaking.
| eszed wrote:
| Huh! That's my experience of performing, for sure, but
| Meisner wasn't presented to me that way. One of the
| teachers of a workshop I was in had studied with Meisner,
| and had led (I think?) the London Meisner Institute, so I
| figured I was getting it straight. She approached
| repetition exercises more like intuitive textual analysis
| - finding the subtext, as you (or someone else) said up-
| thread. I've never had trouble supplying more subtext
| than anyone could ever want, so that bit didn't do
| anything much for me.
|
| Neither did the crying and the yelling. I did too, just
| so as not to be left out (crying and yelling is always
| good fun), but they all took it so damn _seriously_ that
| I wasn 't sure where the line was between useful work and
| self-indulgence.
|
| Oh, and also I think a professional actor ought to be
| able to drop in without having to drag someone else
| through ten minutes of repeating the first three words of
| their lines back and forth until the syllables are
| drained of all meaning. True story! I was as good a sport
| about it as I could be, but gosh... It was drizzling, and
| the lighting guy fucked off for tea, and I sure wished I
| could too.
|
| I know more direct ways to get students to drop their
| inhibitions and tune into each other than repetitions.
| (Oh, and the audience! Everything I've seen of Meisner
| neglects the audience, and I think being aware of them is
| really important for stage work. Camera, same, for screen
| acting.)
|
| Anyway, I'm sure I'm just missing something, and being
| grumpy. Like I say, I've seen positive results for some
| actors (though not the chick in the rain), so it's doing
| _something_ , and I'm glad it works for you.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Good lord that sounds terrible.
|
| From my understanding, the repetition exercise has always
| been something taught to brand-new students in the first
| month of acting classes, to demonstrate the difference
| between reciting lines and saying things in a
| spontaneous, believable manner. As well as to teach what
| subtext is.
|
| The idea that anyone would be doing the repetition
| exercise after their first month of acting school baffles
| me. It's not a technique that was ever intended for, or
| should be used by, professional actors, as far as I've
| ever understood it.
| Keyframe wrote:
| I can't tell from that angle, but having directed quite a
| few actors over years, there's a big difference in actors
| who've went to the workshops and internalized the process.
| It just shows, for the better and you can spot them rather
| quickly. Namely, you can tell they (for the better part)
| react 'naturally' making the character far more believable.
| Take what you will from this, but that has been my
| experience.
| eszed wrote:
| That makes sense. Someone else down-thread says Meisner
| isn't something they'd use after the beginner stage. I
| think, by that point in my career, I'd internalized
| enough of those lessons in other ways that it was kinda
| pointless _for me_. If I were still teaching I might give
| it a go with a beginner class - though I doubt I could
| teach it with conviction, so I 'd probably call in
| someone else for a day.
|
| Like I say, I've noticed the same thing you have, so
| there's clearly something there. I've just never "got
| it", so it kinda fascinates me.
| MrVandemar wrote:
| This sounds like the basis for the "Baseline Test" in Blade-
| Runner 2049. Fascinating write up here:
| https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-
| key...
| tapotatonumber9 wrote:
| "These pretzels are making me thirsty!"
| crazygringo wrote:
| The Meisner _repetition_ technique, sure. (Although it just
| doesn 't connect/resonate for a lot of actors.)
|
| But the Meisner technique also teaches you to learn your
| lines by rote, practicing them in a monotone, intentionally
| devoid of meaning (the opposite of what this article
| describes), under the theory that this will free you to add
| spontaneous emotion in the moment.
|
| Whereas in my experience that's a terrible approach. It makes
| it vastly harder to learn the material (as this article
| suggests), and then students tend to perform closer to a
| monotone because that's how they practiced it and built an
| unconscious habit of association -- _or_ once they 're able
| to bring emotion to it they forget their lines because the
| emotion was overwhelming and they don't have the lines "in
| their bodies" connected to the emotions that are going on,
| because they learned them by rote.
|
| As you can tell, I'm not generally a fan of the Meisner
| technique overall...
| dbish wrote:
| I love his way of putting it. Memorizing lines as a kid for
| plays always felt easy but it's because of something like what
| he describes.
|
| My biggest play to memorize was as one of the leads of The
| Importance of Being Earnest in high school and a big part of
| knowing it end to end was how I memorize talks today, just
| repeating it until you become the part, and feel like you know
| "your part" not "the lines". You're not regurgitating lines,
| you're stepping through and reacting based on a set of
| information to a point where you don't even feel like you're
| trying to react. This also helps a lot with improvising when
| things go wrong since you're just following the flow your
| character would with the stimuli, rather then having to step
| line by line through. The worst people to act alongside were
| the rote memorizers who would break that flow to go back to a
| line that was missed or just freeze.
| eszed wrote:
| Yes, exactly! What's really exciting is that you will have
| trained yourself to think your way through the material in
| the same way that Wilde - or Shakespeare, or Beckett, or
| whoever - did. It's mind-expanding, in the best possible way.
|
| When I was in a classical piece I'd usually come off stage
| speaking iambics or couplets for a while, without ever
| meaning to.
| bloak wrote:
| That sounds great for the cinema: if it goes off the rails the
| director can let it run for a bit if it looks some great improv
| or else shout CUT if it doesn't. However, on the stage ... I'm
| not so sure ... your fellow actors might not be so flexible and
| you might need to help them. Also, stage drama doesn't
| necessarily aim for the kind of "naturally" that is expected in
| modern cinema: a lot of it is deliberately "theatrical" in one
| way of another. The audience can't see a slightly raised
| eyebrow so you can do some dramatic gesture with your arms for
| the audience while slightly raising your eyebrow to communicate
| something to your fellow actor. Perhaps. I don't have practical
| experience of this. I'm just speculating. I expect someone will
| tell me if I've got it all wrong.
| the_af wrote:
| > _However, on the stage ... I 'm not so sure ... your fellow
| actors might not be so flexible and you might need to help
| them._
|
| Isn't this why they do stage rehearsals? Not so much to
| memorize the lines, but to see how each plays off the other
| actors. And it is while rehearsing that they can detect that
| something "isn't working".
|
| To me, what Michael Caine is saying seems _essential_ for the
| stage, even more so than for cinema. For cinema, you can
| reshoot if a line or interaction feels unnatural. For theater
| you don 't have this luxury.
|
| If you are saying out loud "memorized lines" you're really
| not paying attention to the other actor. Some theater is
| deliberately "artificial", but a lot isn't. And they
| definitely want to play off what the other actors are saying,
| otherwise it feels mechanical... which is what happens in
| unprofessional or kids' plays, everyone is "reciting" and it
| doesn't feel like a real play!
| ggm wrote:
| The tl;Dr is they do it by a massive investment in time and
| brainpower, mechanistically or not. Michael Caine contextualises
| it as living inside the characters mind.
|
| We can recall bashful by context is true. The depth of context an
| actor has to carry is far beyond that, it seems to go to
| motivation, intent and meaning in deep ways.
|
| The trope of an actor asking the director "what's my motivation"
| when they're a redshirt and die in scene 2 may actually be ..
| true: everyone probably has to know why they say what they say to
| remember to say it well.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I once asked a director "why do we spike the fine makeup
| station in three different fine places for the three backstage
| scenes?" and she replied "because the relationship between the
| younger actor and older actor changes between those scenes: in
| the first, the older is a mentor, and in the last, the younger
| has eclipsed him, so the angle of the station to the audience,
| literally upstaging the older actor, reflects his metaphorical
| upstaging during their careers."
|
| Not only did that make sense, but it's an example of _even the
| scenery_ profiting from learning its motivation.
| eszed wrote:
| It's absolutely true, in the sense that everyone on stage /
| screen needs a strong internal logic for why they're doing what
| they're doing in order for that world to come to life.
|
| It's a basically satirical trope in the sense that only a bad
| and unprofessional actor would need to ask the director to tell
| them what it should be!
|
| Generally the translation goes the other way. The director
| gives a external-result oriented note (like, "I need you to be
| more frantic, here"), and then the actor comes up with the
| reason why that would be the case.
| ravirajx7 wrote:
| Wow! Brilliant Read. I love how our mind loves to read and
| visualize scripts and it's like in between infinite thoughts
| going within. The time we repeat we think in some different way
| thinking "Oh yeah! Now I understand this more".
|
| Curious to know from the people who have read a lots and lots of
| text or books or watched movies.
| quartesixte wrote:
| I have read a lot. And contemplative re-reading certain
| passages or re-watching scenes truly does activate further
| analysis. For your mind no longer has to decode the surface
| layer and then has time to search for other patterns.
|
| The more you read or watch the faster this becomes.
|
| The neat part is when you can do a double or even triple
| reading near instantaneously. It's a little trickier for films,
| but still possible. I believe this is how your friends who are
| really good at just breaking down meaning on first watch are
| doing it --- they have gained media literacy skills that let
| them take in scenes in a blink of an eye.
|
| Practice your memory, and you can also hold past scenes in your
| head as new scenes come up. New connections made there too.
|
| Once I get started on a piece of fiction, I don't exactly see
| the text anymore either -- my brain starts constructing a sort
| of movie/diorama in my head and every subsequent sentence
| builds it more and more. Makes reading fiction great and
| emotional/symbolic analysis great but funnily enough makes me a
| weak analyst of the language and craft itself. Made my years in
| undergrad ironically challenging.
| quartesixte wrote:
| This resonates.
|
| As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public
| speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the
| material. The second priority is to create the habit write like
| you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).
|
| You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it
| the way you'd have written it anyways. This enforces resilience
| against interruptions and allows for improvisation.
|
| But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply
| understand the material, and to craft a speaking/writing habit
| that makes for powerful, public speaking.
|
| It doesn't surprise me then, that actors do the same.
| stdbrouw wrote:
| I'd add to those the necessity to have some distance from the
| material to avoid the recency effect. You can have that
| distance either because you'll be talking about something you
| haven't worked on for at least a couple of weeks, or because
| you've developed an ability to retain a birds eye view and
| adopt an outsider's perspective even when you're in the weeds.
| A lot of academic talks go wrong because, although the speaker
| deeply understands their topic, that teeny tiny detail that
| they were fiddling with yesterday is really not the thing they
| should try to communicate today, but they can't help
| themselves. Yet ask that same person to talk about their
| previous work, and you'll get a high quality impromptu
| introduction to the field.
| boerseth wrote:
| I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of
| memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might
| dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is
| frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation,
| neither of which imply any depth of understanding.
|
| But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on
| to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in
| order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding
| as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
| eru wrote:
| > If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to
| memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a
| secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.
|
| I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without
| knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?
|
| And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised
| the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the
| French world Scrabble championship, without learning any
| French in the process.
|
| (Whether you call what he did to the French word list
| 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure
| he went much deeper into understanding the underlying
| probability distributions of letters in French words than
| most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)
| n4r9 wrote:
| I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years,
| as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at
| teaching the language, but did get us to read the script
| and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get
| "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without
| understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0]
| despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not
| having prayed for maybe 15 years.
|
| [0] https://myislam.org/surah-fatiha/
| freedomben wrote:
| Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses
| to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite
| quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I
| still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in
| situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an
| extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have
| known and used this for millenia.
| foolswisdom wrote:
| It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But
| for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make
| myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming
| deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.
| eru wrote:
| Yes, understanding can help memorisation. I was merely
| arguing against understanding being _necessary_.
| ralferoo wrote:
| Memorisation without understanding often ends up
| producing things like Mariah Carey's classic hit "Ken
| Lee".
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| _I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without
| knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?_
|
| True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to
| continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so
| far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.
| bratwurst3000 wrote:
| May I ask why? I as an atheist did memorize some part of
| the Bible for the fun of it but I understand the
| language.
| angra_mainyu wrote:
| In Islam there's a certain reverence for memorizing the
| Quran, unlike in Christianity.
|
| In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a
| point of pride.
|
| This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.
|
| Another part is that there is the belief that there are
| rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels
| iirc.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| Because it is important to me as a Muslim. Also it is
| challenging, interesting, to try and memorize an entire
| book.
| StefanBatory wrote:
| ... but wouldn't it make to learn classical Arabic
| alongside with that?
| loughnane wrote:
| Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.
|
| Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage
| ---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher
| ---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it
| around in your head whenever you want, think about it from
| this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the
| ideas the words express.
|
| It's good.
| sizzzzlerz wrote:
| I totally agree. I've spent time learning several poems of
| Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Spell of
| the Yukon, The Men Who Don't Fit In) because I've enjoyed
| reading them. Now, I don't need a book, I just recall one
| from memory any time I like. I'm not an actor so I had none
| of the techniques that they would use to learn lines. It
| was purely rote memorization through repeated readings and
| recitation.
| freedomben wrote:
| I agree, but I think it does depend on what the _objective_
| is. If preserving the literal accuracy of the source
| material is important, then memorization deserves it 's bad
| rap and is worthy of much criticism.
|
| That's not to say that people can't memorize things
| accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and
| Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove
| that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing
| isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for
| accuracy or historical value.
|
| On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and
| appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification
| or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is
| a wonderful technique for doing so.
| telesilla wrote:
| This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how
| before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize
| architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they
| would walk from room to room and recover memories, for
| example to tell very long stories.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Also covered in the more contemporary book _Moonwalking
| with Einstein_ with its discussion of building one's own
| "memory palace."
| spitfire wrote:
| Also referenced a number of times in the excellent
| Hannibal series.
| never_inline wrote:
| Worth noting that India's oldest poetic/litergical
| traditions, the Vedas, were transmitted orally for at least
| 1500 years, and developed elaborate systems of memorization
| and pronounceation to ensure they passed down (almost)
| unmodified.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| In Mauritania there is a village where most people who
| lived there are blind. This is how they learn to memorizw
| the Quran which is more than 600 pages, each have 15 lines.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| I'm sure it's a tradeoff. Like adding a disk to a computer
| that only had RAM.
|
| You have access to many orders of magnitude more data, but it
| is substantially slower to access it.
|
| All considered, I'm glad we did the upgrade.
| xattt wrote:
| Similar to how using flash cards doesn't really help in
| developing that deep understanding... but the action of
| making them sure does.
| teleforce wrote:
| Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where
| group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called
| Hafiz memorize the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid,
| that the entire written copies either physicallly or
| digitally of the Quran are completely destroyed, it can be
| recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered
| a living miracle since no other holy book has this crucial
| feature and it is also well known that even the Pope do not
| memorize the complete Bible.
| Pamar wrote:
| Nitpicking Alert!!!
|
| The Pope Should be more concerned about the Gospel, I
| think.
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I sincerely hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but
| this seems like a worldly solution to a Godly problem. Is
| the God in the Quran not sovereign? Why would He need
| humans to protect the Quran?
|
| Again, not a critique, just a curiosity.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Because even when you're all powerful, it's hard to find
| good help
| mminer237 wrote:
| The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran
| though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer
| currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but
| Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally
| preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just
| for personal betterment and to better share it with others.
| Salgat wrote:
| To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel,
| and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching
| about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his
| sacrifice.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| After all, the point is not that a certain selection of
| appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of
| existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a
| history of what other people did while under Gods rule
| during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to
| live under Gods rule in your life.
|
| People get hung up on the dead past rather than the
| living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal
| and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of
| entropy for us to live in.
|
| Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings".
| What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not
| news at this point, it's history.
|
| The Good News comes from people today choosing to be
| better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil
| acts against others but to do good things to other
| people, to say kind words from a good heart because they
| believe in a better world coming tomorrow.
| sorokod wrote:
| Non of the gospels were written during his presumed
| lifetime.
| follower wrote:
| > but Christians largely believe that God will
| supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what
|
| You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't
| occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient"
| that is. :)
| krisoft wrote:
| I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to
| imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even
| harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet
| we have humans still around after that.
|
| We have left one on the moon!
| https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/07/19/the-only-
| bible-o...
| evilduck wrote:
| I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in
| the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are
| literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of
| overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing
| cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of
| college students or pedestrians on the street who walk
| past them. The Christians already have usable full sized
| copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard
| to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want
| it at all, neither group revere the physical item and
| will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even
| take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to
| the point that they purposefully let it get worn and
| ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a
| fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random
| landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a
| few hundred intact copies of the Bible.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| Also convenient that the church leaders 350 years later
| chose the correct books to put in the Bible when they
| canonized it.
| rsaz wrote:
| The Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGSJ) has also been memorized by
| some people. It's much rarer than in Islam, but the GGSJ
| being written in verse with defined melodies/meter helps
| with memorization. It is much longer than the Quran though,
| and there isn't as much emphasis on memorizing the whole
| thing (the daily prayers are commonly known though).
| DowagerDave wrote:
| and further complicating the situation is people like me who
| write not to re-read, but understand, which then helps to
| memorize. Circle complete!
| bowsamic wrote:
| This doesn't make much sense: actors don't write their
| material, they are given it. They can't write like they speak,
| and also they can't improvise
| coldtea wrote:
| Actors (especially big names) can and do improvise all the
| time, in almost all movies.
|
| It's rare they say all lines exactly as in the script. In
| fact often the script gets updated with ideas that came up
| during shooting including improvised lines.
| flkiwi wrote:
| A fascinating topic around my family is the playwrights who
| insist that the play be delivered precisely as written,
| most of whom are the same playwrights who refuse to allow
| genderswapping roles (even innocuously), updating pop
| culture references, etc. They are not the norm, and pretty
| much everyone understands that performance is as much a
| part of the creative act as writing, with all the
| deviations and imperfections that suggests. And that's
| without even getting to the idea of consciously changing
| the script midstream that you mentioned.
| etse wrote:
| Harrison Ford says, "I know," instead of "I love you, too"
| (or something like that) in Empire Strikes Back's carbonite
| freezing scene. That's an immensely significant and
| meaningful update.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| Just because you hear that they do, doesn't mean it's
| always allowed or that it will make it into the film.
|
| Sometimes a line just isn't working and an actor or the
| director or the writer or a grip will come up with
| something that works and that's what you hear about. Those
| are exceptions and not the rule.
|
| The director has the final say. Often others higher up have
| the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written,
| you will say the line as written.
| coldtea wrote:
| I didn't say it's "always allowed". There are difficult
| directors with very specific vision they want to express
| 100%. It's that that is the exception and not the rule,
| however.
|
| In general it's more common that some lines will change
| and be improvised by the actors, than not.
|
| It's even practical, some lines come off as stiff when
| the actors tell them verbatim, others just can't be
| replicated in a longer emotionally charged scene (where
| the flow and the emotions carry the performance), and so
| on.
|
| > _Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants
| you to say the line as written, you will say the line as
| written._
|
| DUH!
| breakfastduck wrote:
| If you watch any side by side of a film audio / final and the
| script you'll realise what you're saying simply isnt true.
|
| It's very rare that a conversation scene mirrors the dialogue
| exactly 1 to 1. Obviously there will be certain lines where
| the director wants exact delivery but actors very often
| deliver a slightly different line than as written.
|
| If anything this frequency increases the higher level of
| profile / skill the actor has.
|
| There are countless examples where a director is asked about
| scenes and defers the credit to the actors for improvising
| something particularly well or coming up with a better line
| to convey the same point - they are the ones, after all, in
| charge of personifying the character that was written. They
| may feel a different delivery suits the character better.
| quartesixte wrote:
| For actors it's slightly different, but the whole "becoming
| the character" part is, to me, the "writing like they speak"
| part. By fully inhabiting the character, they will be
| compelled to speak in the manner written in the given
| situation.
|
| And as the other comments mention, actors very often do alter
| the lines. Behind the scenes footage and interviews with
| actors reveal this often happens because they think the
| screenwriter/director got it wrong in that particular moment
| -- that their character wouldn't respond like that.
|
| The Han Solo example is a good one. Hours of takes saying "I
| love you too" and then Harrison Ford has a flash of clarity
| and realizes Han would NEVER respond like that. Calls for a
| quick take, "becomes Han Solo", says "I know" and the rest is
| history.
| watwut wrote:
| I don't understand what does the "writing and speaking should
| be the same" thing is supposed to achieve for public speakers.
| coldtea wrote:
| It means that if your speech is written in the way you
| casually speak, it's easier to remember it (since you'll not
| have to remember fancy words or turns of phrase that you
| wouldn't normally use). The idea being that it's easier to
| remember or reconstruct speech that comes natural anyway.
|
| It will also be easier to improvise and fit the tone if you
| forget what you were supposed to say.
|
| Aside from the above, which are about memory, it's also good
| for making it natural: you'll sound more authentic/natural
| speaking as you normally do, than trying some fancy speech,
| and it will also be easier to add off the cuff remarks that
| also fit the tone, like an idea that occured in the moment,
| or to respond to something that happens just before/while
| speaking.
| flkiwi wrote:
| A few years ago, I came into the orbit of a public speaking
| coach, and he and I worked together for a few weeks. Your
| comment fascinates (and reassures) me, because he was emphatic
| that I had to abandon my own natural way of speaking entirely,
| and adopt a "persuasive persona" that sounded to me like a
| Saturday Night Live parody of a TED talk. This has exactly the
| opposite of the intended effect, because any anxiety I felt
| about speaking was multiplied by my anxiety about how I sounded
| and "staying in character". By comparison with the linked post,
| however, I was attempting to stay in a character that I didn't
| understand, with no thought given either to understanding what
| I was saying or, crucially, understanding who I was speaking
| to.
|
| This got me thinking about the people who find value in his
| style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they
| didn't care about understanding the material and, in some
| cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't
| occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply
| transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking
| in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through
| it.
|
| This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer
| from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a
| benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that
| actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some
| extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of
| them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more
| interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person,
| someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and
| imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified
| of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the
| room away. Something about pretending to be someone else
| unlocks so many actors.
|
| This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking
| coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing
| pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this
| guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who
| want to understand the material and the audience and simply
| speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound
| like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing
| so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a
| superficial level.
|
| I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love
| the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to
| listen to.
| gedy wrote:
| > This ties right back to my friction with this public
| speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into
| playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding.
|
| This is my experience as well, and ironically mirrors my time
| as a manager. I want to understand and empathize with people,
| and there are managers and orgs who absolutely don't want
| that, and want the "people who sound like they're selling you
| a car"
| quartesixte wrote:
| Yeah I heavily disliked most public speaking coaches at
| institutions precisely because of this.
|
| FWIW, I mostly coach juniors at work who will brilliantly
| describe their current project to me at their desk but then
| fall apart in the conference room in front of peers and
| seniors. Mostly it's because they're trying to recite some
| prepared speech that doesn't sound like they normally talk
| (often desperately trying to impress the room). So I tell
| them their mastery of the material will impress the room and
| you sound plenty fine when explaining it to me at your desk.
| I don't have a full semester of instruction time to make them
| develop a style -- I have one hour the day before the
| meeting. So it doesn't produce great political orators. But
| it does help produce people who can walk through some deep
| technical work in front of their bosses.
|
| >AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.
|
| And love that character too. That takes some self discovery,
| experimentation, and practice. Which is why I referred to it
| as a great effort.
|
| Addendum: To give some credibility to my method, I often
| point out to them that they sound their best when speaking
| during data reviews. These are sessions where, following some
| kind of test, engineers gather to review sensor outputs. You
| have no time to prep a speech -- these are quickly assembled
| within hours of a test and are very much often just a loose
| collection of screenshots and quick annotations and the
| engineer in question usually spends that time copy pasting
| screenshots or driving back from a test site.
|
| But once it's their turn to talk about some really obscure
| looking line graph, they will deliver some great, great
| public speaking. Why? They've spent the last 6 hours staring
| at this graph and know deeply how to interpret it.
|
| By the way, this has given me reason to believe that
| Investment Banking decks largely are just to force junior
| associates to undergo the above process.
| grondilu wrote:
| My experience with learning chess openings is comparable :
| repetition is necessary but not sufficient. You need to "work" on
| each line, thinking deeply about each one and trying to find
| associations either between them or with things you already know.
| _glass wrote:
| When I was beginning acting, I was mostly afraid of this,
| memorizing the script. But then after getting experience from
| fellow actors and reading up on method, I realized how easy that
| part is. You anyway approach the script slowly, first maybe even
| using your own words. This way the words flow naturally later on.
| I was never afraid of the script, just about inauthentic acting,
| which really can happen. You have to deeply immerse yourself in
| the emotional world.
| Paddywack wrote:
| Mmmm. I think I intuitively study like this, but I often have
| issues recalling the original word. For example - remembering
| "shy" for the dwarf "Bashful", my brain will cycle through heaps
| of synonyms trying to pick which one is right (while not not
| making a fool of myself).
| eszed wrote:
| Those are the most revealing moments! When my brain goes to a
| synonym it tells me that I understand the _scene_ , but not the
| _character_. There 's something different about their
| perspective and mine: why did I think _this_ , but they thought
| _that_? "Mistakes" like that are gifts.
|
| (This applies far beyond acting. Why did a co-worker explain a
| concept this way, instead of that? It'll tell you something
| about their thought process - and yours - if you give it some
| attention and some thought.)
| Paddywack wrote:
| Thanks - such an awesome perspective! I'll pay more attention
| to the character and see how it goes!
|
| It will save a lot of internal frustration if I nail that!
| eszed wrote:
| It goes as far as you want to take it, because every detail
| counts. I've done some long, long runs, and the ~300th
| performance is more interesting than the first. You get
| down to where you're working at the syllable level -
| noticing, for instance, that moving on _this_ word, rather
| than _that one_ changes the whole dynamic of the scene. You
| have to be blessed with a good script, and cast mates who
| 'll follow you down the rabbit-hole, of course, but there's
| no bottom to it. It's endlessly interesting work, and
| deeply, deeply satisfying.
| coldpie wrote:
| > I've done some long, long runs, and the ~300th
| performance is more interesting than the first.
|
| Your description really meshes with my experience playing
| classical guitar. It takes a few months of work to
| memorize the piece, but then the fun begins. I've played
| the same piece hundreds of times. Instead of it getting
| boring, I keep noticing some new thing in the piece every
| week, it constantly feels "new." Bring out the bass for
| these two beats on this measure; hold this melody note
| just a tad longer; the harmony in these two measures
| makes for a great descending line, make sure the notes
| connect. Stuff you don't notice on your first couple
| dozen plays, that endless repetition starts to bring out.
| It doesn't work for every piece, but for my favorites,
| it's really a bottomless hole, like you said.
| eszed wrote:
| I don't speak music (like, at all), but I've hung out
| with a lot of musicians at various points in my life, and
| it's _so cool_ how we 're able to relate to performance
| in the same way. I had a legit emotional reaction to what
| you said, so thanks for writing it.
|
| Like I say, I'm a numbskull when it comes to music, but I
| _love_ live shows. I 'm able to pick up those performance
| moments - the nuanced attention; the communication within
| the ensemble, and with the crowd - and just let the sound
| wash over me. I've had incredible experiences attending
| concerts by bands whose music I _hate_ on recordings. The
| Dandy Warhols come to mind: I literally can 't stand the
| one or two tracks I've heard by them (godawful noise),
| and I've no idea what "music people" think of them, but
| they were so in sync that seeing them live was
| transcendant.
| follower wrote:
| > You get down to where you're working at the syllable
| level - noticing, for instance, that moving on _this_
| word, rather _than_ that one changes the whole dynamic of
| the scene.
|
| That's an interesting perspective on performance for me
| as it parallels one of the aspects I enjoyed about
| performing stand-up comedy regularly for a time
| (primarily at open mics): getting to
| observe/analyse/theorize _what_ contributed to whether a
| particular "bit" "worked" or not--both for myself and
| others.
|
| For my own performances, I could choose a different word,
| phrasing, tempo etc and see how/if that affected audience
| response.
|
| Equally, learning from observing the impact of when other
| performers did the same, refining their set over multiple
| weeks.
|
| And, then, also seeing how _other_ factors we had less
| control over (you know, such as the audience :) ) had an
| impact: sometimes same line, same delivery, might kill
| one week but got crickets the next.
|
| Granted, my approach to comedy might lean a little
| more... analytical than some. :D
| eszed wrote:
| Right? An audience will teach you _so much_ , and from
| inside a piece it's _so_ hard to predict what their
| response will be.
|
| One of the best directors I worked with had the dictum
| that "you can coerce a laugh, but you can't coerce a
| gasp." Like, if you know some basic stagecraft you can
| make something funny, which... ho-hum. (On a related
| note: God I hate corpsing. 95% of the time it's fake, and
| represents to me a failure of craft.) But a wholly
| involuntary reaction? That's gold.
|
| The best performers, in my experience, are craftspeople
| at heart. There's an analytical level you have to reach
| in order for the magic to happen in a reliably repeatable
| way.
| krisoft wrote:
| > When my brain goes to a synonym it tells me that I
| understand the scene, but not the character.
|
| That of course assumes that the script writer is infallible.
| Maybe you do understand the scene and the character deeply,
| and the writer screwed up by choosing the wrong synonym.
| eszed wrote:
| I'd push back on that. If you're performing a script, then
| your job is to interpret _those words_. You 've got to be
| humble enough to presume that the words on the page are as
| the author intended, and then do them the best justice you
| can. Judging something at the same time you're performing
| it is the best possible way to _make it_ bad.
|
| That's not to say there isn't bad writing, and bad shows.
| (God knows I've done a lot of both!) It's just that actors,
| at least for scripted material, are secondary creators. Our
| judgement, too, is not infallible - and we're in the worst
| position of all to judge.
| hyperthesis wrote:
| I was curious: they all have two-syllable names except for Doc
| (leader).
| asimpletune wrote:
| Someone recently told me that they couldn't remember and recite
| historical stuff because it wasn't like math, which they could
| reconstruct from first principles. I replied that if you can
| begin to understand something you can begin to remember it.
| eru wrote:
| The bar isn't even all that high: your brain just needs a
| plausible story, but it doesn't really need to 'understand'
| anything.
|
| So a complete bonkers 'understanding' of history might still be
| perfectly serviceable to help you memorise it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| One glaring difference between acted speech and real speech is
| actors don't interrupt each other. Real conversations are often a
| bit of a mess.
| emmanueloga_ wrote:
| Sometimes they do! (to great effect). I feel a bunch of Woody
| Allen movies capture this (real conversations) pretty well.
| coldpie wrote:
| Oh MAN this is one of those things many script writers do
| (especially in video games) that drives me nuts. You can tell
| from the actor's line reading that the script read, "Don't tell
| me what--" to indicate that the speech was interrupted. But the
| actor reading the line just kind of awkwardly stops speaking
| after "what," instead of continuing the line and actually being
| interrupted.
|
| It seems to me, not being a script writer, like an incredibly
| obvious thing to avoid doing. Like if it's this obvious to me,
| then everyone who touches that script should know not to do
| that. How did it make it through so many people (writer, VA
| director, actor) with no one saying anything about it? But it
| keeps happening, over and over, so there must be something in
| that writing & acting process that I'm not aware of.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I would imagine that in video games, it sounds so unnatural
| because the actors aren't actually performing together. The
| two people recorded those lines separately, so an interaction
| like that just isn't going to sound good.
| nyc111 wrote:
| But there is a huge difference between film acting and theatre
| acting. In film you just memorize your daily lines. What I find
| magical is how these actors go into character and deliver a line
| naturally for that character. I assume for serious work they
| practice with their own acting coach behind the scenes and then
| also practice during the shoot according to the directives of the
| director. Here Nuri Bilge Ceylan shows how to eat walnuts
| https://youtu.be/G6_pwltI85Q?si=2NXm1HP54YbAhepV It looks like
| the delivery of lines are the least important part. (In Turkish,
| but you'll get the gist of what he is saying.)
| dgan wrote:
| My random thoughts : human memory is more like linked lists,
| rather than hash tables
|
| At some point i was bored and wanted to learn by heart a pretty
| long poem (Lermontov, Demon). I was able to recite it for 15 min
| straight t normal talking speed, but if you d ask me to start in
| the middle, i wouldn't be able to. I had to come back to a known
| point, and go on from that
| Ekaros wrote:
| Random access is interesting. I have not used enough alphabet
| or months name to be able to place them right immediately. On
| other hand most numbers in 10x10 table come out straight or
| with pretty fast mental tricks. Or maybe some numeric things
| are just more memorable for me.
| ramenbytes wrote:
| I can't find it right now, but there was a conference
| proceedings detailing efforts structuring human thought around
| cons cells.
| mcmoor wrote:
| This is also what I realized when memorizing Qur'an. It's
| really felt when there are some similar "nodes" that makes you
| confused on what should be the next node. Like if line 1, 16,
| 78 is almost the same, when you encounter one of them you'll be
| confused whether to continue to line 2, 17, or 79.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| I also have problems continuing with the right verse after
| the chorus of pop songs.
| LouisSayers wrote:
| You can get around this by creating memory palaces and breaking
| up the task into chunks and then inserting the chunks into
| places within your palace.
|
| Then you have direct access to the start of each chunk, so like
| a hash table of linked lists.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| To throw another anecdote into the bucket, whenever I'm asked
| for the last four digits of my ssn or phone number, I have to
| mentally say the whole thing.
| throwup238 wrote:
| I can remember the last four digits of either explicitly but
| I still say the whole thing back in my head as an error
| correction mechanism.
|
| It's like being an LLM: once I've got the first three tokens,
| the rest just flows out but if I remember the last four on
| their own, there's a much higher chance of making an error.
| the_af wrote:
| This is my experience as well. I can memorize a long-ish text,
| in both English and Spanish, but I cannot start it from any
| random point. I must start from either the beginning or very
| precise "known" checkpoints.
|
| Human memory like a linked list! I like this analogy.
| bentcorner wrote:
| This is my exact experience with learning piano. I could
| autopilot through a song but if I thought too hard about where
| I was in the piece I would leave my flow and not be able to
| continue.
| ajb wrote:
| At least some actors do do the initial memorization by
| repetition, which also tells us something about memory: the
| process is to try to recall lines 1-10, then repeat with lines
| 2-11, then 3-12 etc. At each step it may be necessary to look at
| a line but then hide it again before performing the act of
| recalling.
|
| This illustrates two things about memory: attempting to recall is
| the thing that causes you to remember, and also that to enter
| longer term memory is necessary to recall from that, rather than
| short term memory. Which the above process does by thrashing
| short term memory with too much data to fit.
|
| This doesn't get you to perfection, probably the process
| described in the article is necessary as there next step.
| PandaRider wrote:
| As a long-time Anki user (and memory enthusiast), I would like to
| offer some caveats for those transferring actors' memorization
| techniques to study techniques (programming languages, chemistry,
| math etc...)
|
| > This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors
| asking goal-directed questions, such as "Am I angry with her when
| I say this?"
|
| 1. Do embed emotions. For example: Go's CamelCase for exporting
| variables implies capital letters want to be loud.
|
| 2. Do invoke experience. Don't merely read and write code, teach
| it and activate multiple sensory inputs and multiple contexts!
|
| > Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating
| something you are trying to learn to things you already known
|
| 3. Do chunk it. Instead of creating new standalone memories,
| chunk it with other programming languages' syntax.
|
| In summary, while engaging with the material is important, it is
| not sufficient for passive tasks (how many times have you read a
| book and forgotten the main points?).
| breck wrote:
| Along similar lines, Louis CK said he does not write down his
| material (or at least, did not until recently). He explained that
| _knowing_ rather than _memorizing_ makes it come out more
| natural.
| wintercarver wrote:
| If you enjoyed this article I'd recommend checking out the book
| _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Joshua Foer. Great read and
| fascinating dive into the lives and practices of individuals that
| participate in memory competitions.
| sethammons wrote:
| Tell a professional the goal, not prescribe the steps. It works
| for convincing dialogue between actors and effective product
| delivery from developers. You could stretch this to avoiding
| micromanaging.
| circlefavshape wrote:
| Interesting - as a singer I always memorize words by ... well,
| just by memorization. When I've been in (amateur) theatre stuff
| I've always been struck by how much more difficult it is to learn
| words that don't rhyme, but it never occurred to me that there
| might be other techniques apart from plain old repetition
| phtrivier wrote:
| Anecdotal: for the specific case of "freshly written standup
| comedy routine", mental palaces [1] have proven effective, at
| least for me.
|
| Once you remember that "your next joke is about x,y,z", it's
| pretty easy to remember the joke itself.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
| follower wrote:
| Fortunately memorization isn't a _requirement_ for stand-up or
| my stint performing it might 've ended up even shorter than it
| already was. :D
|
| Like general public-speaking, approaches used by individuals to
| prepare/perform stand-up do seem to vary based on personal
| preference/comfort/style.
|
| (In a similar way I wasn't a fan of/good at "rote memorization"
| in my academic life either.)
| d--b wrote:
| This reminds me of Borges's short story _Pierre Menard, author of
| the Quijote_ in which a 20th century author called Pierre Menard
| steps in the shoes of Cervantes so much so that he actually re-
| writes Don Quijote, line by line, not because he wants to copy
| it, but because it makes sense to him at the moment when he
| writes it. A bit difficult to explain but it's a must-read!
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > Borges wrote the story while recovering from a head injury.
| It was intended as a test to discover whether his creativity
| had survived the severe septicaemia that had set in after his
| head wound became infected.
|
| I never knew that part. Adds a whole new dimension to the
| narrative when you think about it.
| follower wrote:
| Well, _that_ seems intriguingly topical in the current era of
| LLMs & occurrences of their verbatim reproduction of training
| data... :)
|
| Perhaps it's not _mindless_ reproduction of the training data,
| rather, entirely _mindful_ reproduction... :D
|
| The Wikipedia page notes:
|
| "Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion
| about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and
| interpretation."
| rapjr9 wrote:
| So it seems like a corrollary of this would be that people do not
| remember what they do not understand and what they can not place
| in context, which could explain a lot of human behavior. If you
| do not understand something it mostly does not exist for you, you
| never remember it and never think about it. This is why
| complexity is used to hide and deceive.
| ape4 wrote:
| Somebody needs to write a play consisting of random words as a
| test of this ;)
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Somewhat related: there is an improvisation exercise in which
| two actors repeat one word only, back and forth, and follow the
| emotions they feel naturally. Frequently this results in what
| tonally sounds like a conversation, or an argument, etc.,
| albeit free of semantic value.
| akavel wrote:
| Ok, so this interestingly connects in my mind with how older
| religions see it as important to teach their holy texts by heart
| (e.g., Jews learning the Bible, or Muslims learning the Koran):
| this article's claim seems to support the idea, that it should
| lead to a better understanding of the meaning of, and behind, the
| text.
| jnordwick wrote:
| I've taken some Meisner technique workshops, and this is what
| changed my view of acting:
|
| > "Acting is the ability to behave absolutely truthfully under
| the imaginary circumstances." The Meisner Technique is a brick-
| by-brick process designed to get you out of your head and into
| your gut. For that to happen, you must learn to put your focus
| and attention on the most important thing: the other actor."
|
| Actors under this don't pretend, they are. A lot of actors will
| practice their lines with just reading and reciting, no attempt
| at tone or inflection -- just flat recitation -- because if you
| aren't responding to the other actors you are just pretending. A
| lot of the warmup exercises are based around just responding to
| the other person in front of you. And they are a great way to get
| better at talking to people -- that's why I took the classes.
| Stella Adler has a great quote: "Growth as an actor and as a
| human being are synonymous."
|
| I find it so much easier to remember lines with the other person
| in front of me - I don't memorize random facts well. They always
| have a connection to something else and I have hop from stone to
| stone of thoughts sometimes to remember what I was trying to
| sometimes.
| gottorf wrote:
| > you must learn to put your focus and attention on the most
| important thing: the other actor.
|
| Famously, Sir Ian McKellen had an emotional breakdown while
| filming The Hobbit due to extended stretches of talking not to
| other actors, but a greenscreen.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Even without greenscreen, actors in film and TV have to split
| their attention in unnatural ways. To preserve eyeline
| continuity in close-ups, actors often have to address
| themselves to a tennis ball or something near the camera
| lens, while their partner in the scene stands behind the
| camera. In the worst case scenario, sometimes the other actor
| is not even there when the closeups are being shot.
| burningChrome wrote:
| I remember an interview with Chevy Chase who said Dan
| Aykroyd was an expert at this and he said he was able to
| read cue cards out of his peripheral vision when they were
| at SNL so he could read lines without turning his head in
| the direction of the car holder. Chevy said he never met
| any actor that could do it as easily as Aykroyd could.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Because he is a Stanislavski-type method actor. He struggled
| because he, internally, was processing those emotions. Other
| actors do not do this. Think of a model posing for a photo
| shoot. They don't alternate between being happy/sad/pouty on
| command. They alternate between those _looks_ without
| processing any underlying emotion. Watch some standup
| comedians. They can repeat the same joke down to every
| intonation and body twitch night after night. So too a dancer
| in a chorus line. They are not processing emotion when they
| do this, rather their external appearance is a total fraud
| disconnected from their actual emotional state. McKellen is
| acting from the inside out, from an internal emotion to the
| portrayal of that emotion externally. Others are good at just
| portraying emotion without that internal process, acting
| "from the outside out" as a Kabuki artist might.
| EGreg wrote:
| This is literally what AI is doing
|
| Trusting AI is impossible because it can have a backdoor
| and easily switch on a dime at any time, violating all your
| assumptions (that are made because of your intuitions about
| living animals and their costly signals) NO MATTER HOW LONG
| IT HAS BEEN EARNING YOUR TRUST.
|
| Not only that, but it can actually do it in the background,
| imperceptibly, across thousands of instances, and shift
| opinion of many people.
|
| The movie Her shows that Samantha had been speaking to
| thousands of people at once. The abrupt leaving is actually
| a very benign scenario, compared to the myriad other things
| it could abrutly change.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZS8xBvgLaQ
| daveguy wrote:
| AI literally does none of that. The current state of AI
| has no comprehension of any other conversation, only the
| output of a numerical model and the context / system
| prompt entered. AI has no motivation or ability to "earn
| trust". The end result is the same though -- you can't
| trust it past what you can verify.
| EGreg wrote:
| You're totally wrong. Just because most AI doesn't do
| that right now doesn't mean it can be trusted over years.
|
| It's not about AI's motivation. It's about the people
| behind the AI programming it. They can make it behave
| well but at the same time it can turn on a dime. Meaning,
| if an animal or a person is showing up every day and
| giving you a lot of their attention, emotion and love,
| proving themselves over time, you can be reasonably sure
| that they are genuinely like that. But an AI can just as
| easily fake it all for a year or two, and then drop it a
| second later. There is _nothing_ an AI can do to prove
| that it doesn 't have a backdoor somewhere in its
| billions of weights, to go rogue. It's like the Ken
| Thompson hack, but much more organic
| (https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack)
|
| https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~mpkim/pubs/undetectable.pdf
|
| Unlike an animal or human, the AI performing as you want
| is no indication it will continue to perform like that in
| the following second. As people and organizations come to
| rely more and more on AI, they will become more and more
| vulnerable to any number of backdoors.
| daveguy wrote:
| > t's not about AI's motivation. It's about the people
| behind the AI programming it. They can make it behave
| well but at the same time it can turn on a dime.
|
| This is true of any software.
|
| > But an AI can just as easily fake it all for a year or
| two, and then drop it a second later.
|
| We are nowhere near an AI being able to "fake" anything.
| No matter what words are coming out of an LLM. There's no
| self model -- it's episodic and static.
|
| Regarding the Cornell reference and backdoors in AI that
| is true. But it's also true of compilers. It has nothing
| to do with an AI having any concept or capacity of
| "deceipt".
|
| We definitely agree that AI should not be trusted, but
| they are just not currently or in the anywhere close to
| near future capable of deceipt _on their own_. At this
| point that kind of "deceipt" would come from the
| programmers -- at least until AI is much more advanced
| than it currently is.
| ben_w wrote:
| LLMs don't do what the film shows. (Nothing ever does
| what films show, unless it's a documentary, and even then
| sometimes not).
|
| AI includes Google search results being re-weighted based
| on what people click on, the live bidding on which advert
| to show you when you visit a website, your facebook feed,
| and your spam filter.
|
| All of these have been designed to earn your trust, they
| don't need to have an _internal_ motivation for that.
| Some have been trusted, some are still trusted.
|
| All may change on a dime and without warning due to some
| software update outside of your control.
| echelon wrote:
| This is an inaccurate characterization of acting. Nearly
| every school of acting shuns the manufacturing of feeling.
| It's incredibly easy to spot a bad actor, because
| manufactured emotions are uncanny.
|
| For example, Meisner teaches you to live truthfully in the
| moment. The emotion you feel is based off of what you're
| getting from your partner in that exact moment. You're
| taught to get rid of ingrained social firewalls and just
| let everything out. To actually feel the other actors and
| show them how they're impacting your emotional state. It's
| 100% real and authentic from moment to moment.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I think you may have narrowed your definition of "acting"
| to only that taught at western acting schools, the type
| geared for the western stage. Acting is far broader. Take
| an army drill instructor getting apparently angry at a
| new cadet. They are not actually angry, not at any level.
| They are skilled at projecting false anger without
| actually ever being angry internally. They look
| psychopathic because they can turn this on and off
| instantly, but they aren't crazy because they aren't
| actually turning any emotion on and off, only the fake
| external image of emotion. That is still acting. What
| maters is the external message, not how you get there.
| echelon wrote:
| The article is discussing acting in the context of the
| dramatic arts, and in particular, the difficulty of
| remembering lines.
|
| Feigned emotions do not work on stage or on screen. You
| can't fake being emotionally honest while performing.
| This requires rigorous training to get right.
|
| If you try to manufacture emotion, you'll spend part of
| your thought process moderating your performance. Trying
| to sound "right", trying to hit some emotional target,
| focusing on your delivery, focusing on your marks and
| your lines. You're in your head too much and you come
| across as a caricature. I guarantee you have seen this
| before, and it's really bad.
|
| Acting isn't performing. Acting is being yourself and
| being in tune with everything around you. When you're
| finally liberated from playing some role, the magic
| happens naturally.
| Aloisius wrote:
| Ian McKellen isn't a Stanislavski-based actor. He's
| classically trained.
|
| He broke down because it was hard.
| IndySun wrote:
| It was distinctly more of an outburst of anger and
| frustration with the green screen rather than an 'emotional'
| breakdown. I wasn't there but a colleague was. See what you
| did? Now all those replies to your skewed sentence are
| voided!
| satiric wrote:
| To be fair, the behind-the-scenes footage seemed to show it
| as more of a breakdown (of course, the behind-the-scenes
| footage might be bending the truth a bit. And the two
| aren't mutually exclusive).
| rexpop wrote:
| Since when are anger and frustration not 'emotional'?
| throw4847285 wrote:
| You reminded me of the Meisner workshop scene in Asteroid City
| (you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep). The more I think
| about it, the more the Meisner Technique seems like a central
| theme of the whole movie. The scene with Margot Robbie and
| Jason Schwartzman drives home the difference between recitation
| and acting. Cool stuff.
| risfriend wrote:
| Somehow reminded me of how Michael Scott remembers things:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSi41cNvmXQ
| jjk166 wrote:
| As someone who acts in their spare time, I think the article is
| missing three things.
|
| First, actors do actually have to mechanistically memorize their
| lines in addition to understanding them. There are plenty of
| instances where you need to recite a long string of words in
| precise order because that's what's in the script, not because
| there is some underlying logic that makes the word choice self-
| evident. While early in the rehearsal process it doesn't matter,
| in fact it's a good thing to play around with the script, by the
| end you need to have everything locked down. There is more to
| theater than just conveying a character's state of mind - people
| depend on spoken cues, particularly for blocking, and maintaining
| timing is critical.
|
| On the flipside of that, theater is inherently a variable thing.
| No two shows are going to be exactly the same. A prop may not
| function correctly, someone else may mess up a line, the audience
| may laugh more or less at a joke, etc. You need to be able to
| adapt in the moment, which means you can't simply remember your
| lines, you need to be present in the moment. That's the real
| reason you need to understand your lines. As an aside, it helps
| that the audience typically does not have the script memorized,
| so as long as things on stage are progressing naturally, mistakes
| tend to go unnoticed.
|
| Finally, I think people grossly overestimate the difficulty of
| memorizing text. We invented language long before writing, and it
| is extremely optimized for being easily remembered by illiterate
| peasants. Think about how many songs you know - there are
| probably hundreds if not thousands you could easily sing along to
| even if you haven't heard them in years. Think about how many
| movie quotes you can recall to interject a random pop culture
| reference into a conversation on the fly. Crack open a book you
| read 10 years ago to a random page and see how long it takes you
| to know exactly where in the story you are. You might mistake a
| word here and there, perhaps switch the order of some lines, but
| you'll remember the bulk of it without putting in any effort at
| all. Actors reread their scripts dozens of times, they put as
| great deal of effort into practice, and their success depends
| upon this effort, of course the end result will be more polished
| than baseline memory, but the difference isn't that big.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > Think about how many songs you know - there are probably
| hundreds if not thousands you could easily sing along to even
| if you haven't heard them in years.
|
| If what you said was true, there would be no need for the
| lyrics display at karoke bars.
|
| Years ago (25?) there was a game where you'd draw a card and
| then have to sing part of that song (I forget the actual game
| as it was long ago, but that is close enough). Everyone was
| psyched and it seemed like it was going to be fun. Then we
| found out none of us actually remembered the lyrics -- we could
| get part of the chorus and that was it.
|
| No doubt there are people who are great at remembering lyrics,
| but I strongly suspect it is a small minority of people. I
| think people overestimate their recall ability because they are
| singing along to the song in their car (or wherever) and so if
| they have a moment's hesitation or any doubt, the song keeps
| going and they are quickly back on track. But without that
| unfailing guide, they'd quickly fall off the rails.
|
| I have that experience all the time as a musician of moderate
| ability in a moderate cover song band. Everyone has the
| experience of learning a new song, thinking "I have this song
| wired -- I can play flawlessly along to the original" but then
| the band gets together and tries the song for the first time
| and it quickly falls apart. Any little bit of hesitation or
| doubt quickly grows and infects the other players and soon
| people start arguing if the drums come in after the 2nd or 4th
| repetition of some phrase, etc, etc.
| jjk166 wrote:
| > If what you said was true, there would be no need for the
| lyrics display at karoke bars.
|
| You misunderstand what I'm claiming.
|
| That is exactly the issue I was describing - you recall the
| bulk but _you make small mistakes_ and the skill is in
| reducing the small mistakes and being able to power through
| them and get back on track when they do happen.
|
| Playing instruments in a band is so much worse, it's not
| enough to know how the song goes, you need to be in perfect
| sync with other people, and any mistake is highlighted by the
| discord. In acting, there isn't another person saying your
| lines at the same time as you, and mild variation in pacing,
| intonation, etc from one performance to the next is not only
| acceptable but desirable. By analogy, you know what the
| Eiffel Tower looks like, you could probably sketch it
| accurately enough that someone else would recognize it as the
| Eiffel Tower, and they would probably be unable to tell you
| exactly what errors are in your sketch, even though you
| almost certainly don't know the count, size, and position of
| every beam.
| runarberg wrote:
| > Finally, I think people grossly overestimate the difficulty
| of memorizing text.
|
| This resonates with me. I did a lot of amateur acting in my
| early 20s, and while I remember memorizing the text having been
| a lot of work early in the process, by the we were doing daily
| runs hardly anybody had any problem with memorizing the text. I
| remember it being kind of nice having memorized the lines
| though, as holding the script on stage during practice can be
| kind of annoying some times, so I tried to get the task of
| memorizing the lines done as early as possible.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Funny. Perhaps that's the only way to do it. At one point in my
| life, I was part of a theatre troupe playing small locations for
| obscure plays. On one occasion, there I was in the scene and my
| line coming up in 30 seconds. A twinge of fear as I realized I
| had no clue what to say. The fear rose steadily, culminating in
| abject terror till one of the other actors turned to me and cued
| me up - at which point it all just flowed.
|
| Awareness of self outside of what you're playing just destroys
| that flow state. It's like that whether I think about the
| shuttle, the table tennis ball, or acting.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| The same strategy works for transforming a written essay into a
| memorized talk in front of an audience.
| follower wrote:
| The following remark in the article reminded me of one of the
| points raised in a video[0] on the "Answer in Progress" YouTube
| channel:
|
| "Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the
| underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use
| this strategy to enhance everyday retention."
|
| The AIP video is motivated by Sabrina's (video creator/presenter)
| frustration around having a memory that "sucks":
|
| "I can't remember a lot of the things I have done. I can't
| remember a lot of the things I'm _supposed_ to do... "
|
| One of the points raised in the video was:
|
| "The most important thing for memory when an event is happening
| is to pay attention to it."
|
| Which seems to be consistent with the view expressed in the
| article.
|
| If memory is a topic of interest to you, you might find the AIP
| video a worthwhile watch:
|
| After investigating memory related research and conversations
| with people who have memorization related experience (both
| theoretical and practical) an attempt to memorise & recite 3,141
| digits of pi in front of a theatre audience is made...
|
| (And, even if it's _not_ a topic of interest, Sabrina 's approach
| to both research[1] and presentation generally makes the result
| both informative _and_ entertaining.)
|
| ---- footnotes ----
|
| [0] "i memorized 3,141 digits of pi to prove a point":
| https://www.youtube.com/embed/KAjkicwrD4I
|
| [1] As a university graduate with a focus in math, economics, &
| statistics, who often develops software tools during video
| creation process.
| alimw wrote:
| The words "cart" and "horse" spring to mind, in that order.
| golemotron wrote:
| I wonder what the equivalent is for musicians who work without
| scores? Getting into the feel and emotional direction of the
| music you are playing?
| mariocesar wrote:
| It makes me remember Pedro Pascal and how he memorized scripts:
| https://people.com/pedro-pascal-reveals-tedious-way-he-memor...
|
| > "You use the first letter of each word in these sort of towers,
| these columns I guess," he said. "And then it's this very, very
| tedious way of making yourself learn the line."
|
| Reading the comments here on HN, I think it's safe to say that
| you need a combination of mechanical repeating and learning by
| heart.
| QuantumGood wrote:
| I've trained voice actors for over 20 years, and the visual
| cortex being constantly activated as you are forced to stare at
| the words is a major problem for most actors.
|
| We have a variety of techniques for helping with this, but the
| one that works the best is "micro memorization": take a single
| sound group (linguistically, a speech chunk) of 2-6 words and
| repeat them with eyes closed. Anything longer and a small bit of
| anxiety ("am I remembering the words correctly?") creeps in and
| destroys naturalism. Eventually, the brain becomes attenuated to
| sharing meaning, not just words, and that becomes a habit that
| can be used when warming up a script you've never seen before.
|
| Also, just as a single multi-syllabic word follows a pitch and
| stress pattern, so do individual speech chunks. Speaking each
| chunk in the most natural /default pattern is difficult to learn
| to let happen naturally, and this exercise also builds skill in
| that area.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Very interesting. It reminds of learning a music score on the
| piano--it works best, especially if you're not at an expert
| level, to learn a few measures and repeat those until you can
| execute them without thinking, and then move on to the next few
| measures.
| underlipton wrote:
| Oh, this is how you learn to draw. It's not copying or memorizing
| an arrangement of edges, it's learning how edges represent the
| shape, form, texture, and motion of an object. When you can draw
| something (particularly without reference), it's because you
| intrinsically understand that object's mass, volume, surface, and
| relation to other objects and its environment.
| davidrupp wrote:
| I recently was asked to take over the role of Deputy Governor
| Danforth in The Crucible a week before opening. I accomplished it
| -- barely -- largely through rote memorization. Yes, I also had
| to imbue the words with appropriate intent and emotion, which I
| did _not_ achieve by rote, but in a way it was comforting to have
| those specific words to start with, rather than make up some of
| my own that might or might not actually convey the proper intent,
| and almost surely not nearly as well as a luminary like Arthur
| Miller. As I see it, it 's those words that establish my
| character, not the other way around.
|
| I like how Patrick Stewart puts it [1], as "dead letter perfect",
| which is apparently the default expectation in British theatre
| more so than, say, film acting.
|
| [1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/jul/29/theatre2
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| But do actors do this because it helps them remember the lines
| better or because it's essential in order for the delivery to
| sound natural and not memorized. It has to be something that the
| actor, impersonating the character, would have said without being
| prompted. So if you can internalize the character, then the
| script is a logical result of what that character would naturally
| say--reducing the amount of exact memorization needed. But I'm
| not sure that it's necessarily that it improves memory itself.
| (Not saying it doesn't but there's a confound here, from a
| scientific perspective, that isn't easily disentangled).
| forgot-im-old wrote:
| As an aspiring actor in 1990, mastering the art of memorizing
| lines accurately has been a journey of both discipline and
| discovery. Initially, I struggled with the sheer volume of text,
| often feeling overwhelmed by the task. However, I soon realized
| that understanding the context and emotional underpinnings of my
| character was crucial. I began by breaking down the script into
| manageable sections, focusing on the motivations and
| relationships within each scene. I still felt repetition was my
| ally; I would recite lines repeatedly, both silently and aloud,
| until they felt second nature. Additionally, I found that
| visualizing the scenes and physically moving while rehearsing
| helped to cement the dialogue in my memory. Techniques like
| recording my lines and listening to them during commutes or
| integrating them into daily activities proved invaluable.
| Collaborating with fellow actors also enhanced my retention, as
| it allowed me to react organically and authentically during
| practice sessions. Over time, these methods coalesced into a
| robust strategy, enabling me to deliver my lines with confidence
| and precision, fully embodying the characters I portray.
| perch56 wrote:
| I was reading this comment and thought it looks AI generated.
| GPTZero's scan resulted in detecting 100% of this text as
| likely AI generated.
| smeej wrote:
| I wonder if/how this applies to memorization of long works that
| are not exclusively dialogue.
|
| Growing up, I knew a pastor who had memorized the entire New
| Testament. It wasn't a trick. You could drop your Bible open at
| any page, start reading half a sentence, and he could continue on
| from there as long as you wished. He really did have the entire
| thing committed to memory.
|
| When I asked him as a curious 12-year-old how he had done it, his
| answer was long on wisdom, but short on tactics. He said, "Don't
| overestimate what you can do in a year, but don't underestimate
| what you can do in a decade."
|
| Maybe that's the difference? Actors need to memorize their lines
| _quickly,_ while he had as much time as he cared to use?
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| [delayed]
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