pong ignacio

Stanley Kubrick on how to extract great performances from an Actor: "Interviewer: Do you direct actors in every detail, or do you expect them to some extent to come up with their own ideas? Kubrick: I come up with the ideas. That is essentially the director’s job. There is a misconception, I think, about what directing actors means: it generally goes along the lines of the director imposing his will over difficult actors, or teaching people who don’t know how to act. I try to hire the best actors in the world. The problem is comparable to one a conductor might face. There’s little joy in trying to get a magnificent performance from a student orchestra. It’s difficult enough to get one with all the subtleties and nuances you might want out of the greatest orchestra in the world. You want to have great virtuoso soloists, and so with actors. Then it’s not necessary to teach them how to act or to discipline them or to impose your will upon them because there is usually no problem along those lines. An actor will almost always do what you want him to do if he is able to do it; and, therefore, since great actors are able to do almost anything, you find you have few problems. You can then concentrate on what you want them to do, what is the psychology of the character, what is the purpose of the scene, what is the story about? These are things that are often muddled up and require simplicity and exactitude. The director’s job is to provide the actor with ideas, not to teach him how to act or to trick him into acting. There’s no way to give an actor what he hasn’t got in the form of talent. You can give him ideas, thoughts, attitudes. The actor’s job is to create emotion. Obviously, the actor may have some ideas too, but this is not what his primary responsibility is. You can make a mediocre actor less mediocre, you can make a terrible actor mediocre, but you cannot go very far without the magic. Great performances come from the magical talent of the actor, plus the ideas of the director. The other part of the director’s job is to exercise taste: he must decide whether what he is seeing is interesting, whether it’s appropriate, whether it is of sufficient weight, whether it’s credible. These are decisions that no one else can make." (Stanley Kubrick's interview with Philip Strick and Penelope Houston, 1972)