Videos We Liked (transcribed by Web For Actors)
FREE ACTING LESSON: Introduction to Acting
Recorded by The Heller Approach
Brad lays out the introductory course to acting. If you want to learn more, take your first class in LA for free or study with Brad on Skype from anywhere in the world! https://thehellerapproach.com/ The Heller Approach Acting Studio Ace Studios 2210 West Olive Ave, 3rd Floor, Suite #320 Burbank, CA 91506 https://plus.google.com/b/11463091050... for Google Plus Page https://www.facebook.com/TheHellerApp... for Facebook https://twitter.com/HellerApproach for Twitter https://www.youtube.com/user/thehelle... for The Heller Approach Youtube Channel http://instagram.com/thehellerapproach for Instagram 323-962-8077 (office) 310-503-8262 (cell/text) "The Heller Approach" is an acting technique that gives actors a simple yet practical and solid foundation so that actors are ready and empowered with reliable and easily accessible tools to work in any medium. The technique and it's application is based on muscle memory and not on past personal experiences. It truly frees the artist to access feelings and thoughts that are universal to all humans. An Amazing technique born from working actors and directors. "The Heller Approach" is taught exclusively by Brad Heller. Group classes are available every Thursday night and Tuesday days in Los Angeles, California. Private lessons are also available via skype or in person. Professor Heller taught for 5 years at UCLA before going private. He is an actor, director and teacher. Heller's teachings are based on the works of Don Richardson, who Heller mentored. Don was an original member of the Group Theater, which was the nucleus of Acting in the United States. His fellow students were Sanford Meisner, Stella Adler and Uta Hagen, but Don was the only student from the Group Theater who said, "The Method is NOT what acting is about." He directed over 800 television shows in his time. Richardson was mentored by Charles Jehlinger , who was one of the most important (even if largely unknown) acting teachers in America and taught for nearly 50 years at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Among his pupils were Cecil B. DeMille, Edward G. Robinson, Spencer Tracy, Hume Cronyn, Kirk Douglas, Anne Bancroft and Robert Redford.
Full Transcription:
00:02:
Today we're going to talk a little bit about what acting is. I think that there's a lot of confusion about exactly what it is, what we do when we actually act. If you were to ask somebody, who was their favorite actor, and they may say something to you like Robert De Niro or Anthony Hopkins or Susan Sarandon. I think the next question would be, well, why? What makes them so good? Why are they good? Most people can't actually even answer that question. They just say they're good. They're just good. What makes an actor a great actor is not the ability to get up on stage and perform something. I think that one of the biggest mistakes is calling acting, acting or performing because it implies that we need to get up on stage and actually do something.
00:58:
The idea of acting is for you to have the ability to actually create another person. In order for you to be another person, you have to give the mechanism and use the mechanism of a human being when you act. Our job as actors is to be able to duplicate human behavior. We first have to understand how it is that people interact with each other. The first thing I can tell you is the idea of getting up and performing something is not what I do in life. I never get up and I say, "Okay, Brad, put your hand here. Brad, make sure that you speak out there this way." That to me, what you would say, what a robot does. You'll frequently hear people say, "Oh, that actor looks like a robot." The reason that they say this is because it's almost like they have a chip in the back of their brain saying move hand out, and it happens in a millisecond.
01:55:
Acting is the ability to receive another person with your eyes and with your ears. It's the ability to take something in and use it to cause you to do what you do. Because if you really think about it, who's causing you to look at your computer right now? This is going to sound egomaniacal, but it's me. I'm the one who's causing you to look at your computer, and guess what? You're causing me to look at you or the camera. Everything outside of me is causing me to do what I do. I think once we understand that, once we grasp that, that acting is about what's outside of us, not what we're actually doing, performing, once we understand that, there's a freedom that happens. I can remember when I finally grasped this concept, there's this huge responsibility that went off of me having to perform and suddenly once I grasped the idea that acting is the ability to receive and take something in which causes me in turn to do something, I felt this freedom.
03:03:
The question is going to be how do we actually get this behavior in our body so that when we let go and we receive each other, something is going on? There's many people who will say to you they use different techniques, and there's many schools of thought about how to get our body familiar with emotion or what's going on in our head and our objective, meaning what we're thinking about. There are many people out there who are acting and in order to actually perform, they are using their own personal experiences in order to act. For example, if I had to be angry in a scene, I would start thinking about something that makes me angry. Unfortunately, due to your mental health and stability, I don't believe that this is a very good way to work.
03:55:
I remember one child I was teaching said to me that her acting teacher told her in order to cry, to think of her dog being injected with a thousand needles. Me, personally, I can't even think about that as an adult. I don't want to. I want to have a way to work that's fun because if you really think about it, if acting was supposed to be this, how would it have lasted thousands of years? It happened with the Greeks and then it's gone for thousands of years, and I can guarantee you that when these people were acting hundreds or thousands of years ago, in order to act, they were not thinking of some personal experience of their own life in order to act. How do we do it?
04:41:
Well, the person who taught me acting was a guy by the name of Don Richardson, and he wrote this great book, and it's called Acting Without Agony: An Alternative to the Method. I loved the title because I, at one point when I was acting, found acting to no longer be fun. It just wasn't fun for me anymore. It became overly confusing, complex and traumatic. Don Richardson, what he did is he created this technique, and this was not some fly by night professor. This was a guy who was a very renowned film director and acting guru in a sense. He directed many of the shows that I watched when I was a kid. He directed Lost in Space and Get Smart and One Day at a Time and Bonanza. Hearing that this guy was actually directing these shows, and when I studied with him, I found out not only was he directing these shows, but frequently he was giving actors who didn't know how to act, so he had to teach them quickly, right on set how to act.
05:40:
He was using this technique, which required me to think of some personal experience, how can you come up with that experience and know that it's going to be reliable? You can't, in my opinion. What Don did is he was a member of what was called the Group Theatre, which was the nucleus of theater many years ago, and there were fellow students like Stella Adler and Uta Hagen and Sanford Meisner. Don Richardson was one of these people. The greatest thing about what Don did is he was the one that realized that in order to act, we don't have to go through therapy. He segued off on to his own path and decided that he was going to create a technique that was taught to him by a gentleman by the name of Charles Jehlinger and used the tools he got from Jehlinger to come up with a technique and use that was fun. Jehlinger also had this technique too, by the way. He taught people like Kirk Douglas. Don Richardson taught people like Grace Kelly, amazing actors, icons of acting.
06:45:
How do we do this? There are two main tools that we use when we act. The first thing that we got to do when we act is we got to think about what's going on in our brain. The second thing is we got to think about what's going on in our body.
07:03:
What's going on in our brain is called an objective. What is an objective? An objective is what a character needs and what a character wants. Right now, for example, my objective is to teach you or to make you understand. The difference between life and acting is very interesting. This is one thing that Don Richardson taught me, is that in life, if you watch people, if I was to say just go watch some people at a coffee shop, they can think anything they want. They can think about what they got to do later. They can think about who they're talking to. What happens is if I start to watch these people, that starts to get confusing because we don't know what story we're watching. What Don had said is when we're acting, we got to pick one story and one story only and that's it. This story, for example, is the story of the teacher teaching the pupils and that's it.
08:07:
In life, I can come up here and maybe I'm teaching you and then maybe I start thinking about what I got to do later and maybe I just let my mind wander over here and think about that light. If the audience was watching this, they'd be completely confused because they think this teacher is horrible. What's wrong with him? That's not the story. The story is hopefully the teacher who is good teaching the students, and the objective is what keeps us focused in the scene. For example, like I said, my objective is to teach you, and the way an objective works is it's a controlled obsession. An objective would be, as I said, to teach, and how does it work? Well, what we do is we pick this objective for the scene. We read the scene. We interpret the scene, and then we say, okay, what is this character? What should this character be thinking about in the scene in order to make it work?
09:02:
As I said, if this was a scene, my objective would be to teach you. The way we play the objective is we start thinking these words of the objective over and over and over in our brain. What happens is these words to teach you, to teach you, to teach you, to teach you, to teach you, they start to meld into not so much words anymore, but just me doing it, and that's what I'm doing now. I'm not consciously thinking the words to teach you. I'm just doing it. How does that happen? Well, the way that happens is based on the foundation of not only this acting technique but everything in life that involves any kind of performance, which is muscle memory.
09:52:
Let's talk about the second tool. We talked first about objective. That's a controlled obsession that we're thinking over and over in our brain. The second part of the technique is called the emotion. That's what we're feeling in our body. For example, if I say to you ... Let me just first write this down. This would be called emotion. This is a pretty incredible thing that Don Richardson taught me that if I say to somebody, I need you to be angry in this scene, we don't have to think of any personal experience in order to be angry. I don't have to say, okay, I got to think about that time that that person stole my bike.
10:47:
There are so many reasons why this doesn't work. First of all, I'm not playing Brad in the scene and there's no bike and nobody stole it. It's like putting a different piece of a puzzle into another puzzle and it doesn't fit. The audience frequently may not know what's going on when they watch the scene, but I'm playing the scene of somebody stole my bike in a scene where I'm actually breaking up with my girlfriend, as if the audience is not going to follow this.
11:16:
Especially think about this concept. Don Richardson even said to me one time, he said many times actually that the audience doesn't listen to what you say. They don't listen to the words. It's all about the behavior underneath the scene. If the audience is not listening to what you're saying, and to think if you really don't believe me, this is why movies like Transformers are billion-dollar hits, because it's big explosions and fun lasers and all of this stuff or because people don't listen to the dialogue. If you actually listened to some of the dialogue, I'm not sure you'd be so crazy about the film, maybe, depending on your taste. In order to actually pull off a scene successfully, you have to have the correct behavior.
12:05:
If we do not have the correct behavior and I'm playing this guy who is breaking up with his girlfriend and I'm thinking about the time in order to get to the scene correctly, I'm thinking about that person who stole my bike. I break up with my girlfriend. You know what, honey? This isn't working out. If I do it that way, does it really look like I even give a crap about my girlfriend? I'm treating my girlfriend like it's a bike that got stolen. You don't think the audience is going to figure this out? Of course, they do. One of two things is going to happen. Either (a) they're going to hate me because they're going to think I'm an insensitive person to my girlfriend because in my head, I'm thinking about that time that somebody stole my bike, or (b) they're going to think I'm a bad actor.
12:51:
How do we actually evoke emotion in our body? We can't do it by, as I said, effectively and reliably in a way by thinking of some personal history thing. The amazing thing is that we can actually feel emotion by saying the name of it. For example, if I say the word joy, I feel a little tingle that goes off in my chest and it makes me smile. Go ahead and try that out there in cyber land. Just say the word joy, and you'd be lying to me if you told me that you didn't feel a little tingle go off in your body. Try saying this. The amazing thing about emotion is it's like a keyboard. Say the word anxiety. Anxiety. I feel another little tingle go off in my chest or my stomach. Disbelief. I feel something in the back of my brain. That's not going to be enough to carry me through a scene, but it's the nucleus. It's the kernel that the emotion starts from.
13:48:
We've already established that I can feel something from actually saying the name of the emotion. As I said, that's not going to be enough to carry me through the scene. How do we make the emotion big and intense? If, for example, coming back to this thing where I'm breaking up with my girlfriend, and let's say it's a woman that I've been living with for 10 years and I'm trying to say goodbye and I'm really nervous. How am I going to bring out the emotion necessary for the audience to actually believe that I care about this woman? Well, if I just say the word anxiety, I feel a little tingle, but that's not going to be enough to make the audience believe that I care about this woman. We have to tap into the second part of evoking emotion in our body.
14:35:
Here's the interesting thing. No matter what emotion that you're feeling, if it's joy or anger or disbelief, physiologically, we always have the same thing go on in our body. Our muscles start to tense up. We get a little bit lightheaded. Our heart starts to race. We sweat. If you think about it, think about the times that you were the most angry, the most happy and the most nervous. If you think about what's ... I'm not talking about the feeling. I'm talking about what's physiologically happening in your body. It's always the same. What we do in order to evoke emotion in our body is by saying the name of the emotion, anxiety, and coupling that with a breathing exercise to get our body to a state when we're filled with a lot of emotion, so that we are lightheaded, so that we are a little bit dizzy, so that we are having our muscles tense up.
15:31:
How do we do that? Well, the feeling that you actually have when you evoke emotion, that physiological experience is going to be the same feeling that you have as when you exercise. What Don Richardson taught us is a way to evoke a tremendous amount of emotion by doing a breathing exercise. Keep in mind, this exercise is the preparation phase of acting. I'm not asking you to do some weird breathing exercise in your scene when you actually execute it. This is the same exact thing as me learning the forehand or how to hit in a boxing ring.
16:06:
How do we do this? First, for example, I'm going to use the emotion, anxiety. I say anxiety right here, anxiety. I feel a little tingle in my stomach. Anxiety. What we do next is we take a big breath in and a big breath out and we say the word, anxiety. We do that a number of times until we actually get a little bit lightheaded. Believe me. People are going to think you're weird. That's just a fact. If you actually do it, and I'm going to show you one of my students do this in a moment, when you actually do this and you do this breathing exercise, you will get to a state where you're very lightheaded and a little bit sweaty, and that's when you start your scene.
16:53:
You start your scene lightheaded. If I'm breaking up with this girl, who I've been dating for 10 years and living with, if I'm not lightheaded, there's something wrong with me. I'm on Valium or something. I have to have that lightheaded quality in order for the ... Because the audience knows what a real person is like. They know what it's like to watch somebody break up or they've broken up with somebody before. If I'm flat, if I'm devoid of intensity in my body, the audience will not buy it. I have to bring that to the table.