Actors Anonymous (2 page)

Peace,

James Franco

The Twelve Steps of Actors Anonymous

STEP 1

We admitted that life is a performance—that we are all performers, at all times—and that our “performance” had left our control.

STEP 2

Came to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves, some sort of directing force, that could restore our “performance” to sanity.

STEP 3

Turned our will and our “performances” over to the Great Director.

STEP 4

Made a fearless and searching moral inventory of our “character.”

STEP 5

Admitted to the Great Director, to ourselves, and to another actor the exact nature of our “character’s” wrongs.

STEP 6

Were entirely ready to have the Great Director remove all of these defects from our “character.”

STEP 7

Humbly asked the Great Director to remove our “character’s” shortcomings.

STEP 8

Made a list of actors our “character” had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all.

STEP 9

Made direct amends to such “actors” whenever possible, except when to do so would injure them or other “actors.”

STEP 10

Continued to take our “character’s” inventory, and when he was wrong, promptly admitted it.

STEP 11

Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with the Great Director, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry out his direction.

STEP 12

After our “character” has had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other actors and to practice these principles in all our scenes.

STEP 1

We admitted that life is a performance—that we are all performers, at all times—and that our “performance” had left our control.

I Am the Actor

I
AM THE ACTOR.

I am alive in 2013 and I was alive in 1913.

I am an actor, so I can play everything. Everyone is in me, and I am a part of everyone.

I am a part of your consciousness. You don’t think so? You want to deny that I have made my way inside? Just because you think you don’t know me doesn’t mean you don’t know me. I am all actors.

I am Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando and Jimmy Stewart and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Steve McQueen.

I am Meryl Streep and Natalie Wood and Cate Blanchett and Marilyn Monroe.

I am Nicolas Cage and Robert Pattinson and James Dean and Rock Hudson. I am Sean Penn and Robert De Niro and Cary Grant.

I am Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck and Kathryn Hepburn and Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly, Jean Harlow and Lauren Bacall and Judy Garland and Greer Garson. I am Norma Shearer and Lillian Gish. I am Garbo. I am Joan Crawford and Joan Blondell, Jean Moreau and Anna Karina and Marlene Dietrich and Monica Vitti. I am Ann Dvorak and Lucille Ball and Louise Brooks. I am Vivien Leigh and fucking Shelley Winters.

I am Clark Gable.

I am Montgomery Clift.

I am W. C. Fields.

I’m here to entertain you, but I don’t really care about entertaining you, know what I mean?

Audiences have a taste for shit, so I am not trying to entertain them anymore. Even the smartest critics have a taste for shit, at least when it comes to acting.

Yes, every once in a while people will get it right and appreciate good performances. We have plenty of awards shows. We have the Oscars.

But where were the Oscars for Nicholson in
Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail,
and
Chinatown
? The Oscars for De Niro in
Mean Streets
and
Taxi Driver
? What about Brando in
A Streetcar Named Desire
and
Last Tango in Paris
? What about Clift in
A Place in the Sun,
Dean in
East of Eden
and
Giant
?

I used to care a lot about acting, but now I see that you’re only as good as the material you’re given, and if you have good material, you’re only as good as your director. There is so much dependence on others that I can’t care about acting anymore.

I’m like a sophisticated prop. I’ll give you all the feeling you want, all the accents you want, all the hairstyles and wardrobe changes you want, and I’ll say whatever you put in front of me. But don’t ask me to take pride in the work.

Did Brando deal with fame by getting fat and bitter?

Did McQueen fuck himself to death?

I was alive when Shakespeare wrote all that crap. It was good then, but it wasn’t Shakespeare.

I performed for money, and I performed for free. It’s better to perform for money if you hate the director; it’s better to perform for free if you love him.

I used to care about how I looked. Now I don’t care as much. Maybe it’s because I’m so handsome.

Jack Nicholson used to worry about losing his hair. You can see it going as early as 1963 in the Roger Corman film
The Terror,
and it’s definitely going by
Five Easy Pieces
. But he’s ten times sexier in all his films of the ’70s (post–
Easy Rider
) than he is in the shitty films he did before that. When he had more hair.

Many actors want to direct. Nowadays, many actors end up directing. It’s weird how their films feel small and cliché when they do. I don’t even like thinking about most of them.

If you work in Hollywood, you usually have to play the game. It’s damn hard to only do movies that are good. Even Daniel Day-Lewis did
The Boxer, The Crucible,
and
Nine
. Not that he was bad in any of them, but if you think about how he only does one film every two or three or five years, he must have felt pretty shitty after those films came out.

I hate actors that make their performances more important than the project. Get the fuck over yourself. What’s the point? Don’t you know you’re in a collaborative business? Your career isn’t that important.

I hate books that try to give advice about how movies work. This is how it works: do what you love and believe in. Sometimes you can do a project that will not be the best movie, but it has aspects about it that make it worthwhile, like you get to work with a cool actor for a week, or you get to work with new technology, or you get to play a crazy role for a little bit. But who cares about movies that work? The only people that care about those are the people that care about money and praise: the executives, the agents, and the nonartists.

Yes, film is a populist art form, but it’s been losing its populist standing since the ’60s. Of course you can still produce movies that make tons of money, but so what? Even though books are dying, you can still publish books that make tons of money. That doesn’t mean that the movie industry is going to stay dominant forever.

Theater used to be the place where the stars were.

What about all the vaudeville kings and queens?

It’s great when you travel for a film. You get to stay in a hotel, get fed, see new places, and lots of people from the cast and crew screw each other.

There are some people that are very serious about their acting. But the ones that are too serious are boring and usually end up strangling their own performances.

Daniel Day-Lewis never breaks character, even when he’s in the makeup chair or at home. Can you imagine being Bill the Butcher for half a year? Wouldn’t you feel silly walking around town dressed like Abraham Lincoln? If you were eighteen? If you were twenty-five? If you were forty, fifty years old?

What if you walked around as an insecure loser character for thirty-three years? Wait…

Would you hurt another person to help them give a better performance? If it meant a better performance for yourself, would you slap
someone? Cut someone? Punch someone? Spit on someone? Call someone a kike or a nigger offscreen, meaning it wouldn’t be heard in the film, but you would do it to catch the person off guard in hopes of producing a genuine reaction?

Some actors hate doing photo shoots (mostly guys) because they feel phony. But isn’t posing for a still camera the same thing as acting for a motion picture camera? Is it because the photo shoots are ostensibly capturing the real person and the roles in films are characters? I guess.

Acting teachers are fucked up. They are unlike any other teachers, because they deal with their students’ emotions and bodies. They get inside their students’ heads. Even if they have the best intentions, they can’t help from becoming gurus and therapists for their students, because they deal on such intimate terms. When you have a bunch of students looking up to you because you liberated their emotions, it’s hard not to play the role of mentor/lover/father/mother.

As in any profession, it’s the people who break the rules that become special. The problem is that for every innovative rule breaker, there is a whole army of rule breakers without talent that you never hear about.

Harmony Korine dropped out of NYU. So did P. T. Anderson and Woody Allen and Steve McQueen (the artist/director). You’d think dropping out was the way to become a great writer/director.

What do you think is good acting? The most revealing performance? The biggest transformation? Being the most charismatic? The biggest hero? The sexiest? The funniest?

Are film actors the most respected of all actors? And by whom? The general public? By other actors? Is it the renown that makes them seem bigger and better than the rest?

Do we like to kick film actors when they step outside of their comfort zone? Or do we like to praise them? Julia Roberts got criticized when she went on Broadway. Scarlett Johansson won a Tony.

What do you think the best performance on film is?

What is the best theatrical performance? Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski? Laurette Taylor in
The Glass Menagerie
?

How many people are alive that saw those performances?

Shakespeare was an actor.

So was Sophocles.

It’s funny when people say actors can’t write. Most of ’em can’t, but look at Woody Allen. Look at W. C. Fields.

And what is good writing? Even the best writers resemble the best actors. They have a few good projects in them, and the others don’t seem to add up.

Screenwriters and directors. Weird people. They’re of a different breed. I don’t know if I like them. I mean, I do; I really like some of them, but I’m also prone to hate them.

At acting school I was taught to hate directors, because they knew nothing about acting. My teacher said Elia Kazan was the last great director of actors because he came out of the Group Theater. But this was stupid thinking. Directors might not know much about acting, but there isn’t much to know. Be simple, be in the right place, and go with your instincts.

Basically, if you’re relaxed in front of the camera, you’ll be good.

Acting wasn’t and isn’t always this way, the less-is-more idea. In some cases it’s good to be tense, to be over the top, not to know your lines, to be too loud, or to be too quiet, to jump up and down, or to scream out everything you say.

If you try to look cool, you can sometimes pull it off. Steve McQueen was cool (in
Bullitt, The Getaway, Papillon, The Great Escape
), but how many books did he read in his life? His characters outsmart everyone, but it’s the smarts of the streets, where the rubber hits the cement. Isn’t it lonely in that place? Where thoughts are feelings not articulated ideas?

McQueen’s intelligence was all body and machines: the way he moved and the way he handled machinery, the way he came out on top.

At the height of his popularity Steve McQueen would make people pay him before he would even consider a script. He made tons of money. At one point he was the highest paid actor in the world. I guess that’s something to aspire to.