6

Focus

 

 

 

The Environment

Movie sets are busy places. Even when you are doing a very dramatic scene, you are aware of the camera moving, the microphone flipping back and forth to catch the dialogue, and all kinds of technical devices with people doing their jobs as you act. One flick of your eyelid that acknowledges any of this activity ruins the scene.

An actor must separate the brain into two parts. One part makes note of the technical requirements. The other ignores them completely and creates. When your focus throughout the performance is perfect, you achieve a sensibility in which the audience loses you, the actor, the person, and avidly accepts the character. It is then that the audience cries, laughs, exalts, lives, and dies with ...

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