Young Actors-Too pretty to Learn Their Craft?

One of the things that really struck me at MIP TV was the continued importance of quality acting in American Independent films. The obvious caveat about having name actors has been in play for some time now, and names of any real visibility, do help a lot. They provide an excuse, or a justification if you will, for an international buyer to pick up a film that they already like. Of course if the names are big enough they'll pick up films they don't like too.

That being said, the shoddy acting techniques of many young performers can really hurt a film's prospects. I don't care how good looking an actor is, if they don't enunciate their lines in a way that people can understand, then buyers will simply pass on the film. The average film fan would be amazed to know just how many sloppy performances there are in American indie film. I believe these actors come from the "I'm Too Pretty To Learn My Craft" school of acting. The affected mumbling and swallowing of dialogue that they substitute for real acting costs their producers litterally thousands of dollars.

Obvioulsy directors bear some of the blame, and the sound people too. But lower bugeted indie productions rarely can afford the type of experienced sound man who will know that what he's hearing won't register for a casual viewer without a shooting script in front of them. And the directors? Well, they have usually memorized the script before shooting starts and as a result tend to fill in the mumbled blanks in their heads.

So that leaves it to the actor, who too often seems to have never studied diction, or slept in the back of the class while his mates were at it. With more and more international buyers being fluent in English, this type of mumbled, introverted, pained or whatever, performance becomes more and more of a liability. I saw this first hand with a couple of our titles when we presented them to some Indian buyers at MIP TV. Now these folks have spoken English from birth, but with an accent. They are used to dealing with Westerners and they really had a hard time understanding the dialogue in the trailers we presented. And so did I! Their inital reaction was "we'll have to subtitle this!" Naturally this is an extra expense that drives down the sale price.

My favorite trailers from this trip are the one from our new pick up; ARNOLD'S PARK, and the one from our soon to be released MONSTER CAMP. The first is a feature, and the second is a doc. In both cases, you can understand everything, with a few exceptions where the Monster Camp director added subtitles (Bless you!) to help overcome some ambient noise.

What is the moral of the story? I guess if you want to be a serious actor, then take learning your craft seriously. And if you want to make a saleable film, then hire actors that actually have some training. Rehearse them at least a little. Try to figure out where the mumbling might be and remember, narrative story telling is the process of presenting some version of reality by artificial means; ie actors, cameras, lights, effects, etc. A pained character might mumble in real life, but in theatre and film, the actor has to portray this pain in a way that audiences can digest and believe. Doing so requires craft, and when you do it really well, it might even become art.

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