I've browsed by a few of the"acting vs. improv" debates lately. To me the debate is tiresome. It's a moot point driven by ego. What I find to be a more productive topic is the situation where a writer and/or director surrenders the narrative in part or in whole to his performers. To the very moment of performance. Who would do that? Who would hand over their sense of control like that? That's amazing.
To me it feels like the evolution of storytelling. That's what it is and how people will see it in the future. It's a battle against the flawed R-Complex. The ritualistic part of our brains. (forgive me I was a zombie for halloween)
We're not really talking about adlibbing here. Not as in Robert De Niro subsituting one line for another. I'm talking about straight up improvised guerilla filmmaking / rehearsal. Read this excerpt about PT Anderson and his employment of Mike Leigh's style.
http://www.popmatters.com/film/intervie ... omas.shtml
The making of Magnolia included improvised scenes and monologues. Likewise with Boogie Nights, which is one of my all-time favorite films. Hands down. The performances are so fresh and feel so handcrafted... they fit every character like a glove. Every character has a strong sense of motivation and POV. On the other hand, Hard Eight was filmed more traditionally & bores the living daylights out of me. So it seems that adding true improvisation (not adlibbing) into his narratives really freed Anderson. The films gained texture and mystique. Even if his production process resembles all other film productions (theoretically), his preproduction process is more organic and features the varying perspectives and gifts of improv. More specifically group storytelling and the sacrifice of ritualistic control. Discuss."I ask [Anderson] about some of his choices for Magnolia, which is dense with symbolism and populated by grief-stricken and shell-shocked characters. He was inspired in part by his close friendship with John C. Reilly, who plays the LA cop Jim Kurring. "That stuff," he remembers, "happened about three or four years ago, during one summer when we were really bored, and he had grown a mustache and it just made me laugh. He would do this character, this guy who was on Cops, and I had a video camera and we'd drive around and improvise, and call up actors who weren't working at the time, so we'd call up Phil Hoffman and say, go to Moore Park and fuck with the trash cans and we'll drive by in ten minutes and catch you doing it. Then we got a cop uniform and improvised all these altercations. And eventually I started writing all that stuff down. A lot of Jim's dialogue is based on that improvisation, like the Mike Leigh style. It really is a pretty fucking cool way to work. We've gotta try that again."
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