Playing The Love: a tip for actors & directors

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Ela Thier

Many actors find it much easier and more comfortable to play the “anger”, and most scenes lend themselves to that easily. Scenes are built around conflict: one person wants this but the other wants that. So anger seems fitting.

The trick to playing conflict is to play the love.

When actors immerse themselves in what the character is pissed about, the scene tends to get a “melodramatic” feel to it. This is because the actor is playing exactly what the words say. There is no subtext. What you see, is what you hear, is what you get. The depth is lost.

In real life, our biggest and most painful fights are with the people that we love the most. Would be very unusual if I got into some big fight with a stranger on the street. But boy do I have fights with the person I married! It’s the people we’re closest to and care about most where our pain finds the safety to show itself.

This is true of fiction too.

When an actor places their attention on loving the other character, whatever their relationship may be, the fight becomes electric. Every conflict-filled line, spoken while yearning twinkles in the actor’s eyes, sucks the audience into a performance that they can’t take their eyes off. The performance comes to life.

I see this in auditions all the time. Most actors come in and play the fight. The one actor that comes in and plays the love, while delving into those mean and bitter scripted lines – that’s always the actor that sticks out of the pack.

Say angry things, feel anger, play anger, and the performance is flat and boring.

Say angry things while feeling the love, and the rich, nuanced, and complex layers of the human experience will snap-crackle-pop before your eyes.

Try it out!

The Valentine card pictured above was given to me 30 years ago, in the 6th grade, by Shlomit, my best friend at the time. It reminds me of what love really is.

I wish us all this level of deep, genuine, and openhearted demonstrations of love with many people in our lives.

Happy Valentine’s Day ♥

My next Actors & Directors Weekend Intensive is Feb 25-26, 2012. Visit my site for details at:
http://theindependentfilmschool.com/directors_actors.html

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For Hanuka 2011: Little Known Facts About Jews

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Ela Thier

This year, on my facebook page, I posted some “Little known fact about Jews” for each of the 8 days of Hanuka. Thought to compile them all here in one (long!) posting. Here goes!


First candle factoid: the word “religion” doesn’t exist in Hebrew. We have no equivalent word. Closest word to it is “dat”, which means “law”.

Judaism is not a religion; it’s a system of observances (laws). The focus in our cultures is on what you DO, not what you believe.

As long as you do the right thing (ie. act with integrity), you can think or believe whatever the heck you want. For example, you can hate poor people till kingdom comes, but you still have to give 10% of your earnings to charity.

Your mind and your beliefs belong to you and no one else. In that sense, there are as many Jewish “religions” as there are Jews.

2nd candle factoid: The words “Jews” and “Jewish” are modern words. They were coined in the 1800′s by ruling bodies in order to distinguish between Jews and Christians, later became part of popular vernacular, and were eventually adopted by Jews themselves.

Throughout the Bible and through roughly twenty centuries of Rabbinic texts and literature, we called ourselves “Israel” or “the children of Israel” (b’nei Israel), and viewed ourselves as a nation of people, connected across the globe by ancestral and cultural ties.

The concept of “Judaism” as a “world religion” is predominantly a Christian perspective of who we are.

Third-candle-Jewish-factoid (aka fact’ale) – The Gregorian calendar (ie. the one we use) is a solar calendar. A year constitutes one revolution of the earth around the sun: roughly 365 days.

The Muslim calendar is lunar. A year constitutes 12 revolutions of the moon around the earth, regardless of the sun. This is why the same Muslim holiday can take place at a different time of the year, depending on the year.

The Jewish calendar is an odd one: it’s BOTH solar and lunar. Our year is solar: one revolution around the sun. But our months are lunar: one revolution of the moon around the earth.

Why do we do this? The Bible describes the months as being indicated by the phases of the moon: each month begins with a new moon. Whenever you see a full moon, it’s exactly the 15th of the month in the Jewish calendar.

But the Bible also names Passover a “spring holiday”. So although our months are lunar, we have to observe Passover in the spring. Oy! To pull that off, every few years we add an extra month and observe a 13-month year. It’s the only way we can make this work.

That’s why although we’re lunar, the high holidays are always in the fall, Hanuka is always in the winter, Passover is in the spring, and so forth.

Confused? Well… I tried. Happy Hanuka :)

4th candle Jewish tid-bit. This one is a fact-opinion hybrid.

While on the topic of calendars (see 3rd candle posting), the day, the month, and the year, are all units of time determined by nature (earth, moon, sun, respectively). The week, however, is an entirely arbitrary unit of time. Nothing in nature creates a “week”.

To make work manageable, my peeps created this concept of working for six days and then breaking for a day. We picked Saturday. Christians came along later and picked Sunday (why not?) Muslims picked Friday. Americans like to super-size, so they invented the weekend.

The concept of breaking time into “weeks” was created for the purpose of getting a break from work every few days, and is possibly the most significant Jewish contribution to human societies.

Happy Hanuka and Shabbat Shalom :)

5th candle “little-publicized-news” – Some traditions are 2000 years old. And some are 20 years old. Like “Mitzva Day” in Detroit. Tomorrow, on Christmas day, 125 Muslims will join 800 Jewish volunteers. The two groups will be working together at 40 different social service organizations around Detroit, serving their Christian neighbors as they celebrate Christmas.

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2011/12/mitzvah_day_metro_detroit_jews.html

To those celebrating Christmas, I wish you a warm and meaningful holiday ♥

The Hanuka Tree?!

6th candle little-known-fact: because our culture originally developed while we were an agricultural people, most of our holidays are connected to the harvest cycle.

A component of the original Hanukkah was the celebration of the end of the olive harvest. This is why so much of Hanukkah is about olive oil: the story of a small flax of oil lasting 8 days, lighting an oil menorah, and not only do we fry our latkes in oil (potato pancakes eaten on Hanukkah), we even deep-fry our sufganiot (fried donuts eaten on Hanukkah.)

The holiday, in fact, is so much about our connection to trees, that some theorize that the shape of the menorah was designed to mimic a tree.

In fact, the menorah may have specifically been designed to look like a plant called “Salvia Palaestina” which grows in Israel/Palestine. Take a look at this picture. The resemblance is uncanny!

So this may be a stretch, I don’t know. But given that Hanukkah is the much older holiday of the two, it COULD be that the Christmas tree has its roots here :)

Besides being the penultimate Hanukkah candle, today is also the first day of Kwanzaa, a week-long festival honoring African American heritage and cultures.

Which brings me to talk about ethnicity!

Jews are not an ethnicity. There are white Jews, Asian Jews, African Jews, Indian Jews, Arab Jews. Arab Jews?! You bet. They are called “Mizrachi Jews”, and they come from Arab countries where they lived for centuries.

Up till the 1900′s, some of the largest, oldest and most vibrant Jewish communities in the world thrived in Arab countries, Yemen and Iraq being two of the largest. Iraqi Jewish communities were more than 2000 years old, dating all the way back to the first exile from Jerusalem. Iraqi Jews are the authors of the Babylonian Talmud, and are the founders of Judaism as we know it today.

In Israel currently, the Jewish population looks like this: 47.5% are white Europeans, 50.2% are Sephardic or Mizrachi (Spanish or Arab), and 2.2% are Ethiopian.

One of my favorite things about growing up in Israel was having the great fortune of living among Mizrachi Jews. Their warmth, intelligence, and generosity shaped who I am today.

I’ve always thought that Arab Jews held the key to creating a bridge between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. If we can’t face and heal from the prejudices towards Arab Jews, how can we hope to heal from the racism between Jews and Muslim Arabs?

For a whiff of hope, I’m listing a few music videos featuring a Yemenite Jewish singer, Noa, and a Palestinian singer, Mira Awad. In these videos, the two perform duets about peace, incorporating Hebrew, Arabic, and English. (The darker of the two women is the Jewish one.)

Here are some favorites:

“There Must Be Another Way” – performed at Eurovision 2009.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RN8B1xvCxI0

The Beatles’ “We Can Work It Out” – incorporating the sounds of Arabic music
http://youtu.be/lFwRyaTvnYg

“Shalom Shalom” – a live concert. (Noa is way pregnant in this video, and feeling super beautiful.)
http://youtu.be/5iukOKO-6R0

Happy 7th day of Hanuka.

And to those celebrating, I wish you a proud and joyous KWANZAA

For my last posting, I thought to pose a question rather than make a statement. As a rabbi once told me: Judaism is not about having the answers, it’s about asking the questions.

So my question is: why be individualistic and give each member of the family their own menorah? Why not be communal and light one for the team?

Now, where there are two Jews there are three opinions, so every Jewish person will have their own theory. Here’s mine:

My experience with Jewish observances has been that they are all, ALL, designed to make people spend time with each other. There’s not one observance I can think of that makes people go off on their own to do their thing. Even the most reflective holiday (Yom Kippur) is a collective, community effort. I could go through a litany of examples of how Jewish observances nudge folks towards each other, but this is a facebook posting so I’ll keep it short (ish) and illustrate only one example:

Evan and I are both super busy. Like many married folks in this city, we have to go out of our way to spend time together, and often don’t manage to, even when we try. But every night this past week, for just a few moments of time, we put everything aside, ignored our phones, and lit candles together. If one menorah sufficed, our good intentions would have stayed just that.

The irony of being “individualistic” about it and giving every member their own menorah, is that it actually brings the family together.

Now looking at this picture, guess how many folks we had over last night…? (Album coming soon!)

Happy last day of Hanuka.
peace out.

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Can’t Sleep

Posted on June 2, 2011 by Ela Thier

writing assignment, June 2, 2011

It’s 1:20am and Susan wakes up from a nightmare, her heart racing.

She has a big day tomorrow, that starts at 6am, but she can’t get to sleep.

Now: before I sum up this exercise into the usual format, I want you to do it.

STEP A) Stop reading here, and write exactly what I said above as:
X want [blank]
Because [blank]
But [blank]

Go ahead. When you’re done, keep reading and I’ll walk you through steps B, C, and D.

Welcome back.

We rehearsed a wonderful scene in my lab this week, but the writer-director ran into trouble because he didn’t have an analysis of the conflict in the scene. He hadn’t distilled the scene down to the pursuit of a goal despite obstacles.

This led to the actors getting burdened with way more information than they needed, and the performances didn’t convey a story.

What the writer-director needed to do is translate the scene into a simple format: who wants what, why they want it, what’s in the way. That simple.

So let’s try:

Lisa wants to sleep
Because – uh oh. I see I’m in trouble already. All I’ve got going on is that she has a big day tomorrow starting at 6. Pretty low stakes. What do we care if she gets any sleep that night? Distilling the scene down into this format is not about making your writing more simple, it’s about making it richer. In this case, I realized by plugging the story into this format that the stakes were low. So let me try again:

Lisa wants: to sleep
Because: she hasn’t been able to sleep for more than 2 hours at night for days and has become completely dysfunctional
But: night after night, she wakes up from nightmares and is unable to get back to sleep.

If you come up with higher and better stakes, please replace mine with yours!

And since my last assignment was on the topic of location, let’s add an interesting location into the mix:

On ten pieces of papers write ten different possible locations. I’ll furnish you with the first seven:
1) her bedroom
2) her parents’ house; she’s come to visit and this is the house where she grew up
3) her best friend’s living room; she just moved to town and is couch surfing
4) her office; she’s not managing to meet a major deadline, stayed super late at the office and finally chose to just crash on the receptionist’s couch
5) her ex-boyfriend’s place; she went there knowing full well that she shouldn’t
6) a smelly motel room; she’s at a conference, away from home

STEP B: Just as I did, now you write six possible locations. You may want to set a timer to 5 minutes and make a long list of crazy location ideas; think totally outside the box. Then put a star next to your 6 favorites.

STEP C: Now that you did that, tear up a piece of paper into 12 little pieces and write numbers 1-12 on those pieces. Toss ‘em in a hat or any other receptacle, and pick one without looking.

STEP D: Now that the location is established, write the scene. Remember that her goal is not to stay or leave the boyfriend, meet or not meet the work deadline. Her goal is to get some sleep.

Set your timer to 30 minutes for Step D. Click here for instructions on how to best fulfill these writing assignments.

PS – As you may have noticed, I hadn’t posted an assignment in a few weeks. Am glad to be back.

In truth, I stopped posting because I didn’t get the sense that people were using them. So felt like I was writing to a wall.

On occasion I’d hear from someone that they read them, but don’t actually do them.

Last night, my student Wendy, told me that she executes the assignment every week, and that she counts on them to get any writing done at all.

So: these assignments are for Wendy. If only one person benefits and does these assignments, I feel like it’s worth it for me to create them.

If I fall off the wagon again, and you’re someone who follows and does my assignments, be sure to let me know that, and I’ll keep posting them. For you.

:-)

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Rooming is Verb

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Ela Thier

writing assignment, May 3

People think of scripts as consisting of dialogue (the short lines in the middle of the page), and descriptions (the long lines going across the page). But a better way to think of scripts is as having dialogue and actions.

One of my students brought a piece to class today that had the following line in it:

Jack looks through the cupboard but it’s empty, while unwashed glasses clutter the counter.

Can you picture this kitchen? I can! It looks a lot like my kitchen often does. But instead of describing a messy kitchen, the writer described an action: Jack is looking for a glass, but they’re all dirty.

This week’s assignment:
Martha wants to find the flashdrive with her thesis on it
Because her computer crashed, this flashdrive contains the only copy of her finished thesis, and the deadline is tomorrow
But she can’t find it anywhere.

Choose locations that you know well: your room, your work place, your parents’ house, whatever locations you wish, and place Martha there as she retraces her steps and travels from place to place, looking for her flash-drive. She may have a messy office, but she could also be a neat-freak who can’t find her flash-drive. Neat people lose things too. Give us a tour of each location that she goes to through actions only. No descriptions necessary.

Remember that your reader can extrapolate the feel and look of a location from one or two vital details. You don’t need to fill in every blank. When you write a novel, what you write is all we get, so juicy details make the writing rich. When you write a screenplay, you’re creating a blueprint. The final product is the film itself. The art director needs only one or two details from which they’ll design the rest of the space. Once you tell us about the empty cupboard and the cluttered counter, we’ll automatically know that the trash is overflowing, there’s a pile of dishes in the sink, there are piles of unsorted mail all over the table, and an empty pizza box on the floor, etc.

Click here for instructions on how to fulfill these assignments.

Happy writing!

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Gender-Blender: using cliches to your advantage

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ela Thier

Writing assignment, April 27, 2011

When I wrote THE WEDDING COW, there was a scene in which Jack stops at a gas station. In the first pass at that scene, your typical car-mechanic-type guy in overalls walks out to help Jack. But on the second pass, I went for the less obvious choice. I thought to myself: “rare that you see a woman attending a gas station. What if we make the attendant a she?” And so I did. The plump gas station attendant in overalls, who comes with rollers in her hair to help Jack is now one of my favorite characters in the film.

In PUNCTURE (screening this week at Tribeca!) nurse Vicky in the first scene of the movie is working in the ER with a male nurse. And in “President Katy” (a children’s story), the mad scientist is a black woman.

All of us often go with the obvious choice in first drafts. A fun exercise is to go back through our scenes and find the spots where we relied on cliches, then challenge ourselves to turn those cliches around. Use cliches and stereotypes to your advantage by specifically looking for them and asking yourself what your story would look like if you turned them on their head.

Turning gender roles around is one of the easiest ways to accomplish exactly that, and it’s hardly ever done. By making your gas station attendant a woman you’ve taken exactly 10 seconds to write a fresh scene that no one has written before.

This week’s assignment:

Dr. Lisa Smith, a world’s leading immunologist, wants: Nurse Jack to promise her that he won’t say a word about the fact that she gave a patient the wrong medication
Because: the mistake caused serious illness in the patient and her entire career would be jeopardized if she was found out
But: Nurse Jack knows that Lisa had been drinking and is conflicted about what he should do

And if you’re looking for an extra assignment this week: choose one of your favorite assignments that you’ve already written, and look at where you’ve made the obvious first choice. Gender is the usual suspect; that’s where most of us, myself included, shamelessly fall for stereotypes. (When searching for an image of a blender, I saw 4 pictures of men using blenders and hundreds of pictures of women using blenders. When it comes to genders, it’s soooo easy to be original!)

Happy writing!

Click here for instructions on how to fulfill my writing assignments.

PS: If you’ve studied with me, or just like these assignments, please rate me no city search!

One more PS: My workshop DIRECTING THE MOVING CAMERA: A Master Class in Shot Planning, is this weekend! It’s the class that I wish I had gotten to take.

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Good-News-Bad-News

Posted on April 20, 2011 by Ela Thier
writing assignment
April 19, 2011, (c) Ela Thier

——————————
This week I celebrate Passover, which commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery.

The story of Passover is an action-packed-let-my-people-go epic story of overcoming obstacles towards a high-stakes goal. Like most epic stories, it involves a big chase scenes. And like most chase scenes, it’s built around the “Good-News-Bad-News” principle.

If you observe action-packed chase scenes, the character makes a narrow escape, only to encounter an even bigger problem, then prevails, then encounters another problem, and so on and so forth. This is a tool for creating suspense.

Pharoah declares that all Israelite male babies must die: bad news
Moses’ mom doesn’t kill her baby: good news
The baby is put in the Nile and sent to the unknown: (scary news?)
Pharao’s daughter finds him and adopts him: good news
Moses, grown up, sees a task master kill an Israelite slave: bad news
Moses kills the task master: good news
Moses is hunted down to be killed: bad news
Moses escapes Egypt: good news

60 years later:
After getting married and doing the whole burning bush thing, Moses returns to Egypt to liberate his people: good news
Pharoah says no way: bad news
God, through Moses, bestows first plague (blood) and Pharaoh concedes: good news
Pharaoh changes his mind: bad news
(repeat the above ten times: frogs, boils, and so forth — good news, bad news, good news, bad news)
After the tenth plague, Pharoah lets them go: good news
As they approach the Red Sea, they see that Pharaoh has changed his mind as his army closes in on them: BAD news!
Moses parts the water: good news
Pharaoh’s army chases them into the water: bad news!
Pharaoh’s army drowns as the sea closes in on them: good news

In every action-packed chase scene, from James Bond to Batman, you’ll see the good-news-bad-news principle at work: Bond escapes with his cool car (good), car is shot down (bad), Bond makes it on to a boat (good), three bad guys are on that boat (bad), Bond manages to throw them overboard and arrive on island (good), on island, 17 bad guys await him (bad), he escapes them (good), to be boobytrapped and end up hanging over a pool full of hungry elegators (bad), the woman he slept with earlier in the film shows up to help him (good), turns out she works for the bad guy (bad), etc. etc. etc.

This week, let’s re-write an assignment that I posted earlier in the year. But this time, we’ll adopt the good-news-bad-news tool to heighten the drama and suspense:

Rita wants: to go to the school dance with her friend Gwen
Because: her best friend Neil told her about a bomb in the gym that will go off during the dance
But: her strict father won’t let her go, and she can’t tell her father or anyone (other than Gwen) about the bomb because Neil was involved and she doesn’t want to get him in trouble.

Feel free to start this scene anywhere: apply good-news-bad-news to her trying to sneak out of the house, to her getting to the school with her father on her tail, to her looking for the bomb at the school while her father and all the adults at the dance (which he will enlist) look for her to stop her in her tracks.

(To raise the dad’s stakes: remember that he wont’ let her go because he’s in the middle of an ugly custody battle with his ex-wife. They both agreed not to let Rita go to parties because she’s recovering from some random drug addiction (you pick with). So if she ends up at the party, this could cost him custody rights.

Let’s see Rita get to that bomb in a meaty good-news-bad-news scenario.

Happy writing, and happy holidays,
Ela

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Be featured in a music video

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Ela Thier

Click here for details:
http://elathier.com/blog/be-featured-in-a-music-video-about-friendship

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God Is In The Detail

Posted on April 12, 2011 by Ela Thier

weekly writing assignment
(c) Ela Thier

First part of this week’s exercise is you writing a poem.

Here’s how: I want you, in writing, to describe the shirt that you’re wearing right now. I want you to describe it in enough detail that I could recreate your shirt by reading what you wrote, without ever seeing this shirt.

Go ahead. Take 5 minutes right now and try it out.

You’ll discover when you’re done that what you have is a poem. Great poems aren’t made with big words but with tiny details.

Which of the following is a more compelling expression of love:

“I love you so, so much!”

Or:

“for ten minutes I watched the worn-out soles of your sneakers as you brushed your heels against the floor, sitting in the row in front of me at Math class. For ten minutes after that, I watched the frayed ends of your jeans. Under the loose threads I saw skin.”

The word “love” never comes up in the second example. But it’s more intimate and powerful because it’s detailed.

In today’s story exercises, I feel like offering two story options. Write whichever one will be easier for you to connect with. (Reminder! Story is the pursuit of a high-stakes goal in the face of insurmountable obstacles.)

Option A
MAX WANTS: to describe the day that he met his wife
BECAUSE: she feels that she’s not important to him and asks that he prove his love by describing their first meeting
BUT: he can’t remember the details of their meeting

Let Max’s wife have fun grilling him for details. SHE, unlike him, remembers EVERY detail, down to the type of dog that barked at them at the intersection on Broadway and 96th St.

Option B, in case you’re not inspired to write a “couply” story:
MAX WANTS: to describe his daughter’s graduation
BECAUSE: she feels that she’s not important to him and asks that he prove his love by describing her graduation
BUT: he can’t remember the details of it.

Tip: use real life experiences when creating their meeting or the graduation. Use real-life whether you’re writing an autobiography or a sci-fi fantasy about pigs in space. Pigs in space can still recount that coconut ring he was wearing, or the nervous roommate who wouldn’t clear out of the room. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that truly great science fiction feels like real life. That’s because a great writer draws from her own experiences to write it. Nothing is richer in detail than real life.

The real-life experience doesn’t have to be a perfect parallel. You can draw details from the exchange you had at the post office this morning to create Max and his wife’s first meeting. That “love sentence” above that I just came up with was drawn from two different people that I had crushes on! I remembered ogling someone’s sneakers who I liked. The other crush was someone who used to sit at the row in front of me in Math class back in the eighth grade. I combined the two into a love sandwich ;-)

Remember that you are free to change or invent these characters’ genders, names, ages, etc.

For instructions on how to best utilize these exercises click here.

Happy writing!
Ela :)

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Fish out of water – and on the plate

Posted on April 5, 2011 by Ela Thier
Writing assignment, April 5, 2011


Gloria wants: to get a job as a [insert tough job here]
Because: her husband got caught for twenty years of tax evasion and they’re broke on their bums (ouch)
But: she’s a 50-something who grew up old-money and has been wealthy all her life. Gloria has never filled out a job application in her life, much less had a job interview, much less had a job.

Let’s see how Gloria does.

I recommend you choose a job that you’ve endured so you can enjoy getting into all the juicy little details of a world that you know and can write about. Mine would be: nanny, house cleaning, secretary, selling jewelry at the mall, and manning a Fotomat booth in a parking lot (remember those…?)

Fish-out-of-water stories are fun to write because the premise of someone not knowing the rules of the game, lends itself to endless obstacles.

Click here for instructions on how to fulfill these assignments. (If you’ve read these instructions a while ago, you might find it useful to re-read them. If you spend more than 10 seconds thinking before putting words on the page, then you definitely need to re-read them.)

Happy writing :)

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Beauty and the nerd

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Ela Thier

Weekly writing assignment, March 29, 2011

Lulu wants: to nail an audition
because: she’s perfect for the role! she was born to play this role.
but: when she shows up at the audition after dozens of hours of practice and preparation, she discovers that the director is the scrawny nerd that she humiliated and made fun of relentlessly back in high school when she was super popular.

Good luck Lulu!

click here for instructions on how to fulfill these assignments

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