“The film editor Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, etc.) writes in In the Blink of an Eye that every time he test screens a movie, “there’s a lot of what is medically called ‘referred pain’ in the process.” Referred pain is when you experience pain in a part of the body different from the actual source or cause of the pain. Pain in your elbow, for instance, is often caused by a pinch nerved up in your shoulder—you just happen to feel the pain in your elbow. The pain in the shoulder is “referred” to the elbow. Audience feedback is often like that, Murch continues. If a percentage of the audience agree that they don’t like a specific scene, “the chances are that that scene is fine. Instead, the problem may be that the audience simply didn’t understand something that they needed to know for the scene to work.” So, instead of fixing the scene itself, “you might clarify some exposition that happens five minutes earlier. Don’t necessarily operate on the elbow: instead, discover if nerves are being pinched somewhere else.” -Billy Oppenheimer, Six at Six Newsletter
For the actor…
If you’re having trouble in a particular moment or beat of a scene, chances are that’s not the actual problem.
Go back a few pages and look over your all actions again. Most likely something is amiss in one or several of the prior beats. Get that right and everything else going forward will fall into place.
