“The most important element in an actor’s performance is confidence.” -Howard Hawks
When faced with a difficult task, you can be confident you can accomplish said task for one of two reasons:
Direct experience. You’ve done this exact thing before. You can do it again.
Indirect experience. You haven’t done this before. But you’ve done plenty of hard things in your life. You can do it again. You can look someone square in the eye and say, “I’ve never done this before. But I know I can figure it out. I got you.”
“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.” -Annie Duke
“Failure is an opportunity. If you blame someone else, there is no end to the blame. Therefore the Master fulfills her own obligations and corrects her own mistakes. She does what she needs to do and demands nothing of others.” –Tao Te Ching by Lao-Tzu (Stephen Mitchell Translation)
“In the archer there is a resemblance to the mature person. When he misses the mark, he turns and seeks the reason for his failure in himself.” -Confucius
Just like life as in poker…
You can’t control the hand you’re dealt.
You can only only control how you play the hand. The decisions you make from there determine the quality of your outcomes.
Wondering “why did this happen to me?” is only helpful as a learning exercise.
Did your habits let you down? Okay, correct them for the future.
Or was it dumb luck? Often that’s the case and the right play is to fold. Move on. Next hand.
P.S. – “Don’t you worry son. It will all be over soon.” This scene.
The passion project you’re about to embark on will be harder than you ever could’ve imagined.
It will cost more and take longer than you think.
All kinds of things will go wrong that you never could have planned for.
You will be pushed to your absolute limit. And beyond.
Still want to proceed?
Good.
Because if you do, you’ll remember it for the rest of your life.
P.S. – Supposedly the explorer Ernest Shackleton took out the advertisement pictured above seeking crew for his infamous Antarctic expedition. He was flooded with responses. Over 5,000 answered his call.
One of the awesome things about being a writer or producer (sometimes you’re both) in a collaborative medium like theatre or film or television is you get to set the table for other talented artists to do amazing work. Your passion and persistence provides a platform for other artists. It’s an amazing gift for them and the audience who gets to see this passion in action.
In his memoir “Making Movies” (I highly recommend), the director Sidney Lumet recounts a conversation he had with Arthur Miller…
Arthur Miller’s first and, I think, only novel, “Focus”, was, in my opinion, every bit as good as his first produced play, “All My Sons.” I once asked him why, if he was equally talented in both forms, he chose to write plays. Why would he give up the total control of the creative process that a novel provides to write instead for communal control, where a play would first go into the hands of a director and then pass into the hands of a cast, set designer, producer, and so forth? His answer was touching. He said that he loved seeing what his work evoked in others. The result could contain revelations, feelings, and ideas that he never knew existed when he wrote the play. It’s what we all hope for.
“We know only too well that what we are doing is nothing more than a drop in the ocean. But if the drop were not there, the ocean would be missing something.” -Mother Teresa
“First do what is necessary. Then do what is possible. And before you know it you are doing the impossible.” – Saint Francis Of Assisi
“And…and you know what, maybe I’m crazy. But when I walk through a forest that I saved, when I hear the sound of wind rustling in young trees, trees that I planted myself, I realize that I have my own little bit of control over the climate. And if after thousands of years one person is happier because of it, well then…I can’t tell you the feeling I get when I plant a birch tree and I see it grow up and sprout leaves, I…I mean, I fill up with pride, I…” -Astrov in Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov (Anne Baker adaptation)
Yep, it’s true. That act of kindness, that helpful gesture, that small change you make isn’t a big deal. It’s just a drop in the ocean.
But what if your drop is the one that inspires others, especially our leaders? What if it’s the drop that breaks the dam open and leads to widespread, systemic change? The kind of change that makes the impossible, possible.
Do it. We need your drop. We need everyone’s drop.
“At around twenty-eight, twenty-nine, or thirty years old, after my kids were born, I figured I’d hit some plateau that was adulthood—where I believed things would just stay level for about forty years while I would do great work and have interesting experiences—then rather uneventfully I would begin to decay and die. But this was just not the case. I was not on a plateau. I was descending, tripping, stumbling, and burning. My whole being, or personality or self or whatever is supposed to be the seat of me, or the soul behind my eyes, was being boiled away in a giant iron cauldron like the flavor leaving a carrot.” –A Bright Ray Of Darkness, novel by Ethan Hawke
For the actor…
There’s a huge gulf between trying to get on top of it and being on top of it.
How much time is spent on the summit of a mountain versus the climbing up and down? Let alone the preparing for the climb.
“Trying to” involves struggle and obstacles. Internal and external. Real and imagined. It’s the struggle that’s fun to play and riveting for the audience. We wanna watch you go through some shit.
Resist the natural human impulse to want it to be easy. To be on top of it.
Get down in the muck. Litter the text with obstacles. Give yourself behavior that’s difficult to do.
The harder you can make it on your character to accomplish the objective, the more memorable your character will be.
P.S. – The pic above is from the original production of the play “K2” by Patrick Meyers at The Arena Stage in 1982. Legendary production designer Ming Cho Lee built an incredible set.
“The desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. A society based on the quest for security is nothing but a breath-retention contest in which everyone is as taut as a drum and as purple as a beet.” ―Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety
If we knew 100% it would all work out in the end, we’d probably endure just about anything, including being thrust in a pit of poisonous snakes, to get there. Remember the game show “Fear Factor”?…Contestants would do all these crazy hard, scary things. But if they completed the task, they’d get the reward.
What often stops us from trying isn’t hard work or the trials we have to endure.
It’s not knowing if we’re on the right path. Not enduring the right trial. Not doing the right kind of hard work. That maybe we should be doing something else. And what if we do our absolute best and it’s not good enough?
But we in the audience don’t. It’s our very first time.
Therefore, play each moment, each beat, each scene, as if you’re in the audience. Expect your actions and tactics to work. Fight for what you want right up until the very last line.
And who knows? Maybe this night will be different. Maybe this night you’ll break through to the other person. Maybe this night you’ll achieve your objective. It should feel like it, anyway.
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