The Actor and the Writer

In the recent NYT interview 'Going Rogue', Claire Danes sums up her thoughts on acting with the following paragraph:

“I do get more pleasure from this than almost anything else,” she said, referring to her acting life. “I love words. It is physical. It is intellectual. It’s psychological.” She paused, finished her drink, smiled in her sudden way. “It’s like, I get both to ice skate and fly a trapeze, and who wouldn’t want to do that?”

I would. Or at least, I once did. Over the past year, my relationship to acting has been up and down. Of course, I took up the call for the same reasons Danes described above, for the reasons most actors take up acting. Words. Body. Mind. Psyche. The integration of them all. But it's become quite clear to me this year that the industry of acting is not the same as the craft.

I like acting. As an actor I get to be in the moment with another person and play in the space that exists between the two of us, as well as the entire room. Physically, I get to legitimately express all my pent up emotions and not be jailed for it. Emotionally I get to explore the full range of humanity in the safety of a room. Psychologically, I can examine how words and actions can affect other people, and make them do and say extraordinary things. 

Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton (unknown source). Who shall I be, the writer or the actor?I also like writing. While working on an acting job, I realised that acting and writing are indeed very similar: for both there is an initial research period that can often be exciting and fulfilling (indeed, Cate Blanchett talks about research being her favourite part of the process in this interview with Richard Roxburgh for PBS), leading to a unique and intricate inner world. With writing specifically, there is the opportunity to delve deep into a character's psyche, and then bring it up again with words of such potency that they ignite a whole other set of dreams not only in the actor but the whole universe of people.

The difference between the two arts is the expression: one to be a physical world for a single word, the other to be a word and to contain everything in it. 

All my life I've had the enjoyment of watching actors, falling in love with their expressions, their bodies, the way they exist in space, their courage, their ability to reveal the very thing I was feeling. To act is to be eternally present. To act is to be the ultimate revelatory being, to expose not only your body but your mind and soul, and to be alive to all its consequences.

Writing is equally as revealing. To write is to give access to the way you think, the way you exist in the world, your history, your background, your mindset, your desires. As an actor and interpreter your body, your habits, your personality and your humanity are revealed. As a writer, save for the body, ultimately you are always revealing your truest self. I also find writing to be the ultimate physical act - in order to access the muse of creativity one only needs to get the body moving. Although it is a solitary act, it is also the act of greatest connection. As an actor, you are always surrounded by your family; as a writer, you are never more connected than with the family of words and the self.

Could I be blessed to be able to do both? We'll have to wait and see...

Self-portrait, the novel

The Conversations, Michael Ondaatje

Happiness at 10

The Conversations, Walter Murch

Indoor Clouds

via Time magazine

They're real. Amazing. (via Time magazine)

Michael Ondaatje

As interviewed by Willem Dafoe:

On the editing process:

Once I finish a story, which takes around four or five years, it’s all over the place. The order is not necessarily the order it ends up in. So the editing stage then begins, shaving it down, until you’ve got a cleaner line of the story. What more can you remove without losing the story? I have a tendency to remove more and more in the process of editing. Often I’ll write the first chapter last, because it sets up the story. The last thing I wrote in Coming Through Slaughter was “His geography,” almost like a big landscape shot, with buried clues you can pick up later.

Michael Ondaatje

On the mask of the actor/writer:

I’m getting to the point where I only really love films from other cultures, and the classics, much more than any film that comes from my culture, these speak to me. I think it’s because I’m dealing with them through such a heavy mask. The irony is that the story hits me all the harder, because it’s not about me. I’m like some schoolboy that’s drawn to the exotic, to the other. And I find myself there, almost to the degree that I project myself as that. I feel it so deeply, it’s better than any movie or place I’ve ever seen in my life.

Willem Dafoe

via BOMB Magazine

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PEN Interview:

I guess what drives me when I am writing a book is not, for instance, an overall plot that I’ve prepared. It’s finding someone you can live with for four or five years on the page. Then that person meets somebody else and you have a community of people who interact. The real pleasure of writing is making a portrait of that person in the most complex way—and the most compassionate way, hopefully. And there is also the pleasure of learning things about bridge building and jazz and so forth.

The architecture of a book is a kind of mathematical issue, and it fascinates me. 

Via Colum McCann