Creating Emotions

• By far, the most common question that people ask me about acting is, “How do actors create emotions?”

• In fact, psychologists are now looking at how actors create emotions in order to understand human nature in a new way.

• By analyzing the cognitive capacities that acting draws upon, psychologists have come closer to understanding why realistic acting is so convincing.

Creating Emotions

• This question transcends the scope of this course and delves deep into the psychology behind acting.

• However, a little primer can be helpful to us as lawyers.

Creating Emotions

• Audiences have become impatient with stylized acting and demand to really believe what they are seeing.

• The trend toward realism in acting emerged in the mid-twentieth century due to the influence of Russian actor and director Constantin Stanislavsky, who urged actors to strive for “believable truth.”

Creating Emotions

• As noted on PBS.org:– Stanislavsky first employed methods such as

“emotional memory.” To prepare for a role that involves fear, the actor must remember something frightening, and attempt to act the part in the emotional space of that fear they once felt. Stanislavsky believed that an actor needed to take his or her own personality onto the stage when they began to play a character.

Creating Emotions

• Subsequently, heavily influenced by Stanislavsky, actor and director Lee Strasberg interpreted his teacher’s philosophy for an American audience and emphasized affective memory – a key component of what is touted as method acting, or simply, “The Method.”

• As noted by Pamela Kareman, executive director of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of Theatre, the field was forever changed.

Creating Emotions

• The Neighborhood Playhouse teaches its students according to the principles of the Meisner Technique, an offshoot of Stanislavsky’s work developed by Sanford Meisner – a one-time friend and contemporary of Lee Strasberg.

• The two parted ways on one very controversial principal: Strasberg was much more interested in actors working from their real lives and real pain, whereas Meisner thought that was “psychotherapy and had no place in acting.”

Creating Emotions

• Meisner thought that the biggest gift an actor had was his imagination, which is limitless, while one’s real life and real experiences are quite limited.

• He also discouraged, and I agree with him, the romanticizing of traumatic experiences for art.

• Ruminating on negative events has been shown to consistently predict the onset of depression.

Creating Emotions

• As Deborah Margolin so eloquently states, “There’s this whole thing about suffering for your art and I think that’s baloney. I tell my students not to worry about the suffering. Suffering will find you – seek the joy.”

Creating Emotions

• So, if you experienced something traumatic in your life, such as the death of a close relative or a near-fatal car accident, Meisner never wanted an actor to use that as it was unhealthy.

• According to Kareman, “You might be subconsciously colored by that, but your imagination could bring up something else.”

Creating Emotions

• Another criticism of emotional memory is that the meaning of the past changes over time. The winning of the public school state hockey championship doesn’t elicit the same emotions in me today as it did when I was seventeen years-old. Too much time has passed.

Creating Emotions• Can you remember the last movie you saw where

you cried your eyes out? • For me, this was when the mangled body of Hayden

Christensen’s character, Anakin Skywalker, was engulfed by lava while lying helplessly on the edge of an embankment on Mustafar; when his human flesh burst into flames; and when he was burned alive.

Creating Emotions

• The screeching cries and wailing groans that Hayden let out did not come from the script – the script did not have tears. Nor did they come from the sorrow of another, such as a stunt double.

• Instead, they came out of Hayden’s own sorrow. Had he never cried before, Hayden would have never known his own sorrow. And he would never have been able to seer the most tragic scene of the movie – if not the series – so vividly in our minds as to leave a lasting impression.

Creating Emotions

• To do this, Hayden had to find the essence of that particular emotion within himself. When an actor genuinely marries his emotions with that of the character and grounds the material to himself, something magical happens: the actor’s emotions erupt like a volcano and the character comes to life. As acting instructors teach, the recipe for creating a character is rather simple: start with yourself.

Creating Emotions• Bringing this example back into the legal

realm, Hayden’s heart-wrenching cries and agonizing pain can be understood as his argument.

Creating Emotions

• And this is where the creative world of acting overlaps with the courtroom. By arguing out of his own sorrow – out of his own experience – Hayden did so acknowledging that we, as the audience, have experienced sorrow as well. Had we never experienced sorrow before, the scene would have been an abysmal failure.

Creating Emotions

• Similarly, the jury has experienced emotions similar to those of your client. With the insight of how it was experienced, the jury can understand and relate to him on a deeper level. This will make them sympathetic to his plight.