The Legendary Actor - Chapter 74

How do you define a good movie and a great movie?

For example, popcorn is to entertain the audience, comedy is to make them laugh, and thriller is to scare them.

Take “Transformers” as an example, the series has been scolded by critics for its horrendous and horrible performance, but the box office is always high because it has successfully exploded the audience’s adrenaline, and the visual effects of the action popcorn blockbuster have been displayed to the fullest. From this point of view, “Transformers” is not a bad work.

So what does it take for a good movie to be a great movie?

Every film has a core idea, even the vulgar comedies of the kind “Farty Fartsmith”. It is either family, friendship, or growth. Does the audience get it? Can you bring something more to the audience? Does it reflect the life of the viewer and even society? Can it provoke deep thinking? How profound and high can this thinking go? What does the viewer get out of the experience other than the purely visual and auditory trip? How long does a movie last in the mind of the viewer?

This is the key factor that defines a great movie.

As for what kind of movie can be called a classic, that’s another level. The barrier from bad to great, and from great to classic, is not easy one to cross.

According to Rodrigo’s original concept, the core idea of “Buried” actually stops at what Renly called “the first”. As Renly said, the result would be just an ordinary suspense thriller – if Rodrigo had succeeded in the camera work, the pacing, the atmosphere, and the mood, it could have been even called a good thriller that would have stood out from the crowd.

But that’s about it.

What Renly just called “second” is exactly what can transition “Buried” from good to great.

The Achilles heel of most mystery thriller movies is that the story is not full enough, or rather, the characters are not full enough, and there is no connection between the characters and their personal information and social background, which makes the thriller stay at a superficial level. The reason why “The Shining” became a classic is that the background information of the hotel and the main character’s family background enriched the whole story and made the thriller emotion take root in the audience.

The world outside the coffin is a supplement to the plot, building an empathetic bridge between inside and outside the movie screen, further allowing the ups and downs of the story to touch the audience’s emotions and make the whole movie fuller; in addition, Paul’s social attributes are the key to the sublimation and refinement of the core of the movie.

The deeper Rodrigo’s frowned, the deeper he thinks, and the more surprised he gets, and the more his excitement stirs in his whole!

It is inconceivable that Renly would be able to sketch out such a grand blueprint without even seeing the script, just by reading the simple information left by the union. Of course, Rodrigo could feel that Renly was thinking from the character’s point of view, that, all of his ideas revolved around Paul, and that the director’s point of view was different in terms of the true height of his thoughts, but even so, it was unbelievable!

Rodrigo raised his head and began to examine Renly once again. Above his youthful, impeccable face were a pair of calm, watery eyes, with brown pupils as deep and matte as a black hole.

It is as if looking up at the starry sky that always brings unfathomable shock

In a trance, Rodrigo once again felt the same kind of astonishment he had felt when he first met him – vicarious and calm, restrained and a little coarse, with traces of Paul Conroy written in every detail between his eyes.

“Ahem.” Rodrigo realized that he was out of his depth and coughed lightly twice to cover up his mess, “… You know … I mean, you should know that if you play it the way you interpreted, it’s going to be a daunting task. No, exactly, it’s almost an impossible task.”

“I know.” Renly said with a smile. The curt words were full of irrefutable confidence, even some arrogance, and the sharp light that burst out for a moment made people unable to face up to it.

Unlike “The Pacific”, “Buried” can be said to be a challenge beyond Renly’s current ability, which is precisely the reason why Renly’s blood was boiling.

Acting is an art with a long history, dating back hundreds or even thousands of years, and has developed to the present day after a long period of accumulation. Generally speaking, people’s understanding of acting is to perform a character by means of action, expression, language, etc. This has also been the basic understanding of acting for thousands of years, which has led to the formation of the traditional academic acting method – also known as expressionism.

An actor needs to accurately understand the emotions, the character, and the plot, and then through precise control and relevant methods, he or she can deliver the performance.

There are no shortcuts to this kind of performance, it is a complete test of solid basic skills, which truly illustrates the phrase “one minute on stage, ten years of work off stage.

Each actor has a different level of understanding of acting and a different degree of practice in basic skills, which makes it clear why the performance and the flavor left after the performance are very different, especially in traditional performing arts such as Peking Opera and stage plays, where the same role is performed by different actors in different scenes.

Renly comes from a typical orthodox academic background, and during their studies at the Royal Academy of Arts and Dramatic Arts, he had been working tirelessly to learn the basics from the ground up. In fact, thanks to the advantage of being reborn, Renly began his systematic acting education as a child. In the aristocratic education, acting in plays, operas, and ballets was also considered a fine art, and the study of basic skills was the same.

Therefore, Renly’s basic skills are solid and he has not been lazy in any way, as he is the representative of the traditional expressionism.

In addition to the expressionist school, in the past half-century, another type of acting has emerged strongly and has even become the mainstream of the industry, and that is method acting.

The so-called method acting, in short, means that the actor completely substitutes for the character’s current situation, and then expresses the character’s emotions according to the character’s situation and his or her own understanding.

The most famous example in film history is Robert De Niro’s performance in “Taxi Driver”. In order to feel the real life of a cab driver and the background of the era in which the script was written, he worked as a cab driver in New York City for three months and really felt the confusion and madness of the main character.

The highest realm of this kind of performance is “you can’t live it without going crazy”, completely ignoring the boundary between reality and illusion and reaching the realm of oblivion. Heath Ledger’s Joker in “Batman: The Dark Knight” reached this state, so much so that he never came out of it, and the drugs he used didn’t quite help the situation.”

For methodologists, they are convinced that the characters’ lives are so bizarre that no one can really feel their emotions until they have experienced them themselves. Take “Buried” as an example, in the view of the Expressionists, they need to experience what it is like to be imprisoned in a confined space in order to know what it is like to be buried alive.

More importantly, the expressionist approach is the unwavering academy route, with a very high threshold, requiring not only years of accumulation but also the training and teaching of professionals, which requires the actor to study systematically. But there is no threshold for the methodists. Anyone can participate in this process, feel the character’s emotions with their own understanding, and become a good actor even without any education.

In the contemporary film industry, Europe respects the expressionists, who firmly believe that acting needs a threshold; the United States respects the methodists, and the film industry represented by Hollywood has made the dreams of countless grassroots stars come true, with non-professional backgrounds and no history, opening up opportunities to everyone.

As a re-born dude, Renly was educated in the expressionist school, but in his bones, he is still a methodist, especially because of his two lifetimes of his unique experience, which gives him a rare touch of character perception, so he has always wanted to try to see the method acting, or even further, to merge the two methods, to explore a whole new field of acting.

Obviously, “Buried” provides such an opportunity.

In other words, it was a bold attempt to fuse the two methods of acting!