Why I Hate Actors

Last week, I posted an explanation for my inability to make films. I have, however, dabbled in that realm in the past. What follows is my philosophy on film making, or my feelings when working behind the camera. Keep in mind that this is merely an examination of my own psyche when it comes to this realm and not a realistic ideology for most movies, in fact if all film acquired my ideas, the medium pretty much could not exist.
When I have stepped behind a camera in the past, I have found myself obsessed with one thing: sincerity. I want to capture emotion and reality. Yet, I would hardly consider myself a budding documentarian. I, as director, manipulate the scene but set up the situation in order to draw out the natural behavior of a person.
This sounds like more of a study in behavioral psychology than a means of making entertainment. Yet the artificiality of a scene or of acting or of faking emotions, I find incredibly intolerable, to the point that I cannot stand the site of it. Great cinema allows me to forget this problem I have, and I know that it is all entirely constructed, yet when I try to go to a play I feel very bothered. Film creates an alternative constructed reality, and the combination of these elements like cuts and camera movement, reminds me that the actors are faking emotions. But that is all part of the experience of fiction film. On the stage, all of see is the facade, and I cannot escape it.
I speak of the stage because when I am with a camera, looking out in front of characters that I am attempting to film, that area then becomes a stage. And I am taken aback. I can’t have actors reading lines; I can’t stand the site of the lie. What is much more interesting to me is the prospect of breaking down that realm. Using the camera to capture the realities of human emotion, to see truth. Now that is a very Vertovian statement.
Perhaps, this is my own attempts at therapy. An attempt to understand those around me by capturing them on film or DVI, because they I can study their emotions and feelings, because in the real world they are too confusing. There is something utterly fascinating about watching a person just “be” on camera. What if, per say, I put a camera in front of a person and gave them no direction? How uncomfortable would they get, or what they then come up with something to do in order to calm themselves?
I attempted this discussion of constructed versus unconstructed reality in one of the films I have made, called This Is Samantha Graham. And maybe discussing this example can best help get my methods to come across, or at least how I have applied it. I asked my friend Sam a series of questions about her life. Some of which she knew of beforehand, but most of which came from the top of my head and were entirely unexpected. This, of course, is not an original idea, Godard used this method in Masculin Feminin to ask teenagers about Marx and Consumerism, and draw out confused responses from them. What I got from Sam, I found utterly fascinating. At the start of the interview she seems so uncomfortable with the camera, but she responded to everything I asked completely honestly. She talks about her beliefs in God, love, and different aspects of her personal life. To me, she’s a bubbly somewhat crazy girl, yet see comes across and sincere and emotional. At least as I watched her footage back.
I filmed her in other situations. I asked her to do things in her room, get dressed, makes the bed. What I find interesting about her behavior when I asked her to do these things is not that the situation is constructed, it is that she does these thing knowing that it is constructed. To me it becomes apparent, and the unnaturalness of a situation like that becomes natural. There is footage when she is getting dressed where she awkwardly puts on her outfit attempting modesty in front of the camera. She would never do this in real life, but suddenly anyone watching the footage, knows she knows she is being watched.
A constructed scene with a natural reaction, this is my interest in filmmaking. How far I am able to go with this, I am not sure. But should I decide to yield a camera, this is my obsession.
-M