Acting Lessons: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Since the focus of this blog is on screenwriting, naturally most of the interviews and articles I've posted thus far have been with screenwriters. But that's really only part of the learning process. Movies are a 'collaborative' effort and from a screenwriter's standpoint, the primary other players in that process are directors, actors and editors. They along with screenwriters have more direct impact on the shaping and telling of our stories than anyone else. So it behooves us to understand how directors, actors and editors think when they approach a story and its characters.

Hence this inaugural post of a new recurring feature Acting Lessons. Today we feature Philip Seymour Hoffman, the focus of this great article ("A Higher Calling") in yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine by Lynn Hirschberg. I want to pull a few choice quotes and consider what screenwriting 'lessons' we can learn.

“In my mid-20s, an actor told me, ‘Acting ain’t no puzzle,’ ” Hoffman said, after returning to his seat. “I thought: ‘Ain’t no puzzle?!?’ You must be bad!” He laughed. “You must be really bad, because it is a puzzle. Creating anything is hard. It’s a cliché thing to say, but every time you start a job, you just don’t know anything. I mean, I can break something down, but ultimately I don’t know anything when I start work on a new movie. You start stabbing out, and you make a mistake, and it’s not right, and then you try again and again. The key is you have to commit. And that’s hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to.”

Certainly the process of writing a screenplay can be aptly described as a puzzle. All the different characters, subplots, and plot points, shuffling those 'pieces' around trying to figure out the puzzle. And his point about "stabbing out" and making a mistake -- how often do we come to a plot fork-in-the-road, take one story path only to discover that didn't work, and back to another path. But the most interesting point in this observation for me is this one: "The key is you have to commit. And that's hard because you have to find what it is you are committing to." It seems to me part of that happens as we grow the story: First, perhaps there's a story concept and we commit to brainstorming that. If that bears fruit, then we commit to fleshing out the characters and working up a plot. If that works, then we commit to working up an outline. But even with all the prep-work, what is it we're committing ourselves to as we type those words FADE IN? Because no matter how much we know about the story before we start the page-writing part of the process, we know that our story will change. So beyond the sum of the story's parts, we are, it seems to me, committing ourselves to the very soul of the story, going into the story so deeply that we enter into its inner life in order to communicate that in words to the outer world (i.e., readers).

The film revolves around the question of the priest’s culpability, but that is not what mattered to Hoffman. Hoffman plays the priest as a reformer, a man interested in a more philosophical and tolerant approach to religion. Shanley had given Hoffman a “back story” on Father Flynn, who is based, in part, on a teacher who had a profound impact on Shanley as a boy, but Hoffman added his own interpretation. “I did research by, among other things, going to church. As a kid, I was confirmed and I went to church, but I was bored. Now, I feel the opposite: A good sermon is just like theater. It combines the political scene and the Scriptures, and I thought, Hey, I could do it like that. It’s like a teacher getting up and saying, This is the school I come from.”

We touched on the idea of research here. And isn't it interesting that despite the fact that John Patrick Shanley, who wrote and directed the movie Doubt, based on his own Broadway play, provided a "back story" on Hoffman's character in the movie, Hoffman, as part of his commitment to his craft, felt the need to do his own research. What can we learn from this? First, as screenwriters, it's critical that we know our characters well enough that we can convey their back stories to actors. But we also have to understand that actors make the characters their own by doing research, exploring various takes on how a character will talk, move, interact with others, and so on. So if a screenwriter wants to give the best shot they can that the characters they create will turn out like they envision, we need to craft characters who are flesh-and-blood, who steer the actors (and directors) where those characters need to be.

“His physical form actually works to his advantage,” Meryl Streep told me. “Philip is not particularly any one way, which means he can be anybody at all. One of the most important keys to acting is curiosity. I am curious to the point of being nosy, and I think Philip is the same. What that means is you want to devour lives. You’re eager to put on their shoes and wear their clothes and have them become a part of you. All people contain mystery, and when you act, you want to plumb that mystery until everything is known to you.”

Whereas my thoughts in the previous paragraph might seem to put writers and actors at odds, in reality we all want the same thing: We want to "devour lives," consume everything we can about our characters and put what is essential to the story and most entertaining about them onto the scripted page. Indeed, we even come at the process from the same place that actors do: Curiosity. A writer once told me that our job, at its most fundamental level, is to ask questions. And the single most important question we can ask of our characters is "why." Use that question to drill deeper and deeper into our characters -- why do you want that, why do you need that, why do you act like that, why do you fear that -- to inform our story-crafting process.

“I remember seeing Philip in ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley,’ ” Streep told me. “He played a rich, spoiled snob, and I sat up straight in my seat and said, ‘Who is that?’ I thought to myself: My God, this actor is fearless. He’s done what we all strive for — he’s given this awful character the respect he deserves, and he’s made him fascinating.”

This is a hugely important lesson for writing: Create characters who are "fascinating." Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster -- each of our characters should have personality make-ups, tics, and modes of behavior that interest a reader; and beyond that, characters who actors will find compelling to explore and play.

“I knew that it would be great, but I still took the role kicking and screaming,” Hoffman said now, as he ordered sticky pudding for desert. “Playing Capote took a lot of concentration. I prepared for four and a half months. I read and listened to his voice and watched videos of him on TV. Sometimes being an actor is like being some kind of detective where you’re on the search for a secret that will unlock the character. With Capote, the part required me to be a little unbalanced, and that wasn’t really good for my mental health. It was also a technically difficult part. Because I was holding my body in a way it doesn’t want to be held and because I was speaking in a voice that my vocal cords did not want to do, I had to stay in character all day. Otherwise, I would give my body the chance to bail on me.”

Perhaps the biggest lesson actors can teach screenwriters is how deeply actors immerse themselves into their characters. In a way, it's like they are throwing down the gauntlet to writers: Create a multi-dimensional character who's textured enough, deep enough, complex enough that I can co-mingle my Self into that character's Soul.

“I don’t know how he does it,” Mike Nichols, who has directed Hoffman on the stage (“The Seagull”) and in movies (“Charlie Wilson’s War”), told me later. “Again and again, he can truly become someone I’ve not seen before but can still instantly recognize. Sometimes Phil loses some weight, and he may dye his hair but, really, it’s just the same Phil, and yet, he’s never the same person from part to part. Last year, he did three films — ‘The Savages,’ ‘Charlie Wilson’s War’ and ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ — and in each one he was a distinct and entirely different human. It’s that humanity that is so striking — when you watch Phil work, his entire constitution seems to change. He may look like Phil, but there’s something different in his eyes. And that means he’s reconstituted himself from within, willfully rearranging his molecules to become another human being.”

The next time you finish a script, look at your characters. Do they have enough depth and complexity that will cause an actor to want to "rearrange their molecules" to become that character? If not, challenge yourself -- and dig deeper.

UPDATE: In comments, Josh mentions one of Hoffman's acting instructors was Alex Pendleton. You can go here for Pendleton's Wikipedia page. And to open up the discussion, to those of you who also act or have taken acting classes, what has that experience taught you that you bring to bear on your screenwriting?