Honesty and Creativity

If you get an impulse in a scene, no matter how wrong it seems, follow the impulse. -Jack Nicholson

Have you ever watched a movie with horrible acting? Have you ever sat back and thought about what made the acting so horrible? It’s fairly easy to point out bad acting when you see it and when you see good acting sometimes you almost don’t realize how good it really is because the good one’s make it look so easy. I’ve been taking acting classes for about five years and have a whole new appreciation for the craft of acting. It’s funny. I used to think that the key to good acting was looking good and having a great personality. I thought if I had a bright smile and a twinkle in my eye that I would magically be discovered in the mall and instantly be propelled into a major motion picture. I was wrong. I thought the key to good acting was, well, good acting. That’s not the key at all. The secret to good acting is honesty. When you see a good actor cry in a movie they are really sad, not pretending to be sad. When you see a good actor angry in a movie they are really angry, not just pretending to be so. That’s the reason bad acting sticks out like a sore thumb. Bad acting is the result of someone pretending to be sad or angry or happy. The people who win Oscars are masters of feeling real feelings. When they cry we cry. When they laugh we laugh. We become so immersed in the movie, we forget we are watching actors at all. A great actor will make you forget you are watching a movie at all. That’s the secret. Back to my acting class. So instead of teaching us how to lie well, my acting teacher (Nancy Chartier) takes great pains to help us be true to the moment. True acting is reacting, not forcing fake emotion. She spends hour after hour in class stripping away the fake masks, emotions and ways of being that distort and diminish our true scent. Like the smell of an old shoe in a room filled with roses, our self-conscious walls taint our true selves and hinder our true scent.

True creativity is impossible without honesty. All creativity is a risk. To truly be creative, means to open yourself up to possible ridicule and rejection. To be creative requires the removal of the walls of separation we put up to fit in and be willing to lay our very selves bare.

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