From the course: Creating a Short Film: 04 Working with Actors

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Listening to your scene partner

Listening to your scene partner

- I've mentioned here and there about actors listening to each other. What does that mean? Well, sometimes actors practice and rehearse so much while they're learning their lines that they know ahead of time how they're going to say each line. No matter how their scene partner changes their action verb, they're set in their ways. Now, this results in stiff performances that feel artificial. In order for there to be true emotion, actors must engage with and respond to the other actors in the scene. When I acted in my film "Empathy for the Devil", with Hope Shanthi, she mentioned in between takes of our fight scene that she wasn't listening. That comment made me realize that I wasn't listening either, like at all. (laughs) Once we listened to each other, we stopped being two actors exchanging monologues and became two actors that had genuine responses to each other because we were listening. When I directed the first scene on the first big day of The Assurance, I noticed that something…

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