We’ve touched on this briefly. Film is a very large, very intimate, very “real” (or “reel”) medium. The pictures are huge, and every little pore will be exposed for scrutiny, every article on the set, every stitch of costume. On film, there is nowhere to hide, and your smallest gesture is magnified to gargantuan proportions. Film is not much of a medium for metaphor. Everything is so large and literal in film, that the size of the action and characters force film generally into a literal mode. This is why there is a great premium placed on “truth in acting” in film.
Theatre is different. There is distance between the actor and his audience, distance in which he can hide a little bit. The actor can look small, up there on stage.
There has been much talk over the years about how “big” an actor should play for the screen, in as opposed to on stage. I don’t generally believe that the actor should much alter the size of his performance to accommodate the camera. There are too many great “big” performances on the screen to debate this, very much. This does not take into account the fact, however, that if the actor flails about and bobs and weaves, he’s going to find that the camera can’t follow him around. So somehow, all that “big” physical energy does need to be squeezed into smaller, more controlled gestures to maintain the shot. The size of the performance doesn’t change, but the body is used differently in order to express the performance, to account for the camera and microphones.
However, one often does need to expand the size of his performance a little bit when on stage, if not used to performing in the theatre. The lack of proximity of the audience requires the actor to play a bit louder (unless on a microphone) and bigger than in front of the camera. This can be an interesting adjustment for the actor trained in TV/film.
There is also the issue of pacing. One can move more quickly through a speech or series of actions on film, than on stage, generally, because of the amplification factor. The actor is very large on the screen, and loud, so that his every gesture and nuance is easy to spot by the audience. Thus, he can move a bit faster than a stage actor. Additionally, today, the audience can replay a film as many times as they wish, on DVD. The stage actor has only one pass through the material to communicate it to his audience, so he must take a little more care, and be a bit more conservative in his pacing. But an audience is an audience and expects to be entertained, so don’t take these comments as a license to perform at the pace of the grave.
In the end, acting is acting is acting. Regardless of medium, a character must be created and portrayed convincingly. Audiences are essentially the same from the movie theatre to the theatre (though theatrical audiences probably have more money).
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EXERCISE: Take a scene you’ve run through many times. Run it five times, playing each selected action as large as possible, until, even though it’s large, there’s a certain sort of sense to it (limited). Then do it again for five runthroughs, and take the same ideas and gestures and play them as though you were not allowed to move or gesture in any large way, or you’d be off camera. Maintain the intensity and actor’s choices you played with the first part of the exercise.
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