| Many, many people do my kind of teaching.
"Do this, do that - be a tree.' But Sigourney, Jon Voight, people like
that, they feel I have something special. Other teachers get intellectual
- I explain it simply. Getting people to talk and listen like they do in
life. That's what the Stanislavsky system wants you to do - to really experience
things, rather than suggest. It's like you and me. We really experience
things. We really get sad. We really laugh. We don't suggest anything. Stanislavsky
didn't invent the Stanislavsky system, he just discovered it. It was always
there. People were always real.
Actors can usually use an animal exercise. Going to the zoo is wonderful research for actors. You learn a lot about character work in a place like that. Look at Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire he was doing an ape. The way he was eating, drinking his beer - he really became an ape. And check out Charles Laughton in Henry VIII. He's doing a squirrel. Watch him eat. He was a squirrel. He didn't play the squirrel as a squirrel. He was a human being with squirrel characteristics- that's the key. My job is to help actors get to where they want to go in a technical way. "I need to get more angry here," they say. Or "more turned on there". That's where I come in. I'm like a doctor. Actors like Jon and Dustin Hoffman, they want to be so right, so perfect, that they've always got questions about everything. They don't ever feel anything's exactly the way they want it. I went to see Dustin backstage at The Merchant of Venice. He said, "What did you think?" I said, "I saw what you did, it was very good. When Antonio spat in your face, you smiled, but underneath it you felt humiliated. Maybe you should show it a bit more." And he starts feeling like he didn't do it right. He wants to be so perfect. But maybe that's why he's such a great actor. A couple of times a week, I'll drop into the Actors Studio... You might see Al Pacino - I saw him do a scene from Hamlet once. Sometimes De Niro shows up. It's a place where actors work, do two or three scenes, comment, and try to help each other. It's not a school, but they're there to learn. That's the difference between actors in Europe and actors in the United States - these people keep going to acting classes because they think there's always something they can learn. In Britain, once you go to drama school, that's it. Dustin Hoffman once said to me, "Why don't we start an acting school?" I said, "No, I want to be free." I like to travel around. I guess I'm on a mission. Sanford Meisner, a great teacher, said, "The only time I'm alive is when I teach." Perhaps that's true for me.
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