THE OBJECTIVE (PART ONE)
The four pillars of storytelling are character, plot, setting, and theme. Understanding every character’s choices and interpreting how they weave and connect and lead an audience through a satisfying story is the director’s job. I call it ‘the director’s contract.’
For directors, understanding characters and shaping a performance is critical, and it’s one of the toughest things to teach effectively in film school.
If student directors are working with prepared, dedicated actors and being authentically challenged in directing workshops, there are genuine lessons to be learned, as opposed to working with filmmaking classmates playing the role of the actor. Play-acting can only take you so far in building the necessary skills for sustaining a professional directing career.
Characters in conflict and the actions they choose to take in order to overcome the obstacles in a scene are the starting points for the actor/director relationship. Someone wants something. They have a goal, a purpose, an agenda, and this is covered in the catch-all term: objective.
It’s important to keep in mind that an actor can never play the whole film but only individual scenes. A character’s objective is the character’s want for each individual scene. Objectives provide actors with a through-line for the actions they choose in any given scene.
Every strong objective should fulfill the following criteria: it has to be active, it has to be specific, it has to be achievable within the scene, it has to be able to drive a character’s actions from beginning to end, it has to affect another person and require a response from them.
After decades of directing, as well as leading over 1,000 directing workshops, I can tell you that coming up with objectives is not easy, because objectives are not necessarily on the page.
A strong objective dwells in the subtext, and this needs to be explored by going deep into the script. An in-depth script analysis precedes a directing workshop and strengthens the dynamic relationship between actor and director. Preparation for productive workshops and rehearsals is imperative for actors, directors, and teachers.
More to come…
POZERVISION 