The wisdom of the unrehearsed scene.
This particular reading from Tom Reilly is more or less reiterating the thoughts I’ve had over the last few weeks surrounding the potential for films to become a little stagnant through overplanning and over rehearsal. In my last few reflections I’ve spoken a lot about a discovery based approach to filmmaking – as it’s this approach I find myself most drawn to, both as a spectator and as a practitioner. In large part Reilly is referring to something akin to this approach, although he comes to a conclusion I found rather surprising – that the act of not giving actors time for rehearsal or blocking could actually be maintaining more directorial control over the film rather than less. I find myself somewhat agreeing with this sentiment – though honestly I find the actual directorial approach he’s speaking about to be somewhat questionable. Where in previous reflections I’ve praised a more reactive type of filmmaking where the director, cinematographer and actors would essentially ‘feel out’ a scene and make on the fly adjustments as they go, the approach Reilly refers to is one in which the actors are on that journey alone, while the director and cinematographer have already carefully planned out the scene without any input from the actors. You could even argue this leaves more room for an actor to experiment with their performance – by taking some choices out of their hands (i.e. where they will stand, how they’ll move, etc.) it’s possible that they would then be more free to focus on the details which are perhaps more impactful on performance, like how they say something or their reaction to another characters lines or actions. This kind of hybrid approach may just be the meeting point between the two styles I spoke about in reflection 5 – where the camera is behaving as it would in the classical hollywood era, but the actors are ‘discovering’ a scene as it unfolds, as they may in a more modern independent feature. It’s an interesting idea to me really, and while I certainly still find myself more attracted to the style of modern indie films, the approach this reading is breaking down is one I may look into further.