All language subtitles for 23. Creating Characters - Case Studies

It's interesting. I I I'll talk about

the physicality and Richard III

because there were a number of things

that I needed to understand and know

before I could start making decisions.

So the first thing I asked Sam Mendes

when we began

it was about two years of discussions

about what play we should do. I said are

we going to be working on a rake stage?

Now for people who may not know what a

rake stage is. All right. So this is a

regular stage. It's like this. But a

rake stage is like this.

Which means that from the audience's

perspective everything kind of goes up.

You do that just for design reasons. Um,

and so when I was told yes, we'll be on

a rake stage, I was like, okay,

and then we began talking about, all

right, so what can I do now physically

in which I'm not going to injure myself?

Because the problem with being on a rake

stage is it means that you are always

and constantly imbalanced.

You're always out of balance. Because if

you're standing on the stage this way,

one of your legs is higher than the

other. If you're standing on the stage

that way, you're leaning forward. But in

the case that I was facing, how do I do

this in such a way that I don't end up

injuring myself? Because when you're out

of balance on a rake stage, you could

literally stand on a chair, which

happened to me once in a play, and throw

your back out

just because of the way you're

physically. So, I'm going to stand up

because I did this yesterday. I'll just

have to stand up.

So

essentially um can you all see me? Yes.

So essentially um what I ultimately

decided to do which turned out to be um

a really really good idea for me was I

wanted the character to be almost

spiderlike where I could suddenly be in

front of somebody uh without them

knowing how I got there that fast. So

the look of the character would be quite

deformed. So I had um

a leather glove that with a deformed

hand that was on this one. I had a cane

which was in this hand which helped me.

And I had a leg that sort of twisted in.

So if you looked at the character like

this, it was very much down like this.

Now, that looks incredibly

uncomfortable, right? Looks phenomenally

uncomfortable. And I'm not going to say

it wasn't a little uncomfortable, but it

allowed me to move very quickly. It

allowed me to move a little bit like a

spider. But here's the other thing. Here

was the trick of it.

This

means I was the only actor in balance on

that stage because this is like a

crouch. It's like a It's like a tennis

pose. It's like a fencing, you know?

It's like you're down. So I was able to

move but I was always in balance. And

that was a very good decision because I

was able to work on

multiple stages

in different environments.

We had four moving sets. One was always

traveling.

Sets were slightly different.

Some doors would work in some cities.

Some doors wouldn't work in other

cities, which we constantly figure

forgot which door was the right one to

go out, go in.

But that

choice

helped me practically, but it also the

look of it was very unique and and it

worked.

I could tell you the story about um how

Sam Mendes and I ultimately decided the

the direction we wanted to go in to in

creating Lester Burnham and American

Beauty. Um, both Sam and I felt that

Jack Lemon's performance in the

apartment was just a kind of remarkable

seinal performance of a regular guy

um, who goes through this experience in

this movie.

And Sam said something very interesting

to me early on. He said, you know, it's

like Lemon

never changes in the film. You never see

a moment where he changes. You just see

him evolve.

And that was something that Sam and I

both wanted to try to achieve in

American Beauty was that you never saw

Lester change. You just saw him evolve.

And we talked a lot about how do we

achieve that? I mean, part of it is

obviously a performance thing

and how you go about revealing a

character, but another part of it was a

physical thing. And we thought we could

probably do some what we would call

physical tricks

that could help that journey for an

audience. So, it's all kinds of things

that we did that

audience would never be aware of. I

mean, in the first place, I had to be in

the best physical shape from the very

beginning of shooting that movie because

it's not that we shot, you know, later

less later. We would have days where I

would shoot early Lester in the morning

and in the afternoon I'd have to go

jogging.

So, we would basically do a whole series

of things.

My costumes in the morning were a little

bigger for me so that they kind of had a

kind of droopy quality. Um, my posture

had to be a little worse. Um, the makeup

was a little gray and dull and lifeless.

We had three hair pieces. The first one

had really no life to it at all. Um, the

second one started to have a little life

and the third one had kind of golden

highlights.

The sun would catch. The costumes got

tighter. The makeup got, you know, uh,

brighter and more colorful. My posture

got better. I mean, I there would be

days when Sam would walk up to me and

say, "Kevin, I go what?" He goes, "You

just played that scene a little bit too

much like Walter Mattha. Would you

straighten up?" And I'd say, "I'm sorry.

Um

these things that were physical

uh tricks to a degree all helped in

telling that story of that character the

way that we wanted to tell it in

incredibly subtle ways that an audience

would never even notice. But that for us

we knew exactly when that was going to

shift, when that was going to change,

when I was going to put that hairpiece

on with that. So that so that there was

a kind of um smooth

Evolution.