When Professor Delia Salvi was a graduate student at UCLA, she attended screenings of student films and quickly she noticed a troubling theme common in almost every one of them.
“The story was terrific, the editing was terrific, the sound, everything was perfect,” Salvi said. “(But) the acting was lousy.”
Salvi, who was a professional actress before coming to UCLA to earn a doctorate in theater history and dramatic criticism, knew that the actors were not to blame for their poor performances. She knew that the ones needing more instruction were the directors, who studied technical aspects of filmmaking like camera angle and editing, yet had never learned to work with actors.
“Mechanically they could fix a performance through an editing process, (but) that’s cheating as far as I’m concerned,” Salvi said. “They cannot sacrifice the camera for the actor or the actor for the camera.”
After completing her doctorate, she became a professor at UCLA, teaching a course on the director-actor relationship. “It’s a course that I created because it had never been dealt with ever in any film curriculum. It was not considered important,” Salvi said. “Never even occurred to them that a director needs to know how to get a performance out of an actor.”
But because the director is the one shaping the entire movie and seeing how all the pieces will fit together, understanding each piece of the film, including acting, is crucial.
“(The director) is the one that’s got to be in control because he’s the one with the vision,” Salvi said. “As a director, you’re the boss; what you get and settle for is evidently want you want.”
Actors, she explained, are usually only concerned with their role. It is not really their job to think about how their character fits in with the rest of the script.
“Some of the best directors in films were once actors; look at Clint Eastwood, he used to be an actor,” she said.
Though currently on sabbatical for the spring quarter, Salvi continues to teach the course, which is now a required part of the graduate directing program. She still finds that her directing students are unable to tell the difference between good and bad acting. Their lack of understanding of the value of actors afflicts their films from the very beginning.
“”˜That one looks like a villain’ or “˜that one looks like a hero.’ (But) if they look the part, that doesn’t mean that they are the part or they can be the part,” Salvi said “The more aware they become about what is good acting and what is not good acting, the more their values change and the more they strive to really get good performances and cast really good actors.”
Salvi explained that poor acting is often the main reason for audiences being unable to connect with a film as a whole. If an audience does not respond to a film, it is usually not the viewer’s problem,
“We are empathic animals; if the actor is actually feeling something, we will too,” Salvi said. “If the actor doesn’t do that, the director ends up being screwed. So to me that reflects on the director because he does not know how to stimulate and encourage that behavior.”
Jona Newhall, a fifth-year directing student, who was the teaching assistant for Salvi’s class this past winter quarter and has also the taken the class himself, has changed some of his directing techniques in order to improve his actors’ performances. He now gets actors to do what he wants by using the sense to help them evoke life experiences, a technique learned in Salvi’s class.
For example, if a character has been betrayed, he would ask the actor to remember a time he felt betrayed. Then he would ask the actor questions, such as was he indoors or outdoors, what could he smell, what was around him.
“(I ask an actor) to really explore the full sensory memory of the experience,” Newhall said. “When you lead an actor through that, then the whole life of the emotion comes back.”
Making an experience real for an actor is a major part of the audience being able to connect with the characters. The main criticism she gives actors and directors in her class is that the scene did not feel real.
Directors in her class are required to present three scenes, rehearsed outside of class.
The directors also must turn in an analysis of their chosen scenes detailing what each character wants and why, the relationships between the characters, and descriptions of any themes. This process forces the directors to remove themselves from their technical mind frame, to forget about camera angles and focus on the human beings in the story.
Acting students such as fourth-year Ayanna Makalani, can also enroll in this class and benefit from Salvi’s emphasis on real performances.
Since the acting program is in the theater department, she appreciates the opportunity to work with film directors, though she admits the process can be frustrating. Makalani explained that the directors in the class often give her too much analysis of the scene and too many things to think about.
“He’ll talk about 20 different things. … The scenes were overworked,” Makalani said.
Over the course of 10 weeks they learn how to communicate with each other.
“It’s just experience; the more you’ve seen something the more simply you can put things because you know what to say,” Makalani added.
Makalani said she learns how to ask the right questions and how to say when something isn’t working for a scene. And with Salvi’s input, she is able to make the scene realistic.
“That is pretty much what acting is: finding out a way to make the experience your own. Motivate that thing that’s real within you,” Makalani said.
This is one reason why students appreciate Salvi as a professor: because her experience makes her able to get to the core of the problem quickly.
Though she is not afraid to speak bluntly.
“It’s hard, but sometimes you just have to hear the truth about what you’re doing as an actor,” Makalani said. “There are some people that get really hurt in her class.”
Her frankness is a result of her expertise.
“Delia is so efficient; she’s seen it so much she can go right to the core of the issue,” Newhall said. “There will be like a magical transformation in the performance night and day from what it was.”
Though the lessons are valuable, they are not easy to learn.
“It’s probably one of the hardest classes that you take as graduate student because it’s so intense and her standards are so high,” Newhall said. “She’s a very strict teacher. She’s passionate; she won’t let people slide by.
Salvi, who is also author of “Friendly Enemies: The Director-Actor Relationship,” a book on the subject, is proud of the improvements she has seen in student directors from UCLA.
“The student filmmakers were amazed at what they didn’t know and what was possible,” Salvi said of her students. And now when she watches student films, she no longer has to cringe at the acting.
“Less of that, thank God, because of me,” Salvi said. “I’d hate to toot my own horn.”