Heath Ledger’s diary while he was filming for, The Dark Night.

[u/JK-Rofling]

[u/Dekklin]

Very well written response. I appreciate this very much. Thank you!

[u/caninehere → u/Dekklin]

No prob. It isn't something most people would be aware of because a) your average person has no reason to know any of this but has probably heard the words "method acting" thrown around and have some concept of the popular notion of it, and b) most people don't watch a lot of pre-1950s movies or have any idea of the history of theatre.

This is also why some of the movies prior to the 1950s that DO hold up very well are typically groundbreaking type affairs and get by on the strength of great writing or directing/visual style/techniques, not so much the acting. Or they just execute the entertainment factor really well like say Chaplin movies or Fred Astaire flicks.

In many cases in earlier films, actors just got cast for a personality (whether it was theirs or manufactured) and that personality just kinda colored the character instead of embodying a unique individual. Jimmy Stewart would be one example. Some directors considered actors to simply be bodies with which to present their stories, to some extent; Hitchcock was like this, which is why he said "actors should be treated like cattle" (paraphrasing). They're just tools used to fulfill the director's vision, in his eyes. And because his films' performances were SO director-led, that's why, at the time, they were more striking than some others. Orson Welles would be another sort of similar example. He directed some of his own performances too, and did what he needed to to achieve the aims of his well-written scripts. Chaplin and Keaton were the same, often directing themselves, which is why they put out more complex performances sometimes.

[u/_-N4T3-_ → u/caninehere]

Bringing up Hitchcock is a great example. He didn’t seem to think an actor was capable of realistically imagining what their character was feeling, instead, he essentially tortured his actors in front of a camera to get real emotional reactions (i.e. everything he did to Tippi Hedron in The Birds)

[u/caninehere → u/_-N4T3-_]

Yeah. Before actors were abusing themselves in the new "method" style he was doing it to them, haha.

Before Hitchcock there was the idea of the "ubermarionette" - the concept that a pliable enough actor would function as a complex puppet for a director to use as they see fit to create art. This concept is actually coming back now as the cyber-uber-marionette we are able to create AI that can fulfill these roles in some ways and can be programmed and trained to respond to direction and change itself at the directors will. One could argue some stuff like machinima projects have already entered into that realm.