INTRODUCTION

It is the middle of the night in Wellington, New Zealand at the end of December 2020. I am zipped-up in my puffer jacket on location, watching two world-famous actors giving great performances.

No one is tired even though it is cold and late. The crew is excited by the quality of the work. The actors’ connection and preparation are reflected in the beauty of the images on the monitor. I feel lucky to have been asked to come and support these actors who have just wrapped a fantastic scene.

Now is the perfect moment to start writing this series of articles about naturalism and screen acting. I have been mulling this work over for a long time, through all the twists and turns that have led me to this point. Starting with this introductory article, I plan to publish one a week on Substack as I discuss different aspects of screen craft and spirit. Eventually these will become a book and I am really looking forward to hearing your comments and questions on this forum as you help me shape my thoughts. Coaching actors and helping directors is my passion. Here’s what people say about me and my work.

Intuitive, unique, amazing — Nicole Kidman

Miranda’s skills as a coach place her at the top of her field. The work she does is unique anywhere in the world — Peter Jackson

Miranda is great! — Jane Campion

She’s a great intellectual co-pilot and a very special person — Garth Davis

Miranda is brilliant... So encouraging, detailed and truthful — Ritu Arya

I am a practicing actor and coach. I have read a huge amount about our craft. But in these articles I want to alert you to ideas that come from the worlds outside acting — quantum physics and science, museums and galleries, architecture, sculpture, sport, science, prisons and psychology. It is these other worlds that have provided the sparks that have inspired me. Because the way I see it, acting is life.

I hope that you can find something here that will kick-start your work, whether you are a kid, a teen, a star, a director, a student or an experienced creative searching for a new angle.

These articles will contain challenges, ideas, exercises, quotes and case studies plus references for you to follow up on your own. You will see images and read material that might have nothing to do with acting but everything to do with the creative spark. I would like to ask you to think about acting from other perspectives.

If you want to see some of this work in action you can go to my website and watch the videos that support these articles. After all, whether it is on stage or screen, acting exists not on a page but in the dimensions of time and space.

I work with beginners. With stars. With all ages. I coached 5 year old Sunny Pawar through his epic journey in Garth Davis’ movie LION (2016). And I coached my own 90 year old mother through her role as a witch in the movie I co-directed with my husband Stuart McKenzie, THE CHANGEOVER (2017). I work with top actors around the world in person or via Zoom in preparation for their roles in film and TV. And every Saturday if I am in New Zealand, I work at Rata Studios with a group of 40 teenagers who are just starting their journey as actors.

But that is not where my journey as a coach began. After I had begun to apply new approaches in my own work on stage and screen, I wanted to find a way to go deeper into my practice. This meant challenging some of the ways in which things are usually done in the rehearsal room and the studio. So I went to London to study Dramatherapy at the Central School in London for a year. During that time I worked on secondment at a school for Deaf children (I had learnt sign language for the play CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD (1979) by Mark Medoff which we rehearsed for a year). I worked in a psychiatric ward and I worked in a prison at Wormwood Scrubs Maximum Security D Wing. I fell in love with the poetry of how real people really speak. And so when I came back to New Zealand after my studies, I embarked on a richly rewarding journey with verbatim theater.

For a few years I toured and performed my solo show VERBATIM (1992) in every prison in New Zealand as well as prisons in Australia and the UK. This play, along with its companion piece PORTRAITS, has been published with a great outline of the history of verbatim theater. (You can find them here.) A partnership of collaborators — myself, William Brandt and Stuart McKenzie interviewed dozens of violent offenders and their family members. It is from this source that many of my ideas, inspiration and energy for coaching actors are drawn.

If you are looking for intellectual whakapapa (genealogy) for this approach in the acting world, I guess you could say that the material you will find here is most attuned to the work of actress and teacher Uta Hagen whose book RESPECT FOR ACTING (1973) is one that chimed with me most when I trained as an actor (1983 — 84); and then once I became Head of Acting (2000 — 2007) at Toi Whakaari: New Zealand Drama School. In turn, Uta was inspired by the Italian actress Eleanora Duse who is still renowned for her remarkable screen naturalism in the early days of cinema. You can see the single remaining example of Eleanora’s incredible work in the film CENERE (1911).

QUICK. SIMPLE. CHEAP

You don’t need equipment or technology for this work. Sometimes you don’t even need an acting partner. You just need your immediate environment — and maybe the camera on your phone. When I decided I wanted to shift some paradigms, I wanted to remain swift, flexible and unobtrusive. I have set out to create an approach that can be used easily on set and in the rehearsal room to get actors to where they need to be — quickly, simply and cheaply.

So let's get started in Paris — just about exactly 100 years ago in an artist’s studio.

INFRATHIN

My guess is that you are looking for a key that will lift your work from good to fantastic. French artist and philosopher Marcel Duchamp called this the infrathin difference. For Duchamp, infrathin (in French, inframince) is as tiny as the contrast between two identical chairs — an empty chair next to a chair just after someone has stood up and walked away. The chairs look pretty much the same, but one of them still holds the heat of someone’s body while the other is cold and lifeless.

In the world of acting, Duchamp’s infrathin difference is called an adjustment.

This is my job as an acting coach — to help you find the infrathin difference, the ignition of spirit, a pathway to the tiniest adjustment that will help you turn that key.

VERBATIM

Duchamp’s most famous artwork is called, FOUNTAIN (1917). It was simply an upturned ceramic urinal which he called a “readymade” because it was an ordinary object that already existed. He submitted it to a gallery in New York, but it was refused for being ugly and indecent. Nevertheless, it is now acknowledged as one of the most influential artworks of the 20th century. It celebrates the simple beauty and form of the real world — just like verbatim text does.

Along with Moises Kaufman (THE LARAMIE PROJECT, 2000) actress and writer Anna Deavere Smith (FIRES IN THE MIRROR, 1992) is America’s foremost practitioner of Verbatim Theater. She celebrates the poetry of the way real people really speak by recording their words and then reproducing them exactly, including all the breaks, distractions and broken bits. This is the closest acting gets to documentary. She pays special attention to the tiny faults, repetitions, breaks and stutters that reveal the nature of her source material. It is through specificity that you can achieve universality.

Verbatim texts are often the ones I use in my classes. Here Dawn talks about her daughter’s first boyfriend, in PORTRAITS.

She was 15, and she didn't have a boyfriend. Not really. She was a bit of a hard case. I thought is there something wrong with this girl? Because all our mates had boyfriends, and it was “Boys, yap, yap, yap, yap, yap!” But she was so busy, you see. She was busy with sport, and she was busy with school, and she was busy with horses, and she didn't really have time for a boyfriend, and she wasn't interested. Then all of a sudden one of the boys in her class and her were boyfriend and girlfriend. I was standing at the kitchen bench, and she comes bursting in and she says "Guess what?" I said "I know, you've got a boyfriend", cos I work at the school, you see. "How do you know?"… you know. About three weeks or so before she died.

Like readymade art, verbatim text is a direct pathway to authenticity.

Tracey Emin is a contemporary British artist who also makes art out of readymade objects. Her most famous work is called MY BED (1998). It’s just her own unmade, dirty bed surrounded by empty bottles, discarded underwear and cigarette butts. Like Duchamp’s FOUNTAIN, it caused a huge stir — and still does — because it celebrated something in which few others could see any beauty or value. In 2014 it sold at auction for nearly US$4 million. As the German writer Goethe said:

Few people have the imagination for reality.

CHALLENGE

My challenge to you is to go to the site humansofnewyork.com, select any one of the monologues there and learn it. These are real voices and real lives. You will feel the beauty in the language and the stories recorded there by Brandon Stanton.

We will work together in these pages to give you tools to help you own your monologue so that you are making a journey towards characterization, letting your own spirit infuse the work.

See you next time!

The Fountain (1917), Marcel Duchamp

My Bed (1998), Tracey Emin