PETER AND THE WOLFF: When the Actor Possesses the FraME

(Alex Wolff as Peter in Hereditary, Dir. Ari Aster, Cin. Pawel Pogorzelski.)

Not part of a filmmaking institution these days, I teach mainly the aspects of filmmaking I most care about: story, storytelling, the language and practical aesthetics of the screen, while I emphasize also the imperatives of ‘The Three M’s’—mischief, magic, and mystery. I don’t venture forth on the business, on production and its structures, or give careers advice—all of which I leave to others. Nor do I conflate these topics with the art of the filmmaker under the too convenient but unhelpful one-size-fits-all banner of ‘film production.’ (My career as 1st AD and Production Manager, successful as it was and my careers as director and filmmaking educator have involved entirely different modes of thinking, universes apart.)

Nor do I presume to teach the vital skill of working with actors—there are plenty of people who do that, some of them very good indeed. And there are plenty who teach this as though it’s all a director needs to think about (while, sadly, there don’t seem to be too many who want to teach anything else).

Yet it isn’t as though I don’t have experience of working with actors…

Time ‘on the book’ as an AD in BBC Drama and Films, in rehearsal in the North Acton rehearsal rooms in West London with John Schlesinger and Alan Bates (Google if you don’t know who they were), with Anthony Hopkins, with Anthony Minghella and Alan Rickman provided a privileged education in the approaches of so many different directors and actors.

Then directing Ralph Fiennes, then others in TV drama in the UK. Then, as 2nd Unit Director, watching Martin Scorsese direct Leonardo di Caprio and Daniel Day Lewis…

Even so, I offer no courses on the director and the actor. And yet, the more I focus on what so fascinates me — the filmmaker’s conjuring of the fiction, their manifestation of it on the screen, and that screen (and the speakers) as the filmmaker’s address to the audience through visual and auditory language — the greater my astonishment at what the actor brings. How paradoxical: the more I think about form and the more enjoyment this gives me, the more I’m in awe at how the actor — in many of the most telling of moments — comes to possess the frame.

This doesn’t happen only when they are speaking. It comes with silence too—more often perhaps. The character doesn’t even need to be doing anything, at least in terms of physical action. The actor just has to articulate the instant or the series of instants that take place within…

The great John Huston once said (and don’t ask me when or where—although I always remember his words), Action is in the mind.

What did he mean?

Perhaps he was referring to the narrative of consciousness, the succession of the increments of an inner, silent monologue—or dialogue perhaps, if we think of self as interlocutor to self. The micro-story hard for the screenwriter to write, the territory of actor and lens, the facial language and nuances of expression externalizing the interior passage of perception and realization, of cognition and—most importantly—of CHANGING EMOTION, of acceptance and of the decision-making that follows. The fundamental nature, no less, of the interaction of self with world.

Often here, the camera is still, or moves with respectful stealth, the frame determined by performance, by the eyes, the slightest shift of sinew, of mouth, lips, jaw, blink and breath. The actor brings to life a suggestion of soul and its emotions—muted but all the more eloquent for such restraint—that comes to possess the shot.

Frances McDormand gives a consummate example of this in Chloe Zhao’s flaneurial Nomadland when, towards the movie’s end, having visited her former home for the last time, she steps out of its back door, pauses, settles, scans the vista before her, absorbs what she sees, reflects upon it, pauses again for the barest instant, then, as she sets her jaw, takes her decision to commit to a life on the road… A journey of heart and mind to which the camera is subservient, the audience in thrall, actor and character alive, emotion refulgent. The face as the very canvas of being throughout these brief seconds. A passing of time to arrest time. In short—Cinema.

Elsewhere, in Ari Aster’s matriarchal conspiracy horror Hereditary, Alex Wolff as Peter gives us an instant of the realization of the incomprehensible—the most terrifying of epiphanies we could experience—after the thud of Charlie’s abrupt, brutal decapitation. Limpid, frozen, aghast at and absorbing of the horror at one and the same time, Wolff inhabits the trauma of his character as his performance dictates the frame’s tense dimensions. His eyes, almost imperceptibly, tearing up, the reflection of his car’s tail lights blood red against the night, a fleck of cold green-blue teasingly icy, Peter/Wolff’s gaunt demeanor, rigid in shock, generates a rush of terror that freezes the soul. We feel a churning together with an intensity of arrested time that puts us at the mercy of the actor…

Wolff controls the space, the passage of time, and the pitch of emotion within the frame.

Disclaimer: I, Peter, was privileged to teach, or rather work with Ari Aster in my class. The thrill of seeing his mastery up on the screen, and the mastery of Alex Wolff as Peter he unleashes, beats everything. (My childhood favorite tune, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf perhaps presaged the coincidental [?] concurrence—who knows?)

Look for these instances when you watch a movie! Now bring them to life in your own work…

Peter Markham September 2022