Where have the characters come from? Although this is not normally written in a script, it is important to know if a character went to the bathroom and had diarrhea before this scene, or if a character just got off an airplane, or if he has come from a meal with someone. What is happening in this particular scene? The second part is that I try to imagine what happened immediately preceding the moment in question. These cards contain six columns, the first one being the “facts.” I try to write down the facts in a neutral way.
What is its essential meaning? Which point of view am I going to shoot this scene from? How could this character get what he or she wants? What’s the right amount of dramatic tension for the scene, given the internal rhythm of the film? I have made these note cards for myself as a small guide, a lighthouse, a kind of compass for each of a script’s scenes, one that I can access during the making of a film, while my brain is running crazy and production problems are arising. When you think about a complex, long scene with several characters, it can be about many things. Since Amores perros, I have carried with me note cards that I make during the rehearsals and preproduction of a film. Here I share something that I learned with Judy and that has personally helped me in navigating the journey from intangible ideas to the tangible universe of people and objects needed to bring a film to fruition. You need transparency and clarity in the communication between director and actor, so the actor can understand, accept, and give in to the concept and the object of a film.
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And also the most sensitive and delicate thing: communicating with the actors, who at times carry on their shoulders, through their characters, the full weight of a film.
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But it is also something more: the laborious task of knowing how to lay bricks and place rebar and get your hands in the mud.
To make a film is to write and draw the visual architecture of a story or of your own self-expression. You think, but you do it with your feelings and your body’s memory. Films are made with your body, your liver. Theory and practice are both indispensable, but nothing beats practice. Judith Weston, a North American acting teacher with whom I had the privilege of studying in a workshop in 1995 in Rockport, Maine, came from a more pragmatic tradition, and helped me to translate and apply all of that invaluable knowledge that I gained with Ludwik in a more tangible way. If things are going wrong on set-if an actor has a nervous breakdown, or the location falls apart, or you are running out of money and you must shoot the scene in a couple of hours instead of in two days-that’s when you can start losing your head, your temper and, consequently, your direction and your film. The most traumatic part of the creative process is the inevitable encounter of the intangible and abstract with the tangible and concrete-the idea or ethereal dream that we are rudely awakened from in the face of solid reality.ĭuring the production of a film, it’s easy to lose track of and forget the original intentions and motives that you had three years ago in your head and that are always so important. In spite of all this, it didn’t escape me that my passion and my knowledge of all these theories didn’t do much for me in the moment when I faced a pair of actors and a scene of my own creation. In Ludwik’s class, we read the classic works of theater: we devoured and analyzed Strindberg, Ibsen, and Chekhov just as much as Stanislavsky’s theories and the methods of Strasberg and Stella Adler and the structure of Greek drama, Shakespeare, and the intrinsic poetry of the memoirs and the work ethics of Bergman and Tarkovsky. Theater art can lead us to the discovery of a unique and personal way of communicating our worldview, freeing us of our limitations-or else our limitations, which keep us from expressing ourselves as we dream to, can drag us through an entire lifetime of frustration, mediocrity, and precipitous drops. He was interested in helping someone find their path, or else redirecting them in order to prevent unnecessary suffering. He assured us that, by doing this, he was only awakening the aspirant from a delusion disguised as a dream. He was originally from Poland, lived in Mexico for most of his life, and was without a doubt one of the best theater directors we have had in this country. Ludwik Margules was my theater teacher for three years.
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