Film Acting

Mr. Caine gives you a once-in-a-lifetime chance to rob him blind! The man who's hypnotized the camera lenses for a quarter of a century reveals the most closely guarded secrets on script preparation, working with the director, forming a character, voice, sound, and movement.

Instead of starting with what is real and trying to wrestle that onto the screen, Patrick Tucker explains how to work with the realities of a shoot and work from there toward the real. His step by step guide to the elements of effective screen acting is an extension and explanation of a lifetime of work in the field, containing over 50 acting exercises and the tried-and-tested screen acting checklist.

To the wider world, Al Pacino exploded onto the scene like a supernova. He landed his first leading role, in The Panic in Needle Park, in 1971, and by 1975, he had starred in four movies—The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, Serpico, and Dog Day Afternoon—that were not just successes but landmarks in the history of film. Those performances became legendary and changed his life forever. Not since Marlon Brando and James Dean in the late 1950s had an actor landed in the culture with such force.

Jesse Vint is a veteran of over 100 films and television shows. He has also produced, directed, and written full-length feature films that have played throughout the world. Jesse shows actors how to internalize. Once they listen to this audiobook, they will have a clarity about acting and what it is that they have never had before, regardless of how long they've studied.

Act: The Modern Actor’s Handbook is the result of 30 years of one of North America’s most renowned acting teachers teaching some of the world's most talented screen actors. This is a full tour through the concepts at the heart of Rotenberg’s techniques: states of being, primaries and secondaries, images that you elaborate up or distill down, modifiers, actions and beats, and more. Although his methods loosely draw on the great acting teachers like Hagen and Meisner back to Stanislavski, he teaches new techniques suited to the best of today’s screen actors.

What do you do when actors won't do what you tell them to? Remembering his own awkwardness and terror as a beginning director working with actors who always had their own ideas, director John Badham has a bookload of knowledge to pass along in this inspired and insightful must-listen for cinema fans as well as actors and directors at all levels of their craft.

Emmy-winning editor Jordan Goldman, ACE, takes you inside the cutting room and pulls back the curtain on how and why directors, showrunners, and editors decide whether your performance makes it to the screen. He explains the key things actors should do—and shouldn't do—to avoid getting cut out. Topics include what an editor does, how editors evaluate your work, why actors get cut, what you can control, and what you can't control.

Screen Acting Trade Secrets is the definitive guide for the screen actor in the 21st century. From your first awakening as an actor to the end of your first day on a movie set, Screen Acting Trade Secrets walks you through it all with humor, priceless information, eye-opening revelations, helpful exercises, real-world examples, tales from the trenches, insider secrets, and a boat load of genuine inspiration. You won’t be able to put it down. Then, you’ll start again with a highlighter.

Sanford Meisner was one of the best known and beloved teachers of acting in the country. This audiobook follows one of his acting classes for 15 months, beginning with the most rudimentary exercises and ending with affecting and polished scenes from contemporary American plays. Written in collaboration with Dennis Longwell, it is essential listening for beginning and professional actors alike. Throughout this audiobooks, Meisner is a delight - always empathizing with his students and urging them onward, provoking emotion, laughter, and growing technical mastery from his charges.

The casting director for Chicago, Pippin, Becket, Gypsy, The Graduate, The Sound of Music, and Jesus Christ Superstar tells you how you can find your dream role! Absolutely everything an actor needs to know to get the part is here: What to do that moment before; how to use humour; how to create mystery; how to develop a distinct style; and how to evaluate the place, the relationships, and the competition. In fact, Audition is a necessary guide to dealing with all the "auditions" we face in life. This is the bible on the subject.

Esper worked closely with Meisner for 17 years and has spent decades developing his famous program for actor's training. The result is a rigorous system of exercises that builds a solid foundation of acting skills from the ground up, and that is flexible enough to be applied to any challenge an actor faces, from soap operas to Shakespeare.

Noir emerged as a prominent American film genre in the early 1940s, distinguishable by its use of unusual lighting, sinister plots, mysterious characters, and dark themes. From The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), films from this classic period reflect an atmosphere of corruption and social decay that attracted such accomplished directors as John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, and Orson Welles.

Created by established Chicago actor and teacher Chris Agos, Acting in Chicago demystifies the question of how to earn a full-time living as an actor. Learn about the seven ways Chicago actors make money actually acting, how much career actors can earn, agents, casting directors, essential investments to make (and which to skip), the actors' union, and much, much more. This edition adds new information on self-taped auditions, how Chicago actors can prepare for a move to Los Angeles, and how to get a child actor into the business.

Hollywood was built on beautiful and complicated matinee idols: James Dean and Marlon Brando are classic examples, but in the 1990s, the actor who embodied that archetype was River Phoenix. As the brightly colored 1980s wound down, a new crew of leading men began to appear on movie screens. Hailed for their acting prowess and admired for choosing meaty roles, actors such as Johnny Depp, Nicolas Cage, Keanu Reeves, and Brad Pitt were soon rocketing toward stardom while an unknown Leonardo DiCaprio prepared to make his acting debut. River Phoenix, however, stood in front of the pack.

In this book, Richard Ayoade - actor, writer, director, and amateur dentist - reflects on his cinematic legacy as only he can: in conversation with himself. Over 10 brilliantly insightful and often erotic interviews, Ayoade examines Ayoade fully and without mercy, leading a breathless investigation into this once-in-a-generation visionary. They have called their book Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey. Take the journey, and your life will never be the same again.

Directing movies promises vast rewards--but not for free. Traps and pitfalls await even the most talented, most skilled and hard-working director. "Darkest Secrets of Film Directing" by Tom Marcoux offers priceless knowledge. Knowledge of those traps lying ahead. More, he describes effective countermeasures with which to handle each one. Problems on set come in many forms. Directors need to spot them in advance and fix them as each arises. When the crew turns on you, a name actor goes through a breakdown mid-shoot, or the producer starts squeezing your budget--knowing all these and the rest...

Master your facial expressions. Complete your on-camera training. Change your life. Contrary to popular belief, the camera doesn’t magically place emotion or thought on your face - you do. Here’s the thing about facial communication...your face speaks an emotional, cognitive, and emblematic language. Knowing how to speak this language fluently and authentically is a skill and often the difference between booking the on-camera job or not. Mastering how your face speaks to the camera starts here.

Her name is synonymous with elegance, style, and grace. Over the course of her extraordinary life and career, Audrey Hepburn captured hearts around the world and created a public image that stands as one of the most recognizable and beloved in recent memory. But despite her international fame and her tireless efforts on behalf of UNICEF, Audrey was also known for her intense privacy.

Jeff Corey (1914-2002) made a name for himself in the 1940s as a character actor in films like The Killers (1946). Everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Corey refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted, which forced him to walk away from a vibrant livelihood as an actor and embark on a career as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors. In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Corey recounts his extraordinary story.

On stage and screen, we know a great performance when we see it. But how do actors draw from their bodies and minds to turn their selves into art? What is the craft of being an authentic fake? More than a century ago, amid tsarist Russia’s crushing repression, one of the most talented actors ever, Konstantin Stanislavski, asked these very questions, reached deep into himself and emerged with an answer.