Actors, on the whole, are the most loyal members of the film business, probably too loyal for their own good and definitely more loyal than the rest of us often deserve. They are especially loyal to writers. Who else in this business is willing to give us the benefit of the doubt—even when they have a feeling we’ve written something that isn’t very good. Actors usually assume we know best, when everyone else in the business usually assumes we don’t. Sure they make us crazy sometimes, but who else in this business will fight for our cause the way actors do. Actually, the reason they make us crazy is because, in a way, they’re too loyal. If they knew what we know, they might not be so loyal, and that would be just fine with the camera.
Actors generally assume that everything that exists on the page is all that exists in the world—the world of the story that is. For writers, what’s on the page is just the tip of a very big iceberg, most of which is not visible to the naked eye or on the surface. Writers leave most of the world of the story off the page. On film it’s the job of actors and directors to imagine the world the writer left off the page and apply it to the words the writer
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