SPEAKER_00 0:00

I love the specificity of your questions. As we just went through Uda, she gives us the questions in a very generalized way. You know, and it's up to you to make it specific. You don't really leave that to chance. You're like, you're you come digging in, you know, what is this scene about? And I love how in the book you talk about the first question cannot be, who am I? Because then it's all about you. So let's talk about that. Because most actors, that's where we start from. And and and uh before we get to the memorization, you know, we start from who am I? And you say, What is this scene about, people?

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Right. Um, I think it comes from my experience as a director, you know, years of 30 some odd years of directing film, theater, you know, is that you step outside. So the first question you answer in the third person. So you step outside and look at the whole picture. And I just see not enough actors do this. And what makes these questions a little bit revolutionary is that not enough people ask these questions, right? And even actors that have been really experienced, studied with so many teachers and read all the books, they're like, oh, this kind of puts it all in an order for me. It makes something that I can repeat, it gives me something that I don't forget, you know, like 12 points, that's a lot to remember. You go to shirtleaf, there's 16, they're guideposts. Like, that's a lot to remember. And some people are gonna say, well, basically, I kind of have 12, but they work, they fall together and they and they work in and that I, you know, I didn't plan that either. They just sort of showed up that they worked in order. So that first question is we're standing on the outside going outside, going, what is this scene about? So you can get the full picture of the story. Too many actors. And I was one of them. It's like, how many lines do I have? Do I get to kiss the guy? And what are all the emotions and feelings that I get to dive into and enjoy? Right. And instead, what I learned directing is let's get the whole picture. And especially as an actor in television and film, when you get a script and you're you you gotta know what is the story that these directors and producers are looking for, especially in television. If you're getting into procedurals and episodics and even sitcoms, what's the style, what's the character that's actually gonna work into another book that I'm writing? It's called The Eight Keys of Intentional Script Analysis. But building on that is that you've got to know the picture of what they want, and not enough actors do. They don't know what the production wants, and they're telling you when you read it and you go, What are the relationships? And I break down all the relationships in the room because too often all we're focusing on is that actor is like my lines and this character, and I forget, oh, there's a social worker who is over here watching, or there's, you know, or there's another victim and they have an opinion and they speak, and even though they just have one line, how important that could be, right? So, like I said, relationships put us into behavior. And I think that Uta, you know, I I know I read Uta Hagen years ago. I when I came up with my nine questions, I honestly didn't, I just I was like, oh, there's nine. Okay, one through nine. Okay, you know, I didn't it so it could have been in my semantic memory that she had nine questions, but I didn't remember it consciously. And so then when I was doing my research and looking at all these different um techniques and teachers and going, well, how am I different? Um, I read her nine questions. I'm like, well, they're you know, that she's trying to get really specific, but some of them all I brought them together and make them more specific, I think. And she also, I think what I also respected about her is she was looking for a procedure because I'm a trained classical musician, I'm a trained ballet dancer, I'm a trained actor. I even went to cooking school, so I had chef, I had chef and technique. So technique was something that you you do over and over. And as athletes, you know, you how do you throw that ball? How do you, you know, aim, shoot the basket, how and the the watching them on the football field as they run those laps back and forth. And that's what Uda Hagen was looking for. She was trying and she talks about it, creating a bar, a basic, I call it a bar, about like in ballet bar, everybody, whether you are brand new or you are at the New York City Ballet or your Barishnikov, and whether you're three or you're 83, you're doing the same bar, right? And it's this releves and plie's and jumps, all these things that you do to warm up your body so that when you go to jump and do that beautiful tour j'et, the muscles just know what to do. And I believe that's what Uda was working for. She wanted an actor to have a technique that they could repeat on their own by themselves every single day because she knew it was practice that would create that. But that's why she created Nine Questions. Um, but I don't think that that ever took off, you know, and I think a lot of a lot of another thing that I talk about in the book is that I feel like I got out of graduate school and I have all these ingredients of what acting is, but I didn't have the recipe. And think about how many things you can make with flour, butter, sugar, and eggs. I mean, hundreds of things, right? But it's how much egg or how much butter or how much salt or how much sugar, how much flour that you put these things together. And that's the same thing with acting. So they came together, and so in those nine questions, the first one, I'm trying to get back to your question, was on the outside. You want to be from the outside observing. You want to go, what is the whole story? What is the picture? Because then I know what the director wants, and I know what the casting wants, I know what production wants, right? And so many people, and then I'll go, where does this take place? And when, too. And so many actors were like looking all over the script, or they're like, well, or they're guessing out of their right out of their head, and it's right there. It says interior or exterior, right? And then how we behave inside, you remember, go back to use your inside voice and your outside voice, and how we behave outside, how I behave in my own, in my own home office, and how I would behave in a co-working space, how we behave at the White House and how we behave at our mother's house. We just behave differently, and those things will instantly give you information that you don't even have to consciously maintain or hold. From the outside, you see all these pieces, then you start to see the picture of what's going on. And but then you get into question number two, and remember, you even turned on it when you were saying the nine questions. You said, How do I relate to my character and the circumstance, right? How do I relate to that? So now we understand the big picture. Now we can step into our character's shoes. And so the rest of the questions are from I. What do I think? What's my experience? Now that's where we're bringing the character and ourselves together.

SPEAKER_00 7:44

I think that's fantastic. I'm gonna go back to talking about the the actor under pressure to deliver the lines, but when they come with the nine questions, there's a freedom. And I wanted to read. Um, I'm going back to the book. In chapter 14, how can I practice my lines? Internalization versus memorization. And there's a young lady named Crystal who gives her perspective on the nine questions. So it's uh she says, it becomes clear that Lauren's approach to learning the beats of the scene instead of memorizing the dialogue was pivotal in my performance. The technique helps actors break down scenes into smaller, manageable units that focus on the emotional and physical shifts of the characters. By concentrating on the beats, I was able to identify my characters' intentions and motivations within each moment, allowing me to navigate the dialogue with authenticity. And then in the next paragraph, you say the nine questions incorporate the crucial principles of acting, but also provide a step-by-step efficient process for mastering your lines. And that's what we're talking about is how do you master your lines? And I'm gonna go back to something you said earlier, which is with time, that you have to learn technique first, so then you can, whenever you have to memorize lines, you have that system to take you to memorizing it with much more effortlessness.

SPEAKER_01 9:42

Correct, but I would add more to that, okay, because yes, this works as acting technique and memorization, they work together, and that's what I think is so cool about it, is because too often I spend all this time memorizing lines, and then I would do my acting technique and they felt like two separate things. Or if you're learning the tips and tricks that people teach, like our mind palaces or mnemonic devices where you know apparently just learn the first letter of every word. Like now you've got this whole other thing. And if I'm trying to memorize all my emotions and all my intentions and all that, it's like so much that how do you put all that together, right? So it is technique, but what I also want you to understand is that what you're really memorizing is the story, and what you're really internalized, and think about the difference between memorization, because I this is why I said internalizing the script. I didn't say memorize, I do use the word memorize a lot, but it's memorize, I think of like, and I I think record record players are back in style. So those old vinyl records where it goes round and round in a groove, and it literally that's what's going on in your brain, is your brain is finding the grooves and getting stuck and going into a groove. That's why when you learn something by rote, and I just have coined lately rote don't work. When you learn something by root, you're basically diving into these grooves, right? And that's why, you know, little kids particularly they learn it and they the mom says it, then they say it, and mom says it, and then they say it, and it sounds exactly the same. And then as a director, I want to change it, and then like, and it sounds like this. I heard your note, but I'm gonna say it like because it's stuck in a groove. Think about it when you're really in character, when you're lost in that scene and it's the joy, the hive actings there, you've internalized the character, right? But you've internalized the story too. What's been proven in science is that our brains will remember story over facts, over details, right? And so the words are the just the details. But what the nine questions are doing is that you are asking yourself questions that are helping you to build the story in your conscious and in your subconscious. And so what my actors feel is that when they've even after the first two or three questions, they're like, oh my God, I'm so much deeper into the story. And I also think it's teaching actors how to read a script because I know we all know how to read and we know read English and it's words on a page, but you have to read what is what's really going on in that scene. So, for example, in class, we were working on a scene from the pit. Boy, what a remarkable actors! And there's this whole beat where the victim goes into a heart into cardiac arrest. None of that's on the script. It just says, and they pull out a VTEC. And so, if an actor isn't really looking at the whole story and everything that's going on, and this is what we found, then they make their self-tape, they're gonna miss this huge event, which is a beat that's super important in that scene, and then wonder why I didn't get the job. And that's why understanding that story, and then when you understand the story, all the pieces come to that's now you're building ability to retain it. And then Crystal is also the one she has a story about when she um had a Zoom audition, and it was like producer's callback, big deal, and her whole computer wasn't working, nothing, the Zoom wasn't working, the computer wasn't working. She got on like 20 minutes late, she felt terrible, and then the casting director starts talking to her and talking to her, and she's like, and normally most actors are like trying to remember the scene and the line and be able to jump and and why and they hate it when casting directors are talking to them and laughing, and now we're gonna do a dramatic scene. And she said she could just slip right in because she just thought of the story and the questions and they came really quickly, and she just slipped right in. And the other thing is that when you're memorized, it's in wrote, you're giving the same performance over and over again. Whereas when you have internalized it and you're living in this story, that when a director comes in and gives you a note and she says something that changes the story a little bit, one, you have so much more to give back to that director. And second of all, it's easier to shift. And that's what we just find with these nine questions.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

What are three wrong questions actors ask? If they don't know the nine intentional questions, what are three wrong questions they ask when they first get the script?

SPEAKER_01 14:34

Well, first one's probably who am I, right? We've addressed that one. The next one is like, what are my emotions and what am I feeling? What's another one? I don't know them anymore because I don't use them. Uh a big one, like I was thinking about when you were talking that actors really miss is the conflict in the scene. And the conflict is gold. And so, and Uda says, What's stopping me? What was that question? She says, What is in my way? What is in my way, right? Conflict is so important. It's like why we watch TV and why we go to the theater and why we watch movies. And in fact, there's just not even enough conflict for reality TV show. They have to make it up and they have to add more in, right? Because conflict is what makes us go, well, how's that gonna work out? It's what we relate to with, you know, go go back to the Greeks. It's our catharsis of working out our own problems. So conflict's really important. And this is where a lot of people get stuck. And that's why I created a formula for it, you know, because people go, well, there's a war outside. I go, that's not the conflict in the scene. And then I made it more specific, and I made it's not just the conflict in the scene, but the conflict between the characters, make it even more specific. Well, they go, well, Susie wants to go out with him. That's not a conflict. A conflict is two opposing needs, right? I want Lydia to buy 100,000 books and she won't do it. That's a conflict. I want somebody to do something and they won't, and A wants B to do something and B won't do it. That's when two, that's what happens, is we conflict. And when you have that versus what's in my way, what's in my way didn't help me. It didn't, I kind of go, well, I and that and it didn't help me to even get over it. And I just remember taking a Tony Robbins seminar, and it was one of those we had to do the karate chop through the piece of wood, and I feel bad for all the people who were with me because I couldn't get my hand through that piece of wood, and he wouldn't let anybody leave till I got the wood broken. It took me three hours. But what and and but it why I sent tell that story is because it fits perfectly. Because what's in my way was a piece of wood, right? And what's in my way is my brain goes, my hand cannot break a piece of wood. And so that's where I got stuck. And what I had to do was get past that piece of wood to the other side, is what they kept telling me. You have to think past it. And so when there's a conflict, if I just think my mom's gonna tell me no, and maybe I was just raised that way, she said no, I don't do it, you know, and so now I'm shut down versus mom said no, and ah, I need that cookie, and I'm gonna get her to buy that cookie. Now I'm gonna find your brain, literally will find a billion different ways if you have a very specific intention. Your intention is connected to your conflict. What do I need them to do or say? And so then if I'm fighting for that, my brain, your brain will find a when you have it's called perspective memory, your brain will find a bunch of ways to solve that problem. But what's in my way didn't let my brain solve a problem.