The actors who make it up as they go along

Every actor should know how to improvise. But, writes Rob Long, there's a wrong time and a wrong place

Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity. Rob Long notes that many lines in the film were improvised (Courtesy Universal Studios)

There’s an old story about a young girl who comes to Hollywood seeking fame and fortune. She goes to a splashy movie premiere and manages to corner one of the stars of the film.

“Do you have any advice for someone starting out in the business?” she asks the world-famous actress.

“Yes,” was the reply. “You’ve heard of the ‘casting couch,’ right? I’m not telling you what to do, but if you go down that path, for heaven’s sake don’t waste your time with a writer.”

When the company that produced the recent hit movie Everest issued a press release touting the film’s opening, they followed the usual protocol.

They synopsised the film’s story in as succinct a way as possible. They mentioned the true events that the film is based on. They sketched out the basics of the picture: that it depicts the struggle of two expeditions to reach the summit, and that it’s a challenging and dangerous climb. The PR folks even went so far as to remind the readers of the press release that Mount Everest is the “world’s tallest mountain”, something everyone should know, of course, but probably a good idea to reiterate considering that the targets of the press release, entertainment journalists, aren’t terribly informed about non-Hollywood, non-celebrity-related facts.

The press release mentions the director and the producers and the stars. It identifies the editor and the production designer and the person responsible for the hair and make-up.

What it omits is any mention of the writer. It’s as if the making of the film Everest required a full battery of personnel – as many, perhaps, as were necessary to make it to the actual summit – but did not require, at any point, someone to write down the dialogue and keep the story moving along.

Scripts, for most of the people involved in the movie and television industry, just magically write themselves, somewhere between the director’s calling out “Action!” and the filming of the final scene. The long-standing rumour about one of the most successful action movie franchises ever – oh, all right, I’ll name the pictures: I’m talking about the Bourne series of films – is that the filming process is a chaotic mess, with so much dialogue being improvised on the set that when the film is finally compiled and edited down to a “first cut”, the plot makes no sense whatsoever.

What happens then, in situations of this kind, is that they bring in a master editor – someone who, essentially, rewrites the film based on the footage available. The actors are reassembled months later for something called “wild lines” and “looping,” where new clarifying dialogue is carefully dubbed into the movie in as unobtrusive a way as possible. Sometimes this happens because the script was murky – in the blockbuster film The Sixth Sense, certain lines were “looped” in later to clarify which characters were dead, which were alive, and which were dead but didn’t know it.

But in general, by the time a picture is in production, the script has been polished and refined several times. There really shouldn’t be much need for radical post-production surgery. Unless, of course, there’s a lot of improvisation on the set.

This has happened in more situations than you’d imagine, when you consider how expensive it is to make a motion picture.

But for those of us who are working writers in Hollywood, there always seems to be a more obvious solution: how about they just shoot the script as written?

Actors, though – especially the famous ones – like to “feel” their way through a scene when they get on the set.

Improvisation skills are now a basic part of any actor’s training. Comedy theatre groups like Los Angeles’s famous “Groundlings” – where some of the biggest comedy stars in the movies emerged, people like Will Ferrell, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig – and New York-based “Upright Citizens Brigade” – which introduced Tina Fey and Amy Poehler to the world – are hunting grounds for studio casting directors, searching for the next big star. And that can mean only one thing: at some point in the future, most of the actors appearing in films or on television will be convinced that whatever it is that they improvise on the spot is better than whatever the writer set down in ink.

The trouble with improvising a scene is that as you’re making up your own dialogue, whoever else is in the scene with you is doing the same thing, resulting in two actors who seem to be acting in different films at the same time.

The rule of improvisation – and I’m told by some reliable actors that there actually are rules to this kind of thing – is that you’re not allowed to directly contradict your scene partner and you’re required to “go along” with whatever direction the scene seems to be taking.

In other words, the rules of improvisation require the actors to treat each other with exquisite sensitivity while they treat the writer like studio press releases and ambitious actresses do: they ignore him.

Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood

On Twitter: @rcbl