An potentially influential and important experience for a screenwriter is to get the understanding of a script from the perspective of an actor. Acting, being the major component of performed drama, overlaps and interlocks with screenwriting in some very important and integral ways.

Thus, a great way to better understand the role that character plays in your own screenplays can be via an understanding of the actor's process, and of how an actor looks at a script.

A Mirror Image

The way that a trained actor approaches a play or script in order to prepare for a role is exactly the opposite direction that a screenwriter or playwright takes to create that same script.

An actor, in order to create their role, must examine a script for clues that will enable them to understand the interpersonal dynamics within the story and the motivations and psychology of their character. Thus while a writer's methodology is constructive, concerned with the building and creation of a story, and actor's methodology could be said to be deconstructive (or even reconstructive, as the information they uncover they use to build their performance).

While the original author of a work may have specific ideas about their artistic goals and intentions, when a script is taken in hand by an actor or director as prelude to performance or film production, they will re-interpret that same work based upon their own preferences, life experiences, and personal agendas. This reinterpretive process is usually accomplished by analyzing the script to uncover kinds of information that are both textual (directly present and described in the work itself) and intertextual (literally "between the lines," i.e. suggested by the work but not immediately visible in the written words). Between text and intertext is a lot of overlap, and many elements have both textual and intertextual components. As you might imagine, the intertextual elements are especially open to personal interpretation.

Some of the kinds of information sought by actors or directors in the reading of a text could be:

Textual:

• The characters' outer goals
• Character actions and behavior, especially in relation to others
• Dialogue
• Character values, mores, hopes, fears
• Detail about time and place (such as dress, class or societal values)
• How the script structure reveals information (rate of revelation)

Intertextual:

• The characters' inner goals
• Character subtext and hidden agendas
• The backstory behind the current events, including the histories and biographies of each of the characters
• The power politics between characters
• The themes explored by the writer

But what does all of this mean to you, the writer?

Page 2 >>