I only worked withKate Nelligan for one long day. I had been asked by The Southbank Show to re-stage andfilm an extract from the David Hare play, Plenty, which had been a big hit at The National Theatre some years before. For this I was given the two stars of the original cast, Kate Nelligan and Stephen Moore. As they had performed the play to great acclaim over lengthy run, and Kate’s performance had even been nominated for an Olivier Award, I assumed that they would both be very set in the way they wanted to do the scenes for me. I could not have been more wrong. It was a joy to discover that they were both wide open to direction and more than ready to hear what I had to say.

As the day wore on, Kate, in particular, I found quite fascinating as, over and over, she proved to be one of those rare actors who always surprise. She could play directions quite precisely yet the effect would be beyond anything that I had anticipated. Her behavioural language was so rich and nuanced that, whatever I asked her to do, she could quickly and easily make it appear fresh and original and uniquely her own.

By the time we wrapped, I was determined to work with Kate again, and told her so, but, such are the vagaries of the industry that, before an opportunity arose, she had left to work in New York, and from there returned to her native Canada. Prior to that, however, I had a scene reported to me from a BBC rehearsal room that made me laugh. Kate was working with a director known to be “actor centred”; after a series of gushing comments, I was told, she suddenly turned on him and snapped — “I know it’s bloody marvellous but is it RIGHT?”

A basic question and surely one any director should be able to answer without hesitation. Yet, in some quarters the idea has grown up that it is better for the director not to have any clear idea of where he wants to go — which is labelled directing for results. Instead, his role should be just to facilitate the actors’ process. Foremost among the theorists of this approach is Judith Weston, who, in her book The Film Director’s Intuition, gives the following advice:

“An alternate response to the actor's hypothetical "You mean you want it angry?" might be to ask, "What do you think? Do you think she's still trying to reason with him? Or has she had enough of his shenanigans and is ready to give him hell?" Here I turned the responsibility for her emotional life over to her - I have also translated her result- oriented formulation into verbs.”(39)

When I was first starting out in TV drama I tried this “Socratic Questioning” technique. The first couple of times the cast indulged me, before one of the old timers gave me a beady look and said, “Why don’t you tell us what you think first and then we’ll tell you what we think.” On reflection it seemed a perfectly reasonable request, and that was the method I adopted from then on. Further, in the above quote, as Weston herself proudly points out, she skews round a question about feeling to one about “actioning”. Although she addresses herself specifically to the film director, this is a technique more applicable to theatre than screen acting where the internal response invariably carries more weight than the exterior attack that prompts it.

Many actors are highly intelligent with a wide range of knowledge, and even those with little formal education, have more often than not spent a good part of their lives studying drama and scripts of all kinds. Of course they readily grasp what is intended and also that much is open to interpretation. It is the director’s role to provide this and then judge the actor’s results against this criteria. It is the actor’s role to be guardian of his own process in achieving that end.

Mark Rydell, former actor and movie director (nominated for an Oscar for On Golden Pond) put it like this:

“I learned from an interview with a conductor I saw on television in Chicago. Guy interviewing him said, “I know this will sound stupid, but what does a conductor do? It looks like he’s waving a stick. They’re all playing the music, what does he do?” And the elderly conductor said, “I tell them how it’s going to go. That’s my job” ... And I never forgot that. Really what a director does is tell them all how it’s going to go.”(36)

Imagine the conductor of a symphony orchestra who told his musicians to just pick up their instruments, start playing, and see what happens ... Or started engaging in convoluted questioning as to how each player felt. Actors must be challenged: what they do by instinct is, by no means, the final word. To achieve this end they cannot stand back and judge themselves. They must shift from the dissociated, objective view of the piece as a whole, to the subjective view through their character’s eyes. It is the director who must remain on the outside as witness of what they do, a spur to greater achievement, andguardian of the result.

Only the director can know if what the actor offers up is right, because this is his job. The actor, Simon Abkarian, has summed it up to a tee:

“As an actor you invent things because of the vision of the director. No vision, no invention.” (29)