Write On

Hi There,

We’ve just hit the end of the busiest period in the television production calendar. January through April sees the overlap of pilot development and the last few months of network episodic season. And although pilot orders have shrunk considerably in the last decade, actors with busy pilot season auditions still encounter a lot of material without much time to prep.

Knowing how to get under the lines quickly, and into the life of the character, is key to turning in consistently great auditions. Especially under high-pressure time constraints.

In this edition of The Dialogue, I’m sharing some of my techniques for handling these stressful opportunities—gleaned from some of the best acting resources in the biz.

JC

Develop Your Approach

Developing a specific approach to script analysis can help you create a structured method for breaking down sides when you get an audition. But you can only do this with practice. Reading and processing a script a week, or if you can, every three days, is a perfect way to train your eye to spot behavior, subtext, obstacles, and events.

The best advice I’ve found for analyzing scripts has unsurprisingly come from writers. When you’re looking to bring the page to life in a way that rings true and is compelling to watch, why not go right to the source?

It’s such a generous act to put down on paper a story that lives vividly inside of you. And it is equally generous to bring that story back to life as an actor. It’s a joint process, and a collaboration. And sometimes actors think they must invent things out of thin air.

But everything you need is on the page. It’s just a matter of knowing what to look for and then recognizing the clues the writer has planted. This is why I recommend studying screenwriting—at least the basics. Understanding the thought process that goes into writing a great script can help you deconstruct audition sides and craft behavior that reveals character.

Look to the Experts, Forge Your Own Way

Effective script analysis follows an intentional process. There is no right or wrong approach—but you do need a specific approach. After much study and practice, I’ve developed a method of my own that I apply to everything I work on. And though every script I encounter is different, I use the same analysis techniques on each one. Usually, I’m prepping a script with just a day or only a few hours’ notice. Here are some of my favorite script analysis concepts, culled from experts, and a brief explanation of how I put them into practice.

“Your first task for when reading a play is to find each action: find each action’s first event (its trigger) and its second event (its heap) Both will be there.”
—David Ball, Backwards and Forwards

In a rush to prep an audition, memorize lines, and set up your equipment to tape, we forget that your character’s action is only one part of each moment. There are actually (at least) two.

Ball calls it the Trigger and the Heap, Meisner trained actors might know it as the Pinch and the Ouch. One has to do with your character, the other has to with someone (or something) else. If you’re only looking at the behavior of the character you’re playing, you will miss a lot of important information.

Aline Brash McKenna, screenwriter of The Devil Wears Prada, says:

“You want all your scenes to have a “because” between them, and not an “and then.”

Looking only at your lines and actions will leave you with “and then,” and not “because.” It’s also much easier to learn the lines when you know the “because.””

Learn to explore your character through the actions and words of others, and you’re onto some meaty details.

“If every choice a character makes tells us something about them, then that includes their subliminal, subconscious choices too. Each character’s voice will be a result of those different choices, some probably made long before the story has begun. Grammar, vocabulary, syntax, rhythm, sentence length, jargon or slang – when combined in a particular way, they all allow us to understand who a person is. Change one and the character changes. Dialogue isn’t just about what someone says; how they choose to say it is important too. Every utterance reveals something of the melting pot of desire, culture, background, worldview, status, social codes, gender, subconscious fears and upbringing – the crucible from whence they came.”
— John Yorke, Into the Wood: A Five-Act Journey into Story

When prepping sides for a session, I’m always on the hunt for clues about what the character’s dialogue reveals about them.

Time spent examining how they speak can unlock a lot: their education, how they hide their true intentions, and the stories they tell themselves to operate in the world. From there, you start to build a person that exists off the edges of the pages in the script.

“When can an inappropriate part of a character take control of their actions and cause an increase in tension or extra problems? What internal parts of one character conflict with the internal parts of other characters? Which other character brings out a particular part? And why?”
— Darian Smith, The Psychology Workbook for Writers: Tools for Creating Realistic Characters and Conflict in Fiction

Larry Moss says, “acting is about doing specific things for an emotional reason.” When you’re working with great scripts, the characters will get in their own way and cause a host of problems because of their own internal struggles.

“Examining events backwards ensures you will have no gaps in your comprehension of the script. When you discover an event you cannot connect to a previous event, you know there is a problem for wither writer or reader to solve.”
—David Ball, Backwards and Forwards

This is how I breakdown sides. Starting at the end, working either line by line or beat by beat back to the beginning. It helps to clarify exactly what’s happening and, most important, why it’s happening. When reading scripts, there’s often a line or idea that feels disconnected from the rest of a scene. When you move through it backwards, you’ll discover why it’s there.

“Good dialogue doesn’t resemble conversation – it presents the illusion of conversation, subservient to the demands of characterization and structure. Dialogue is not narrative either; it’s not there to carry the story: dialogue is the characters’ responses to the narrative – their reactions to the obstacles that litter their path. Speaking, then, is another form of ‘doing’ – it’s a tool used by characters to negotiate their way around an obstacle.”
—John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story

When you hear from casting about everyone giving the same auditions, it’s typically because the actors are playing the plot instead of the character. This is a mistake. The lines are specific clues about how your character handles the world. This should be the focus. The plot will take care of itself.

When looking at a script, steal that great sentence from Yorke and ask, “How does this character negotiate their way around an obstacle?” Do they bully? Seduce? Avoid? It’s in those answers that the character’s behavior comes into focus. The lines are one of the last pieces to come into play, don’t make them the be-all end-all in prepping for an audition.

When you see something in a scene that seems illogical, it’s usually a sign that something stirred the character emotionally, and now their behavior is more reactionary. Keep your eyes on the behavior that is happening under the lines. This is where Ball’s technique of moving backwards through the text is most helpful.

“When designing a character, it’s often useful to think of them in terms of their theory of control. How have they learned to control the world? When unexpected change strikes, what’s their automatic go-to tactic for wrestling with the chaos? What’s their default, flawed response? The answer comes from that character’s core beliefs about reality, the precious and fiercely defended ideas around which they’ve formed their sense of self.”
—Will Storr, The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better

There’s something so simple about looking over the scene and noticing how the characters in it try to control their environment and one another. With this approach, you see patterns of behavior and then you can see when those patterns change. From there, the arc of the character starts to emerge.

“Subtext emerges from the interaction between a character’s façade and their actual intention or goal. Under pressure to express their true feelings, characters struggle to keep up their mask. As want collides with need, the greater truth – the gap between what characters say and do – is revealed. And that gap is the stuff of drama.”
—John Yorke, Into the Woods: A Five-Act Journey into Story

I’ve watched actors thrown off by what the character says, using that as the determining factor to find out what they might want in the scene. In life, rarely do we say exactly what we want. Well-drawn characters are no different. This is a reminder to go to the behavior and see how it might conflict with what they’re saying, or how they’re striving to be seen. From there, the full person starts to emerge.

Recommended Reads

There are many wonderful books about script analysis. But there are two that I think every actor must have on their shelf.

Build Your Process

If you’re invested in building a respected craft in your acting, you need to have a process for working up a role. And the first step is creating a specific technique for examining the scripts you read. I hope these bits of insight give you the impulse to explore further—it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Start here, find what works for you, and seek out more tools for developing your own approach that you know backwards and forwards.