My Name is John- Building characters

It seems to me that my main role on the production of My Name is John is to assist in direction in what I have made my specific field after minor, which is getting performances from them and building a character for them to fill and live out on screen. I realise this isn't a method which all actors will be used to, especially the amateur level we tend to work with, but if I can get them on board with how I work then the production should benefit greatly from it. So in doing this role my first port of call was to do character sheets for the characters that I felt gave enough tot he film to warrant the extensive prep, the fact that the only characters with extensive dialogue in the film are John and his wife and coupled with the fact that the schedule meant that I would only be in the country for 2 shoots I decided that the only character sheets worth creating are for John and his wife (these sheets will be added to the VLE) so I created these sheets based on how I felt the characters should play out and how I felt they fit into the script (after having conversations with the director and writer). So upon creating these I had the platform to sit with the actors and work out the subtleties and worlds of the characters. It is worth mentioning that by the world of the character I mean how the character relates to the world around them in the same way that we, as people, relate to our world in an manner that is unique to every person, it is the same for fictional characters in both real and fictional worlds.

On shoot day one for this production whilst equipment was being set up I took John and Susie into the front room and started off by asking how they saw their characters and the world of their characters. Interestingly, Susie was a lot more on board with this way of thinking than John was. We had great conversations around how she was very understanding (as the character) but was losing patience and we talked about how her relationship with John functions on a  daily basis. These were all fabricated from her created world of the character and the only input I had was to mould and refine the world she had already created, all of the basis for said world was her own world and then I simply changed and tweaked a few things to fit more of the vision that I had for the character. Literally beyond her created world I only reshaped what was already there and encouraged her to changes some minor details in her thinking that would have small effects on the way she came across in the film. Most notably on these changes was how close the character was to leaving her husband, she admitted that in this she wasn't sure whether the character was on the edge or whether nothing could shake their relationship, to which I suggested that she is probably somewhere in the middle of the two and that she was getting closer to the edge but she would be a lot more secure if it looked like John was getting help, in other words it is implied that when John eventually does get help some of the stability in their marriage would return. This may seem like a minor difference in the character but it does affect how she plays the role because a woman on the edge of divorce will behave very differently in the minutiae of a performance than one who is confident that nothing will break that bond. I do feel that Susie benefitted from the time we spent and gave a more three dimensional performance as a result, it would have been nice to see a before and after character work comparison but unfortunately this is not something that benefits the film so it would have been unnecessary.

My time with John was much shorter due to time restraints as they were finished setting up and need to start shooting as soon as possible. But in the time we did have we were able to use real John (as a stage performer) as a base point and from there we worked out what subtle differences there needed to be from that version of John to our character of John. After great discussion with John about these two things, we decided that John is stuck in the performance mentality and shows flashes of the man behind it all in parts but for the most part, in his daily life it is a show and as such he plays a man who is playing another man in a sense because it is an act of a man stuck in his ways who wants to change but is addicted to the facade of telling people everything is okay and trying to deflect his issues by making people laugh and smile. Admittedly, this didn't seem to hard for John to grasp as he got the impression from the script that it was a multilayered performance and he was fighting to break the performers mentality but was losing the fight. In this sense John was a joy to work with because we established his character's world very quickly and we were on roughly the same page from the get go, which is excellent considering we had limited prep time, this saved a great deal of that time because I didn't have to make any drastic changes to the world which would affect his mentality. In doing this prep, I feel we got the best from John as an actor as he played the role perfectly, I do wonder to what degree he was playing himself, but as I don't know him personally I can't say, but as a director watching a great performance I must say that I also don't care. To sum this up, I feel that I got great performances from both actors after doing my character prep with them and while I can't prove that it had any effect on the performance I do feel that my work with them will have a huge positive effect on the film, especially if John carries that work we did into the other shoot days beyond the ones I will be on.