Perspectives
When going through the work of analyzing the script and the character, it is important to find what will justify the character’s actions for me personally, and maybe even find a way to connect the actions more to me, in order for me to more easily and authentically portray this person.
When working as an actor I get to experience so many different characters. Creating backstories and understandings for such a great variety of personalities, I have even found myself bringing these analyses into my personal life. I constantly ask myself why people act and say what they do. Where do they come from? What do they want to achieve with the way they are acting? And why now?
When writing and/or directing a script I need to have the given circumstances for every character, no matter how prominent they are in the script. Everyone needs a reason to be there and have an objective for the scenes they are in. Therefore, there are no “small roles”, every role is there to serve the plot and is much needed for the story to be told. Through this work, I got an even bigger challenge in personally understanding every character’s behavior, but also, as a director, I needed to work on being able to transfer my understanding to the actor, in order to help them with the justification of their own character as well.
This work of trying to justify everyone’s actions and creating backstories from people fed further into my curiosities and search for why people chose to do what they do. What sparks their behavior? Through studying the art of impact, I have been able to feast in psychological terms and learn further about the reasonings behind people’s behaviors. Learning about theories like cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias and the gratification theory has all helped feed into my understanding of the people and the world around me, which is something I aim to bring with me further into my art.
After writing my first film, What I Wanted to Say, based on a monologue about the woman’s perspective of the situation, I decided I wanted to write the man’s side of the story as well, mainly as a character-study through the eyes of a writer and director to see how the man would respond, but also as a challenge for myself. I wanted to see if I could justify his actions and through that make his character come more to life.
After several version, I ended up with one that I felt worked both for the character and for the film. I decided to test the monologue out with the actor to see if we could manage to make his version of the film as well. Having the actor, Martin Hendrikse, read through the voice over in the studio became an emotional affair. I believe that my work and an actor-director in that setting worked really well. I allowed him to speak to me as the character Lisa, which I had played in the film, and the recording felt very intimate and with a clear receiver. Together with the editor, Tove Lindblom, we created his version as well, with a limited number of differences in the visual images. We then decided to put the two versions after each other to see how the audience would react and how that would change the perception of the story and the two characters.
After writing the two different monologues for my first film, I became interested in other ways of playing with perspectives and how I could incorporate that into my research. I already knew that I wanted to make a new film, where I wanted to say something about what it is like to be a woman today. But how could I make a film about being a woman and have it appeal to a wider audience than just women? I decided to go for the story of the female bartender, Sarah, being followed home by a group of men after work. The challenge then became to humanize the men while still clarifying the threat for the woman. With the first drafts I looked at changing the perspective between the first scene and second scene through changing the protagonist. I looked at different ways of humanizing the group of men, and how nice I had to make them for the audience to have sympathy, but also how bad they had to be for the audience to also have sympathy for Sarah.
Throughout the writing I learned more about the individual characters and separated the group of men by giving them each their own personality, which I managed by writing given circumstances and studying their reactions to what was happening further. Through this work, the perspective moved from being a group perspective over to becoming the shy guy, Marcus’ perspective. I worked on developing Marcus’ character and arc. What does he want and what does he achieve in the end? Yet, when working with him as a possible protagonist, he became a little too passive, mainly because of his character traits of being shy and uncomfortable.
When I came to that realization, I decided to change the protagonist to Pete, the self-proclaimed group leader, and the most active character in the film, that drives the story forward with his actions. Through this switch, another change became clear: I should let the two characters Sarah and Pete share the role of the protagonist throughout the film, not just give them one scene each, but rather jump back and forth between the two of them. From that decision I had to look at the ending again, and make sure both characters got their natural end at the same time. I also had the tweak the script so that it became clear that this was the story about two people, throughout the film, and allocate at what points in the story each one was the protagonist. During the shoot we tried to safeguard the film by shooting most of it from both perspectives. When we then got to the editing we got to choose where it was most natural for each character’s perspective to lead for the audience to be able to understand both sides of the story.
