TRANSCRIPT
Dedicated To The Craft podcast

Get The Milk! Forget Motivations, Focus On Objectives When Preparing A Character

It's time to get struck. This is the Electric Secrets variety podcast.

Demystifying the theater profession, offering a foundation for creative life, and reinvestment in the creative process. This is Dedicated to the Craft. I'm Scott Leon Smith, and I'm your host. Let's flip the script.

What's my motivation? What's your motivation? What's anybody's motivation? This is a word, the word motivation, I hear this word still, used in the theater, in the live theater. I first heard it back in the Middle Ages, what you might call the 1990s when I was a young actor. The word motivation was often used to make fun of actors in the acting craft and to make fun of the process by which an actor develops a character.

That is not exclusive to the 1990s. I remember a particular episode of The Twilight Zone from the fourth season, which nobody watches, where Bert Reynolds is doing an impression of Marlon Brando, who of course was very, very, very popular, still in the 1960s, when this episode aired. And he does a great Marlon Brando impersonation. But the idea is that this type of acting process makes actors difficult to work with, and portrays actors as making ridiculous demands on the set. And I don't think the character that Reynolds is playing uses the word motivation, but he's just interrupting the filming all the time and asking the director, what's going on in the scene, what's happening with my character, this and that, and that all sort of coalesces into this lampoon phrase for actors, what's my motivation, what's motivating my character.

So here's my take on it as a teacher. 

One thing that I love to go through with my students, one of my favorite lessons, I guess, is when I show them a ball. I hold a ball in my hand, it's usually a tennis ball, something that will bounce. And I ask them, what is the ball's motivation? 

Usually, students will answer something like, well, it doesn't have a motivation, it's not moving, or it's to take up space. The motivation is to take up space or to be something that you play with and throw around. 

So then my follow-up question to my students is, can it do these things on its own? It certainly exists in space, but can it take action?

And the answer to that question, of course, is no, it's a ball, it's not a human being. A ball can't do anything on its own in terms of motivation or motivating itself. It needs a human being to bounce it, throw it, hurl it, toss it, pass it, to chuck it.

So my take on the word motivation is that it's a word that connotates not doing something or waiting for something to act upon you. And remember, if you are constantly asking yourself or asking your director and your collaborators, what's my motivation? Well, as an actor, it's to find an action, it's to find an intention. It is important to know what's motivating your character to do the things that they're doing, but ultimately it's up to you to find the actions and the objectives of the character. And usually, the word motivation doesn't go far enough into defining what those things are, objectives and actions, and obstacles against those actions. 

Motivation is kind of a nebulous word. If you think about it, it doesn't give you enough to act upon. It's basically a thing. Now, you can motivate something, but that takes a tactic. It takes an action. If I want to motivate an actor to give me more of a performance or more of something, whether it's anger or happiness or joy, they need to take an action. They can't act a motivation. They can know what's motivating their character, but they have to choose very specific actions to make that thing a reality or to make that thing seem real to them and to the audience. 

So for me, motivations as a pursuit of the acting craft are too passive a philosophy. If we're to look at them as a philosophical thing, the motivation of the character, it doesn't go far enough. It's too nebulous. It's too passive. We're actors. We're looking for the active thing, the verb, the thing that we can do, rather than the thing that we're looking for or waiting to act upon us. That's another connotation to me of the word motivation. You're waiting for something to happen or if we're waiting for something to motivate you, well, you are the one that motivates you. The action is the thing that motivates you. So you get much better results as an actor, more natural and believable results. That's what you're going for when you take an action. 

You are listening to Dedicated to the Craft, part of the Electric Secrets variety podcast. Be sure to check out our other segments, BizVox for small businesses, and the forthcoming The Unforgettable Voice, focused on vocal performance and the iconic voices that shape our lives.

Now back to the show.

So if the word motivation is too nebulous and too passive a word, what's the alternative? The alternative is objective. The word objective connotates action. What I immediately think of is the military. A military objective. You have to take a hill. You have to control a piece of land or get control of a city. That's the objective. And what do you have to do? You have to achieve the objective, or conquer the objective, or reach the objective. All verbs achieve conquer reach. All actions. And how do we do that? We do that through using very, very specific tactics. In the military, they do that? Soldiers, tanks, planes, drones, air strikes, ground strikes. You can get even more specific. As an actor, that's what we're doing as well. Finding the specific actions that our character can take to reach an objective that we have to figure out by looking at the script and reading the script and looking at the character's relationships and what's going on. We figure out scene by scene and moment by moment and beat by beat. We'll talk about beats as well. Figuring out an action to reach an objective. And what you find is you analyze your script and analyze your character is that the tactics have to change. The objective might stay the same for a particular scene, but in order to achieve that objective you have obstacles that you're dealing with. Other people that are standing in your way. Things that are environmental. The weather. The climate of the room. The noise in the room. In whatever location or setting the character is in. Obstacles that your character is struggling through on their own. Whether they be physical or emotional. Self-doubt. Fatigue. Pain. Disease. All kinds of things internally that could be obstacles to the actions that you're taking to achieve a given objective.

So, this all goes beyond relying on that cliché or lampooned phrase, “what's my motivation.” This is the work of being an actor. What we call the work of the imagination. Taking what the playwright has written, or the writer, the screenwriter, and figuring out what is actable. Where are the actions? What are the objectives and what is in my character's way? And all of that is the work of the imagination. 

So, let's do a mundane example of this. Let's say my character needs milk. For whatever reason, this is all hypothetical. So, my character goes to the grocery store, and something very, very unusual happens. There is, at the grocery store, absolutely no milk to be found. In any form. I go to the milk section, I see the cooler, and it is absolutely empty of any milk. 1%, 2%, skim, vitamin D, almond milk, soy milk, it is all gone. There is nothing there.

So, my objective was to go to the store and get some milk. Now, my objective has changed. 

Find out what happened to the milk. Can I still get milk? What do I do? What actions do I take? I find somebody that works there. I ask them, what happened to all the milk? Is there going to be more milk? I really need milk. When does the truck arrive? So, you could define the need for milk as a motivation, but you can't act a need. The action is, I go to the store to buy some milk. That's the action I have taken. Then, the motivation to find the milk that isn't there is the discovery that, oh my God, there is no milk. What am I going to do? I find someone who works there. I take action.

So, really, anything that is a motivation happens in the blink of an eye. I need this. I've discovered that the thing I need isn't there. Now, I have to take action. So, anything that's a motivation is only a little piece of acting. You've got to find the actions and what your character is doing to achieve the ultimate objective, which in this case is, get the milk.

Now, the why of getting the milk, the reason we need the milk, could be thought of as a motivation as well, but those are contextual clues, which should be there for you in the script. Or, if they're not there, they're something that you have to invent yourself as the actor. So, maybe, if this is a script that I'm doing, maybe the character has a child that needs a special type of milk. And that becomes something that I can use as an obstacle. Fear, or panic, as an obstacle to getting what I want, coming from the discovery of, there is no milk at all. The context demands that my character does something. So, all of these things are work of the imagination that go beyond just that fallback phrase, what's my motivation? 

Objectives are active and not passive.

So, to me, if I'm saying the word motivation is too passive, the word objective is the active substitute. In terms of the work of the imagination, the word objective gets you better results, more natural results. The objective is made up of two elements, a tactic, and a desired result. 

So, if I go back to my scenario of the grocery store and the milk, any action that I use to find the milk that has disappeared is my tactic. And usually, those tactics go in a sequence.

First, I have to find somebody that works there. So, find is a verb, an action. And there are a bunch of different verbs and actions within that not very specific word, find. Look, look up and down the aisles. Can I find someone who works here? Call out. Call out for help. Hey, can somebody help me? My child needs a very specific brand of milk and you have no milk. So, finding someone that works there may be a smaller objective to your larger objective, find milk. Maybe as you're calling and looking, you see somebody at the front of the store. One of the cashiers in the aisles, maybe you wave your hands, you take a physical action. So, you have a vocal action, a visual action, and a physical action, all trying to reach the objective of finding someone who works there. So, that you can achieve the greater objective of learning what happened to the milk and getting the milk.

So, here we have another objective. Another smaller objective. Learn what happened. Ask questions of the person you find. What happened with the milk? Will there be more? When will it be here? So, all of those tactics are paired with a desired result. Get that milk. So, that my child gets the milk that they need. So, your desired result is the second element of your overall objective. 

So, in this scenario, we could express our overall objective as obtain the milk my child needs, an action, with all kinds of tactics attached to it. 

Obtain the milk my child needs so that my child is healthy.

Now, that expression of a desired outcome so that my child is healthy might be a little too nebulous for you as an actor. Perhaps there's something else so my wife doesn't get mad at me. So, I don't have to go to another store to find this milk. So, I don't have to go all over the city to find this milk. Find it now so that I don't have to do all that stuff. Right? So, there could be different needs and different outcomes that you could express in an objective. And it really is for you to decide what these things are and you use whatever works. This is all a rehearsal tactic. You aren't expected or you shouldn't expect yourself to be able to portray these things. To portray the expression of an objective on stage, in the moment, during a live performance if this were a play. This is all rehearsal and preparation for the performance. And along those same lines there to help you discover what you can use and what is useful to you in performance and useful to your collaborators. Your director, your cast mates. If you're doing this work for the purposes of rehearsal you get more natural results which in turn makes their reaction to you. Your cast mates characters, their reactions to your actions become more real and more natural. And the whole thing snowballs into more discoveries.

And the theory is that by the time you get to performance, you've done all this work of the imagination so now you can live those things moment to moment as you perform them. 

Whenever I'm talking acting philosophy, and acting craft and the acting process, I want to always give you a personal example to illustrate the concepts for you. So the example I've chosen is the character of Barrett in the musical Titanic.

Now when I was playing Barrett there is a scene where he wants to send a message to his girlfriend. And he's a tough dude and he doesn't want other sailors to know that he's doing this. 

And you know if they find out that he's transmitting a love letter to his girlfriend they're going to give him crap for it. The entire voyage. So he wants to avoid that. 

So my objective was to send a message to my girlfriend in such a way that nobody's going to find out. Now the only way my character could do that was to give the message to the radio operator on the ship. So my objective now has this obstacle, this other person that I'm dealing with. And he gets kind of curious about my girl and the picture that I show him. 

So all of this affects my character's objective. This person wanting to see her picture and me needing to do this, the character needing to do this, in secret. So one of the tactics I came up with was always looking behind me to make sure no other sailors were within earshot or within sight of what was happening in this radio room. So I was constantly checking over my shoulder, a physical action, to make sure nobody was watching. And that was part of how I reached my objective, which was a very simple objective to get this message to my girlfriend. But with this radio operator and with the possibility of other sailors seeing me do this. Now I have two sets of tactics going on, one with the radio operator and one with anyone who could be watching. I look out for anybody watching and I try to patiently deal with this radio operator's curiosity.

So because I've done this so much, I have multiple tactics and multiple objectives. So the simple objective of sending a message to my girlfriend, the so that phrase, what's my desired result? Well, so that my girlfriend can know that I still love her, that I'm waiting to see her and hope that she's waiting to see me, that she hasn't married somebody else. So that could be a desired outcome to show my girlfriend that I love her. And in order to do that, I have to send the message. And in order to send the message, I have to deal with the curious radar operator and possibly someone who might blab to the other sailors that I'm sending my girlfriend a message and they're going to make fun of me.

Now all of this starts to get a little confusing, which is good. That makes the character human. That gives you something real to play. 

So again, you don't have to be wrote with your objectives and your tactics and your desired outcome. You can just think of an objective as a tactic plus a desired outcome with the understanding that those things are going to change moment by moment. And if it helps you to write all of that in your script as you're preparing, go for it. But you do whatever works. And I think the most natural results and the best results come from at least thinking about expressing an objective for the entire scene, like getting a message to my girlfriend so that she knows that I'm thinking about her and that I still love her and that I hope she still loves me. And all the tactics that I come up with based on the obstacles that I'm facing are what I'm doing to achieve that objective. Even with the other sub-objectives that come up, those unexpected things that cause me to change my tactic or to play two tactics at the same time.

Now I'll tell you the value of this, the value that this had for me, especially this particular scene. On opening night of the performance, I have a big vocal number at the beginning of the show. And I croaked a note. On opening night. It sounded awful. And I was so down on myself. I did so much work for this character to be able to sing it well and to sing it right. And I screwed up on opening night. Now if you do the work of the imagination, you will be able to get past moments like that, which is what I did when I got to that scene with the radio operator. I went back to the work that I did with my tactics and my objectives and my obstacles, looking behind me, listening to the radio operator, and reacting the way I discovered I can react in rehearsal and using those tactics. And the rest of my performance just flowed naturally and I felt so good about it. Because I used my training, I used the system to get past a bad moment that I had in performance.

So that's the value of seeing beyond this idea of what's my motivation. You're doing the work. You're not waiting for something to happen to you. You are discovering in rehearsal what your character wants, what they expect the results to be, and how they're changing their tactics in order to achieve that objective, those results. 

Everybody, thanks so much for listening. Remember, as always, if you have any questions or any suggestions for an episode, you can email me at info@monstervoxproductions.com. In the next episode of Dedicated to the Craft, I'm going to talk about how you use tactics and more specifically the energy of specific tactics. I'll show you some exercises that you can do every single day to keep your imagination active and focused on action.

Till then, stay dedicated. I'll see you next time.

This has been Dedicated to the Craft. Be sure to check out my other podcasts for performance and creative life. Look for those at https://www.monstervoxproductions.com/.

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