How actors remember their lines | Hacker News Reader

How actors remember their lines

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

630 pointspepys197 comments

I've taken some Meisner technique workshops, and this is what changed my view of acting:

> “Acting is the ability to behave absolutely truthfully under the imaginary circumstances.” The Meisner Technique is a brick-by-brick process designed to get you out of your head and into your gut. For that to happen, you must learn to put your focus and attention on the most important thing: the other actor."

Actors under this don't pretend, they are. A lot of actors will practice their lines with just reading and reciting, no attempt at tone or inflection -- just flat recitation -- because if you aren't responding to the other actors you are just pretending. A lot of the warmup exercises are based around just responding to the other person in front of you. And they are a great way to get better at talking to people -- that's why I took the classes. Stella Adler has a great quote: "Growth as an actor and as a human being are synonymous.”

I find it so much easier to remember lines with the other person in front of me - I don't memorize random facts well. They always have a connection to something else and I have hop from stone to stone of thoughts sometimes to remember what I was trying to sometimes.

> you must learn to put your focus and attention on the most important thing: the other actor.

Famously, Sir Ian McKellen had an emotional breakdown while filming The Hobbit due to extended stretches of talking not to other actors, but a greenscreen.

Even without greenscreen, actors in film and TV have to split their attention in unnatural ways. To preserve eyeline continuity in close-ups, actors often have to address themselves to a tennis ball or something near the camera lens, while their partner in the scene stands behind the camera. In the worst case scenario, sometimes the other actor is not even there when the closeups are being shot.

I remember an interview with Chevy Chase who said Dan Aykroyd was an expert at this and he said he was able to read cue cards out of his peripheral vision when they were at SNL so he could read lines without turning his head in the direction of the car holder. Chevy said he never met any actor that could do it as easily as Aykroyd could.

Because he is a Stanislavski-type method actor. He struggled because he, internally, was processing those emotions. Other actors do not do this. Think of a model posing for a photo shoot. They don't alternate between being happy/sad/pouty on command. They alternate between those looks without processing any underlying emotion. Watch some standup comedians. They can repeat the same joke down to every intonation and body twitch night after night. So too a dancer in a chorus line. They are not processing emotion when they do this, rather their external appearance is a total fraud disconnected from their actual emotional state. McKellen is acting from the inside out, from an internal emotion to the portrayal of that emotion externally. Others are good at just portraying emotion without that internal process, acting "from the outside out" as a Kabuki artist might.

This is literally what AI is doing

Trusting AI is impossible because it can have a backdoor and easily switch on a dime at any time, violating all your assumptions (that are made because of your intuitions about living animals and their costly signals) NO MATTER HOW LONG IT HAS BEEN EARNING YOUR TRUST.

Not only that, but it can actually do it in the background, imperceptibly, across thousands of instances, and shift opinion of many people.

The movie Her shows that Samantha had been speaking to thousands of people at once. The abrupt leaving is actually a very benign scenario, compared to the myriad other things it could abrutly change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZS8xBvgLaQ

AI literally does none of that. The current state of AI has no comprehension of any other conversation, only the output of a numerical model and the context / system prompt entered. AI has no motivation or ability to "earn trust". The end result is the same though -- you can't trust it past what you can verify.

You're totally wrong. Just because most AI doesn't do that right now doesn't mean it can be trusted over years.

It's not about AI's motivation. It's about the people behind the AI programming it. They can make it behave well but at the same time it can turn on a dime. Meaning, if an animal or a person is showing up every day and giving you a lot of their attention, emotion and love, proving themselves over time, you can be reasonably sure that they are genuinely like that. But an AI can just as easily fake it all for a year or two, and then drop it a second later. There is nothing an AI can do to prove that it doesn't have a backdoor somewhere in its billions of weights, to go rogue. It's like the Ken Thompson hack, but much more organic (https://wiki.c2.com/?TheKenThompsonHack)

https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~mpkim/pubs/undetectable.pdf

Unlike an animal or human, the AI performing as you want is no indication it will continue to perform like that in the following second. As people and organizations come to rely more and more on AI, they will become more and more vulnerable to any number of backdoors.

> t's not about AI's motivation. It's about the people behind the AI programming it. They can make it behave well but at the same time it can turn on a dime.

This is true of any software.

> But an AI can just as easily fake it all for a year or two, and then drop it a second later.

We are nowhere near an AI being able to "fake" anything. No matter what words are coming out of an LLM. There's no self model -- it's episodic and static.

Regarding the Cornell reference and backdoors in AI that is true. But it's also true of compilers. It has nothing to do with an AI having any concept or capacity of "deceipt".

We definitely agree that AI should not be trusted, but they are just not currently or in the anywhere close to near future capable of deceipt on their own. At this point that kind of "deceipt" would come from the programmers -- at least until AI is much more advanced than it currently is.

Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing preventing a human from turning on a dime, either. It’s happened to me with an extremely close and highly trusted confidant, first hand (luckily they recovered years later).

LLMs don't do what the film shows. (Nothing ever does what films show, unless it's a documentary, and even then sometimes not).

AI includes Google search results being re-weighted based on what people click on, the live bidding on which advert to show you when you visit a website, your facebook feed, and your spam filter.

All of these have been designed to earn your trust, they don't need to have an internal motivation for that. Some have been trusted, some are still trusted.

All may change on a dime and without warning due to some software update outside of your control.

This is an inaccurate characterization of acting. Nearly every school of acting shuns the manufacturing of feeling. It's incredibly easy to spot a bad actor, because manufactured emotions are uncanny.

For example, Meisner teaches you to live truthfully in the moment. The emotion you feel is based off of what you're getting from your partner in that exact moment. You're taught to get rid of ingrained social firewalls and just let everything out. To actually feel the other actors and show them how they're impacting your emotional state. It's 100% real and authentic from moment to moment.

I think you may have narrowed your definition of "acting" to only that taught at western acting schools, the type geared for the western stage. Acting is far broader. Take an army drill instructor getting apparently angry at a new cadet. They are not actually angry, not at any level. They are skilled at projecting false anger without actually ever being angry internally. They look psychopathic because they can turn this on and off instantly, but they aren't crazy because they aren't actually turning any emotion on and off, only the fake external image of emotion. That is still acting. What maters is the external message, not how you get there.

The article is discussing acting in the context of the dramatic arts, and in particular, the difficulty of remembering lines.

Feigned emotions do not work on stage or on screen. You can't fake being emotionally honest while performing. This requires rigorous training to get right.

If you try to manufacture emotion, you'll spend part of your thought process moderating your performance. Trying to sound "right", trying to hit some emotional target, focusing on your delivery, focusing on your marks and your lines. You're in your head too much and you come across as a caricature. I guarantee you have seen this before, and it's really bad.

Acting isn't performing. Acting is being yourself and being in tune with everything around you. When you're finally liberated from playing some role, the magic happens naturally.

Acting is deeply being someone else while being yourself

Ian McKellen isn't a Stanislavski-based actor. He's classically trained.

He broke down because it was hard.

It was distinctly more of an outburst of anger and frustration with the green screen rather than an 'emotional' breakdown. I wasn't there but a colleague was. See what you did? Now all those replies to your skewed sentence are voided!

To be fair, the behind-the-scenes footage seemed to show it as more of a breakdown (of course, the behind-the-scenes footage might be bending the truth a bit. And the two aren't mutually exclusive).

Since when are anger and frustration not 'emotional'?

You missed out the bit where I explained the context and object of an 'emotional' outburst. I removed 'breakdown' too. You're doing what I saw as emphasising just one part of what happened for the biggest headline. But yes, somewhat pedantically, you're right to describe both anger and frustration as emotional. The point is the 'emotional breakdown' is used originally (in press reports) as an attempt to enflame a not so enflamed event. Footage of an event will often lend itself to various interpretations from different viewers.

You seem to be the pedantic one. Emotional can appropriately describe McKellan’s reaction and like you say can “lend itself to various interpretations” of what emotional means - anger, frustration, whatever else the viewer observes and feels.

I think you're referring to me pedantically pointing out specifics in what happened, not the use of emotive language. I must take therefore 'emotional breakdown' suggesting a myriad of outcomes in the readers mind is ok with you. It appears so. I wasn't ok with it. I didn't want 'emotional breakdown' left hanging with all of its broad connotations, without the important reference to the green screen.

You reminded me of the Meisner workshop scene in Asteroid City (you can't wake up if you don't fall asleep). The more I think about it, the more the Meisner Technique seems like a central theme of the whole movie. The scene with Margot Robbie and Jason Schwartzman drives home the difference between recitation and acting. Cool stuff.

I’m not sure I will ever fully understand that movie, but I loved it anyway.

That's the neat part, you won't!

But in all seriousness, there's a current of irrationality flowing under that movie that is oddly satisfying. Why does Augie burn his hand on the quickie griddle?

I feel like Anderson has honed his craft so much that for the people who aren't instantly turned off by his antics, he can create these incredibly emotionally evocative nonsense scenes. I'm not entirely sure Anderson understands how he does it. He's tapping into something deep in his subconscious that resonates with some select set of other people. I guess that's art!

Good acting requires the actor to fully inhabit their character and respond to the imaginary world as if it were real.. Without that I think it's impossible to trully understand the story.

I’d love to hear any other details you or anyone else would care to share. I’m making an audio drama as a hobby and have never directed before, and most of my actors will be untrained volunteers. Posts like yours are so interesting

This resonates.

As a frequent public speaker and coach of others in public speaking, the top priority is to just deeply understand the material. The second priority is to create the habit write like you publicly speak (i.e develop a style).

You put these together, and you have no choice but to explain it the way you’d have written it anyways. This enforces resilience against interruptions and allows for improvisation.

But this is hard. It requires two great efforts: to deeply understand the material, and to craft a speaking/writing habit that makes for powerful, public speaking.

It doesn’t surprise me then, that actors do the same.

I'd add to those the necessity to have some distance from the material to avoid the recency effect. You can have that distance either because you'll be talking about something you haven't worked on for at least a couple of weeks, or because you've developed an ability to retain a birds eye view and adopt an outsider's perspective even when you're in the weeds. A lot of academic talks go wrong because, although the speaker deeply understands their topic, that teeny tiny detail that they were fiddling with yesterday is really not the thing they should try to communicate today, but they can't help themselves. Yet ask that same person to talk about their previous work, and you'll get a high quality impromptu introduction to the field.

I am reminded of Socrates, who lamented the practice of memorization being replaced with writing. Today one might dismiss this idea as silly, since memorization alone is frequently associated with dumb parroting and regurgitation, neither of which imply any depth of understanding.

But from this discussion, we see the old man may have been on to something! If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

> If understanding something deeply is necessary in order to memorize it well, then one might achieve understanding as a secondary effect by aiming to memorize something by heart.

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

And there's also the Kiwi chap, Nigel Richards, who memorised the whole French Scrabble dictionary in order to win the French world Scrabble championship, without learning any French in the process.

(Whether you call what he did to the French word list 'understanding' is up for debate, I guess. I am fairly sure he went much deeper into understanding the underlying probability distributions of letters in French words than most speakers, but he couldn't read a newspaper.)

I went to a Saturday school for many of my childhood years, as my dad wanted me to learn Arabic. They were bad at teaching the language, but did get us to read the script and memorise several Quran verses. You were supposed to get "rewards" in heaven just for memorising without understanding. To this day I can recite Al-Fatiha [0] despite not understanding a word, being an atheist, and not having prayed for maybe 15 years.

[0] https://myislam.org/surah-fatiha/

Same, as a kid there were a whole bunch of bible verses to memorize, which was required. To this day I can recite quite a few of them, and (despite now being an atheist) I still occasionally have some of them pop into my head in situations where it might be relevant. Memorization is an extremely powerful tool, and particularly religions have known and used this for millenia.

The difference between your experience and mine is that I have no idea what the verses are saying! They almost never pop into my head because I can't relate them to situations.

It's possible to just memorize the words, of course. But for myself, I find that very tedious and difficult to make myself do (nor very worthwhile), and much prefer becoming deeply acquainted with the text in order to memorize it.

Yes, understanding can help memorisation. I was merely arguing against understanding being _necessary_.

Memorisation without understanding often ends up producing things like Mariah Carey's classic hit "Ken Lee".

So?

I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

True, I am doing this myself. 4 days a week and plan to continue for the next 10 years. Memorized several pages so far with a lot more to go without understanding any of it.

May I ask why? I as an atheist did memorize some part of the Bible for the fun of it but I understand the language.

In Islam there's a certain reverence for memorizing the Quran, unlike in Christianity.

In fact, being a Hafiz or your child being a Hafiz is a point of pride.

This in part goes back to Islamic lore/history.

Another part is that there is the belief that there are rewards associated with, being accompanied by angels iirc.

Because it is important to me as a Muslim. Also it is challenging, interesting, to try and memorize an entire book.

... but wouldn't it make to learn classical Arabic alongside with that?

> I heard there are people who memorise the Quran without knowing the slightest bit of Arabic?

I think the main issue being described in the article and in the comments is that rote memorization like you described is both much harder and also meaningless. In fact, it is much harder because it is meaningless.

So yes, it can be done, but also: why?

Memorization def gets a bad rap, for the reasons you mention.

Yet I bet most folks who have memorized a poem or a passage---out of an affinity for it, not when demanded by a teacher---know the value. Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express.

It's good.

I totally agree. I've spent time learning several poems of Robert Service (The Cremation of Sam McGee, The Spell of the Yukon, The Men Who Don't Fit In) because I've enjoyed reading them. Now, I don't need a book, I just recall one from memory any time I like. I'm not an actor so I had none of the techniques that they would use to learn lines. It was purely rote memorization through repeated readings and recitation.

I agree, but I think it does depend on what the objective is. If preserving the literal accuracy of the source material is important, then memorization deserves it's bad rap and is worthy of much criticism.

That's not to say that people can't memorize things accurately (there are plenty of kids who memorize Bible and Quran verses verbatim for example that can easily disprove that), but memories are fallible in ways that writing isn't, particularly when it comes to comparing sources for accuracy or historical value.

On the other hand, if the objective is to understand and appreciate the source, even simply for personal edification or enlightenment, then I agree completely: memorization is a wonderful technique for doing so.

> "Memorizing something means you can roll it around in your head whenever you want, think about it from this perspective or that, and let the brain really absorb the ideas the words express."

That's also the reason little credence is given to coders who moan about college CS knowledge being useless memorization of stuff that can easily be looked up when needed.

This extraordinary book from Frances Yates explains how before writing, scholars and story tellers would visualize architecture so they could store memories in rooms, then they would walk from room to room and recover memories, for example to tell very long stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Memory

Also covered in the more contemporary book Moonwalking with Einstein with its discussion of building one’s own “memory palace.”

Also referenced a number of times in the excellent Hannibal series.

Also in the series The Mentalist.

And Sherlock.

Worth noting that India's oldest poetic/litergical traditions, the Vedas, were transmitted orally for at least 1500 years, and developed elaborate systems of memorization and pronounceation to ensure they passed down (almost) unmodified.

In Mauritania there is a village where most people who lived there are blind. This is how they learn to memorizw the Quran which is more than 600 pages, each have 15 lines.

I'm sure it's a tradeoff. Like adding a disk to a computer that only had RAM.

You have access to many orders of magnitude more data, but it is substantially slower to access it.

All considered, I'm glad we did the upgrade.

Similar to how using flash cards doesn’t really help in developing that deep understanding… but the action of making them sure does.

Fun facts, there is an important Islamic tradition where group of people (tens or hundreds thousands of them) called Hafiz memorize the entire Quran. If for example, God forbid, that the entire written copies either physicallly or digitally of the Quran are completely destroyed, it can be recreated completely in no time. This practice is considered a living miracle since no other holy book has this crucial feature and it is also well known that even the Pope do not memorize the complete Bible.

Nitpicking Alert!!!

The Pope Should be more concerned about the Gospel, I think.

The Catholic church could use a Bible memorisation contest to pick their new Popes. They don't. I presume for good reasons?

I sincerely hope this doesn't get taken the wrong way but this seems like a worldly solution to a Godly problem. Is the God in the Quran not sovereign? Why would He need humans to protect the Quran?

Again, not a critique, just a curiosity.

Because even when you’re all powerful, it’s hard to find good help

Why would any almighty deity need humans to do anything at all?

This is a generalised critique against most commandments of many religions.

(If the deity didn't want me to commit act X, why is act X even physically possible?)

There are quite a few specific and also generalised responses to this critique. Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)

> Look for eg "Why does God permit evil?", "Why does God allow suffering?" and similar.)

That's addressed in Job.

Yes. And that's just one way to address a part of this topic of one (or a small number of) religions.

There's different answers, even amongst the same religion, but even more across religions.

Btw, you might like https://unsongbook.com/

The Bible is about ten times the length of the Quran though. Some people like John Goetsch and Tom Meyer currently have most of it memorized nonetheless, but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what, so memorization is just for personal betterment and to better share it with others.

To add, Jesus only commanded the spread of the Gospel, and not the books or writing, but rather just teaching about Jesus and how he provides salvation through his sacrifice.

After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

People get hung up on the dead past rather than the living present. They say God is unchanging and eternal and neglect that he built an ever-changing universe of entropy for us to live in.

Even the "Gospel" means "Good News" or "Glad Tidings". What good news comes from 2,000 year old texts? It's not news at this point, it's history.

The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

> After all, the point is not that a certain selection of appropriate texts be considered the end all and be all of existence, but rather that the Bible is supposed to be a history of what other people did while under Gods rule during their lives so that you can get an idea of how to live under Gods rule in your life.

There's lots of stuff in the Bible. Much of it falls under the category you describe, but not all.

> The Good News comes from people today choosing to be better, to do better, to not oppress, to not commit evil acts against others but to do good things to other people, to say kind words from a good heart because they believe in a better world coming tomorrow.

Different people have different interpretations. What you describe sounds nice, but I don't think it's exactly the orthodoxy for many Christians.

I see what you're saying, but that's literally the point. Jesus was hardcore, but that's because he had a mission.

Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

Be nice. Be better. Do your best. Apologize when you mess up. Grow.

If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

Anything else is part of some hokey religion masquerading as spirituality.

> Children understand how to get into heaven. Adults are the ones who have problems with it.

You get in because you're predestined to? Sounds pretty simple to understand.

Or go to heaven because of faith alone, if you subscribe to a different strain of Christianity.

Or go to heaven because of faith and good works, if you subscribe to yet a different strain of Christianity.

Or any number of other interpretations you can find.

I don't think your homebrewn theology is necessarily better (nor worse) than the other guys' versions.

> If God wants more from you, God will tell you personally, in a way that can't be confused with schizophrenic mania or paranoid delusion.

I'm not doing anything at all, and God hasn't told me anything ever. So I guess I'm good by your interpretation?

Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

> Non of the gospels were written during his presumed lifetime.

More importantly, none of the gospels were created during his presumed lifetime.

(For the Christian tradition this seems like a minor difference, but we are exactly talking about oral vs written preservation and transmission here.)

Homer's works are an interesting parallel, because they are believed to have been transmitted orally first, before being written down later.

Correct, the gospel was originally spread by word of mouth.

Just in case you don't realise the Gospel is 'the message of salvation through Jesus' and is not the books in the New Testament called "the gospels". In the Bible when Jesus tells disciples to teach the gospel, the Greek word can be translated 'good news'.

A similar reference-instance error occurs with the Bible itself: 'the Word of God' is Jesus, not the Bible, the Bible is a pointer to the Word.

Perhaps too much of a digression for this forum.

Any reason to assume that common folks in the Roman province of Judea were preached to in Greek?

As to the actual gospel you may be interested in this

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_of_Jesus

> but Christians largely believe that God will supernaturally preserve the Bible no matter what

You know, until you put it in this context, it hadn't occurred to me how--from some perspectives--"convenient" that is. :)

I mean. Bibles are everywhere. It is really hard to imagine all of them getting destroyed all at once. Even harder to imagine a scenario where that happens and yet we have humans still around after that.

We have left one on the moon! https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2019/07/19/the-only-bible-o...

I'm American and have spent the majority of my life in the US, so limited perspective and all, but Bibles are literally disposable here. There's plenty of instances of overzealous churches setting up on a corner and forcing cheap mass produced pocket-Bibles into the hands of college students or pedestrians on the street who walk past them. The Christians already have usable full sized copies and will eventually realize they don't need a hard to read $0.10 copy and the unreligious mostly don't want it at all, neither group revere the physical item and will commonly throw it away. Some Christians take even take pride in showing off they have a well used Bible, to the point that they purposefully let it get worn and ragged. Eventually they will also just replace it with a fresh copy. I think you could excavate any random landfill in the US if you absolutely needed to retrieve a few hundred intact copies of the Bible.

Also convenient that the church leaders 350 years later chose the correct books to put in the Bible when they canonized it.

That's what divine inspiration is for.

The Bible’s also not generally regarded as wholly and precisely an exact, unaltered, unfiltered, and unadulterated message directly, syllable-by-syllable and letter-by-letter, as written on the page, message straight from God, not so much as a word out of place for its entire length, all as revealed in a single (long) event to a single person and recorded without error. I think that has a major effect on how important precise preservation of the Quran is to believers, and how interested in memorizing part of all of it they might be, versus the Bible.

Forget the entire Bible, how about memorizing just the Gospel or the New Testament that's pertinent to Jesus, I think that all the Christians will fail that too including the Pope.

Another fun fact is that there is nowhere in the Bible either in the Old or New Testaments that the God had promised to preserve its content and its veracity, only in the Quran that Muslim consider the Last and Final Testament [1][2][3].

Another reason it's a living miracle by the fact that many thousands of these Hafiz don't even understand Arabic but they can read it, just like you can learn Hangul characters in a few days but never understand Korean at all. It is like trying to memorize War and Peace in its original Russian (and French) in its entirety but your only language is Mandarin and the alphabets are totally differents. Heck, even Tolstoy’s wife Sofia who reportedly personally and manually copied the original manuscript twenty one times did not memorize it [4].

[1] https://quran.com/en/al-maidah/48:

"We have revealed to you [O Prophet] this Book with the truth, as a confirmation of previous Scriptures and a supreme authority on them."

[2] https://quran.com/en/an-nisa/82

"Do they not then reflect on the Quran? Had it been from anyone other than Allah, they would have certainly found in it many inconsistencies"

[3] https://quran.com/en/al-hijr/9:

"It is certainly We Who have revealed the Reminder, and it is certainly We Who will preserve it."

[4] Ten Things You Need to Know About War And Peace:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5lrPL2vWJG6Th9zmh1...

The Gospel is literally the good news of God coming to earth as a man to die for our sins, not the literal words of the Bible. It's this message that is to be shared, not necessarily the exact words on the page, especially because it's going to be translated anyway.

But the Bible does promise that it will be preserved to the letter regardless:

Isaiah 40:8

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

Matthew 5:18

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

The Guru Granth Sahib Ji (GGSJ) has also been memorized by some people. It’s much rarer than in Islam, but the GGSJ being written in verse with defined melodies/meter helps with memorization. It is much longer than the Quran though, and there isn’t as much emphasis on memorizing the whole thing (the daily prayers are commonly known though).

and further complicating the situation is people like me who write not to re-read, but understand, which then helps to memorize. Circle complete!

This doesn’t make much sense: actors don’t write their material, they are given it. They can’t write like they speak, and also they can’t improvise

Actors (especially big names) can and do improvise all the time, in almost all movies.

It's rare they say all lines exactly as in the script. In fact often the script gets updated with ideas that came up during shooting including improvised lines.

A fascinating topic around my family is the playwrights who insist that the play be delivered precisely as written, most of whom are the same playwrights who refuse to allow genderswapping roles (even innocuously), updating pop culture references, etc. They are not the norm, and pretty much everyone understands that performance is as much a part of the creative act as writing, with all the deviations and imperfections that suggests. And that's without even getting to the idea of consciously changing the script midstream that you mentioned.

That's why in almost all cases screenwriters or source novel writers are strictly forbidden on set.

The biggest problem are writer/directors who cannot deal with improvising actors. Like a Haneke, who would turn around in his grave if an actor goes against his sacred script. That's why they have 25 shots per scene, and 3-6 months per shoot.

Harrison Ford says, "I know," instead of "I love you, too" (or something like that) in Empire Strikes Back's carbonite freezing scene. That's an immensely significant and meaningful update.

Just because you hear that they do, doesn't mean it's always allowed or that it will make it into the film.

Sometimes a line just isn't working and an actor or the director or the writer or a grip will come up with something that works and that's what you hear about. Those are exceptions and not the rule.

The director has the final say. Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

I didn't say it's "always allowed". There are difficult directors with very specific vision they want to express 100%. It's that that is the exception and not the rule, however.

In general it's more common that some lines will change and be improvised by the actors, than not.

It's even practical, some lines come off as stiff when the actors tell them verbatim, others just can't be replicated in a longer emotionally charged scene (where the flow and the emotions carry the performance), and so on.

>Often others higher up have the final say. If he wants you to say the line as written, you will say the line as written.

DUH!

Yes, but sometimes, I think the director might ask for the script to be delivered exactly as written

If you watch any side by side of a film audio / final and the script you'll realise what you're saying simply isnt true.

It's very rare that a conversation scene mirrors the dialogue exactly 1 to 1. Obviously there will be certain lines where the director wants exact delivery but actors very often deliver a slightly different line than as written.

If anything this frequency increases the higher level of profile / skill the actor has.

There are countless examples where a director is asked about scenes and defers the credit to the actors for improvising something particularly well or coming up with a better line to convey the same point - they are the ones, after all, in charge of personifying the character that was written. They may feel a different delivery suits the character better.

For actors it's slightly different, but the whole "becoming the character" part is, to me, the "writing like they speak" part. By fully inhabiting the character, they will be compelled to speak in the manner written in the given situation.

And as the other comments mention, actors very often do alter the lines. Behind the scenes footage and interviews with actors reveal this often happens because they think the screenwriter/director got it wrong in that particular moment -- that their character wouldn't respond like that.

The Han Solo example is a good one. Hours of takes saying "I love you too" and then Harrison Ford has a flash of clarity and realizes Han would NEVER respond like that. Calls for a quick take, "becomes Han Solo", says "I know" and the rest is history.

I don't understand what does the "writing and speaking should be the same" thing is supposed to achieve for public speakers.

It means that if your speech is written in the way you casually speak, it's easier to remember it (since you'll not have to remember fancy words or turns of phrase that you wouldn't normally use). The idea being that it's easier to remember or reconstruct speech that comes natural anyway.

It will also be easier to improvise and fit the tone if you forget what you were supposed to say.

Aside from the above, which are about memory, it's also good for making it natural: you'll sound more authentic/natural speaking as you normally do, than trying some fancy speech, and it will also be easier to add off the cuff remarks that also fit the tone, like an idea that occured in the moment, or to respond to something that happens just before/while speaking.

A few years ago, I came into the orbit of a public speaking coach, and he and I worked together for a few weeks. Your comment fascinates (and reassures) me, because he was emphatic that I had to abandon my own natural way of speaking entirely, and adopt a "persuasive persona" that sounded to me like a Saturday Night Live parody of a TED talk. This has exactly the opposite of the intended effect, because any anxiety I felt about speaking was multiplied by my anxiety about how I sounded and "staying in character". By comparison with the linked post, however, I was attempting to stay in a character that I didn't understand, with no thought given either to understanding what I was saying or, crucially, understanding who I was speaking to.

This got me thinking about the people who find value in his style, and I realized that the consistent feature was that they didn't care about understanding the material and, in some cases, were so incapable of doing so that the notion wouldn't occur to them. Not dumb, just not interested. They were simply transactional, and almost always very, very scared of talking in public, and this coach's method allowed them to get through it.

This also helped me realize that I don't particularly suffer from stage fright or public speaking anxiety, which has been a benefit, though it's important to note how insignificant that actually is. A family member has worked on stage with some extremely successful actors, and it's REMARKABLE how many of them have absolutely crushing stage fright. To me, that's more interesting than the line-learning thing: you take a person, someone most people in this thread would have heard of, and imagine them hiding out in a bathroom because their terrified of going onstage, then they get out there and utterly blow the room away. Something about pretending to be someone else unlocks so many actors.

This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding. So this guy is producing two categories of students: people like me who want to understand the material and the audience and simply speak like a better version of ourselves, and people who sound like they're selling you a car they've never driven but doing so competently, checking more "good public speaker" boxes at a superficial level.

I'm guessing the great actors and public speakers do both: love the material AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

> This ties right back to my friction with this public speaking coach, because he was attempting to coach me into playing pretend, though without any empathy or understanding.

This is my experience as well, and ironically mirrors my time as a manager. I want to understand and empathize with people, and there are managers and orgs who absolutely don't want that, and want the "people who sound like they're selling you a car"

Yeah I heavily disliked most public speaking coaches at institutions precisely because of this.

FWIW, I mostly coach juniors at work who will brilliantly describe their current project to me at their desk but then fall apart in the conference room in front of peers and seniors. Mostly it's because they're trying to recite some prepared speech that doesn't sound like they normally talk (often desperately trying to impress the room). So I tell them their mastery of the material will impress the room and you sound plenty fine when explaining it to me at your desk. I don't have a full semester of instruction time to make them develop a style -- I have one hour the day before the meeting. So it doesn't produce great political orators. But it does help produce people who can walk through some deep technical work in front of their bosses.

>AND love the act of becoming a person you want to listen to.

And love that character too. That takes some self discovery, experimentation, and practice. Which is why I referred to it as a great effort.

Addendum: To give some credibility to my method, I often point out to them that they sound their best when speaking during data reviews. These are sessions where, following some kind of test, engineers gather to review sensor outputs. You have no time to prep a speech -- these are quickly assembled within hours of a test and are very much often just a loose collection of screenshots and quick annotations and the engineer in question usually spends that time copy pasting screenshots or driving back from a test site.

But once it's their turn to talk about some really obscure looking line graph, they will deliver some great, great public speaking. Why? They've spent the last 6 hours staring at this graph and know deeply how to interpret it.

By the way, this has given me reason to believe that Investment Banking decks largely are just to force junior associates to undergo the above process.

I've been described as a good communicator and public speaker on several occasions. I have also felt that I have improved this aspect of my life tremendously as the years have gone by. I also noticed that what used to be a rather...impeccable or "by the rules" writing style...has morphed into a much more "writing what you would speak/recite" style.

For a long time, I felt annoyed at the fact that my mom (who teaches language) would rightfully find more and more problems with the way I wrote. I felt as if I was losing some of my younger qualities (I was always considered a pretty good writer).

Now, though, I have realized that it's exactly as you described: I accidentally started writing as I talk — and that has morphed the writing into this sort of weird stream of consciousness thing with its own rules, ebbs 'n' ibbs. Most people who know me like what I write because they feel as if I'm talking with them via text. My personality is there. And as someone managing both bits and people, personality and the associated gift of energy is perhaps the best thing I can give my team.

I try to counteract this perceived reduction in quality by practicing my other passion: writing poetry :)

This would only work for actors bring able to play themselves, and nothing else. The screenplay is not always written for a specific actor, there are strange lines there that you have to transport naturally. There is where the method helps.

play different personalities.

Loved this quote from Michael Caine

>You must be able to stand there not thinking of that line. You take it off the other actor’s face. Otherwise, for your next line, you’re not listening and not free to respond naturally, to act spontaneously.

The Meisner repetition technique is such a powerful method of teaching this.

The technique has two or more actors repeating the same lines back and forth at each other, based on simple observation and repetition. But what's really being said and communicated is the subtext of how the actors sense and feel - not the words at all.

Saying "you're wearing a blue shirt" might encode the thought "I don't like the tone of your voice" or "you've got a nice smile." And the other actor is meant to read that off of you and respond in kind.

This is very interesting. Some lines which I remember from movies, I rarely do so because of the words. It's almost always because of the way it was delivered and the emotion or "vibe" that it put out.

Oh, God. I can't stand Meisner work! I had to do a fair bit of it in graduate school, and it never, ever clicked with me. I could see it working for other actors, so I don't discount it, but I find it tedious in the extreme. Can you tell me a bit more about what you get out of it? What's your internal experience of the repetition exercises?

> What's your internal experience of the repetition exercises?

It's a lot like improv in that you establish an unspoken protocol for exchanging lots of side channel information.

But unlike reading between the "yes, and" subtext to build a narrative world and rules, you're taking in raw, full sensory emotion in an intimate way by completely dropping your own filters. Brains melded, firewall open. You have to say what you see, what you understand, and what you feel. And you have to tell the truth and not lie to yourself and your partner.

It's as uncomfortable as staring into their eyes, until it stops being uncomfortable. And you don't even have to be looking at one another. You can hear it in their breathing and the cracking of their voice. You know exactly how you feel about everything with exacting precision. You're uncomfortable and vulnerable and excited and anxious, and you let them know.

Meisner removes all the social filters of the adult brain. All the platitudes and the scar tissue of decades of interacting with people in society. You stop judging and worrying and just say and do what you feel. And you hear it from them too, and you believe them because they're being honest with both you and themselves.

You know if they're lying, because you've trained and can sense it. And you'll call them out on it. They'll do the same to you when you attempt to hide. They'll really dig in. Once you're under that spotlight, there is no hiding. You can go wherever you choose to go. It feels raw and weird and more intimate than being with a lover.

With practice, "you're wearing a blue shirt" becomes "I don't like how you look at him and smile, but when you look at me you frown". And everyone cries and yells and things get thrown.

On the spectrum of our robotic "how are you? / I'm fine, and you?" programming and a raw and intense fight with a lover, Meisner is the latter. Except you get to be that authentic for the entire range of human emotions: good, bad, happy, sad. A door to everything you could potentially feel.

It's animalistic and completely cerebral. And it's real and you live it. Sometimes you come away shaking.

Huh! That's my experience of performing, for sure, but Meisner wasn't presented to me that way. One of the teachers of a workshop I was in had studied with Meisner, and had led (I think?) the London Meisner Institute, so I figured I was getting it straight. She approached repetition exercises more like intuitive textual analysis - finding the subtext, as you (or someone else) said up-thread. I've never had trouble supplying more subtext than anyone could ever want, so that bit didn't do anything much for me.

Neither did the crying and the yelling. I did too, just so as not to be left out (crying and yelling is always good fun), but they all took it so damn seriously that I wasn't sure where the line was between useful work and self-indulgence.

Oh, and also I think a professional actor ought to be able to drop in without having to drag someone else through ten minutes of repeating the first three words of their lines back and forth until the syllables are drained of all meaning. True story! I was as good a sport about it as I could be, but gosh... It was drizzling, and the lighting guy fucked off for tea, and I sure wished I could too.

I know more direct ways to get students to drop their inhibitions and tune into each other than repetitions. (Oh, and the audience! Everything I've seen of Meisner neglects the audience, and I think being aware of them is really important for stage work. Camera, same, for screen acting.)

Anyway, I'm sure I'm just missing something, and being grumpy. Like I say, I've seen positive results for some actors (though not the chick in the rain), so it's doing something, and I'm glad it works for you.

Good lord that sounds terrible.

From my understanding, the repetition exercise has always been something taught to brand-new students in the first month of acting classes, to demonstrate the difference between reciting lines and saying things in a spontaneous, believable manner. As well as to teach what subtext is.

The idea that anyone would be doing the repetition exercise after their first month of acting school baffles me. It's not a technique that was ever intended for, or should be used by, professional actors, as far as I've ever understood it.

Well, it was the director's girlfriend - or maybe just a woman he wanted to shag? Memory fails. He was good enough - the finished piece looked fantastic - and I was doing a favour for a friend, so it was all OK. The girl had a list of London credits that I doubted heavily, but she came off very well on camera, so <shrug>. It's nowhere near my worst experience with a film actor, only annoying at the time, and totally worth it (as most things are) for the story.

I can't tell from that angle, but having directed quite a few actors over years, there's a big difference in actors who've went to the workshops and internalized the process. It just shows, for the better and you can spot them rather quickly. Namely, you can tell they (for the better part) react 'naturally' making the character far more believable. Take what you will from this, but that has been my experience.

That makes sense. Someone else down-thread says Meisner isn't something they'd use after the beginner stage. I think, by that point in my career, I'd internalized enough of those lessons in other ways that it was kinda pointless for me. If I were still teaching I might give it a go with a beginner class - though I doubt I could teach it with conviction, so I'd probably call in someone else for a day.

Like I say, I've noticed the same thing you have, so there's clearly something there. I've just never "got it", so it kinda fascinates me.

This sounds like the basis for the "Baseline Test" in Blade-Runner 2049. Fascinating write up here: https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/blade-runner-2049-how-a-key...

“These pretzels are making me thirsty!"

The Meisner repetition technique, sure. (Although it just doesn't connect/resonate for a lot of actors.)

But the Meisner technique also teaches you to learn your lines by rote, practicing them in a monotone, intentionally devoid of meaning (the opposite of what this article describes), under the theory that this will free you to add spontaneous emotion in the moment.

Whereas in my experience that's a terrible approach. It makes it vastly harder to learn the material (as this article suggests), and then students tend to perform closer to a monotone because that's how they practiced it and built an unconscious habit of association -- or once they're able to bring emotion to it they forget their lines because the emotion was overwhelming and they don't have the lines "in their bodies" connected to the emotions that are going on, because they learned them by rote.

As you can tell, I'm not generally a fan of the Meisner technique overall...

I love his way of putting it. Memorizing lines as a kid for plays always felt easy but it’s because of something like what he describes.

My biggest play to memorize was as one of the leads of The Importance of Being Earnest in high school and a big part of knowing it end to end was how I memorize talks today, just repeating it until you become the part, and feel like you know “your part” not “the lines”. You’re not regurgitating lines, you’re stepping through and reacting based on a set of information to a point where you don’t even feel like you’re trying to react. This also helps a lot with improvising when things go wrong since you’re just following the flow your character would with the stimuli, rather then having to step line by line through. The worst people to act alongside were the rote memorizers who would break that flow to go back to a line that was missed or just freeze.

Yes, exactly! What's really exciting is that you will have trained yourself to think your way through the material in the same way that Wilde - or Shakespeare, or Beckett, or whoever - did. It's mind-expanding, in the best possible way.

When I was in a classical piece I'd usually come off stage speaking iambics or couplets for a while, without ever meaning to.

That sounds great for the cinema: if it goes off the rails the director can let it run for a bit if it looks some great improv or else shout CUT if it doesn't. However, on the stage ... I'm not so sure ... your fellow actors might not be so flexible and you might need to help them. Also, stage drama doesn't necessarily aim for the kind of "naturally" that is expected in modern cinema: a lot of it is deliberately "theatrical" in one way of another. The audience can't see a slightly raised eyebrow so you can do some dramatic gesture with your arms for the audience while slightly raising your eyebrow to communicate something to your fellow actor. Perhaps. I don't have practical experience of this. I'm just speculating. I expect someone will tell me if I've got it all wrong.

> However, on the stage ... I'm not so sure ... your fellow actors might not be so flexible and you might need to help them.

Isn't this why they do stage rehearsals? Not so much to memorize the lines, but to see how each plays off the other actors. And it is while rehearsing that they can detect that something "isn't working".

To me, what Michael Caine is saying seems essential for the stage, even more so than for cinema. For cinema, you can reshoot if a line or interaction feels unnatural. For theater you don't have this luxury.

If you are saying out loud "memorized lines" you're really not paying attention to the other actor. Some theater is deliberately "artificial", but a lot isn't. And they definitely want to play off what the other actors are saying, otherwise it feels mechanical... which is what happens in unprofessional or kids' plays, everyone is "reciting" and it doesn't feel like a real play!

I've trained voice actors for over 20 years, and the visual cortex being constantly activated as you are forced to stare at the words is a major problem for most actors.

We have a variety of techniques for helping with this, but the one that works the best is "micro memorization": take a single sound group (linguistically, a speech chunk) of 2-6 words and repeat them with eyes closed. Anything longer and a small bit of anxiety ("am I remembering the words correctly?") creeps in and destroys naturalism. Eventually, the brain becomes attenuated to sharing meaning, not just words, and that becomes a habit that can be used when warming up a script you've never seen before.

Also, just as a single multi-syllabic word follows a pitch and stress pattern, so do individual speech chunks. Speaking each chunk in the most natural /default pattern is difficult to learn to let happen naturally, and this exercise also builds skill in that area.

Very interesting. It reminds of learning a music score on the piano--it works best, especially if you're not at an expert level, to learn a few measures and repeat those until you can execute them without thinking, and then move on to the next few measures.

As someone who acts in their spare time, I think the article is missing three things.

First, actors do actually have to mechanistically memorize their lines in addition to understanding them. There are plenty of instances where you need to recite a long string of words in precise order because that's what's in the script, not because there is some underlying logic that makes the word choice self-evident. While early in the rehearsal process it doesn't matter, in fact it's a good thing to play around with the script, by the end you need to have everything locked down. There is more to theater than just conveying a character's state of mind - people depend on spoken cues, particularly for blocking, and maintaining timing is critical.

On the flipside of that, theater is inherently a variable thing. No two shows are going to be exactly the same. A prop may not function correctly, someone else may mess up a line, the audience may laugh more or less at a joke, etc. You need to be able to adapt in the moment, which means you can't simply remember your lines, you need to be present in the moment. That's the real reason you need to understand your lines. As an aside, it helps that the audience typically does not have the script memorized, so as long as things on stage are progressing naturally, mistakes tend to go unnoticed.

Finally, I think people grossly overestimate the difficulty of memorizing text. We invented language long before writing, and it is extremely optimized for being easily remembered by illiterate peasants. Think about how many songs you know - there are probably hundreds if not thousands you could easily sing along to even if you haven't heard them in years. Think about how many movie quotes you can recall to interject a random pop culture reference into a conversation on the fly. Crack open a book you read 10 years ago to a random page and see how long it takes you to know exactly where in the story you are. You might mistake a word here and there, perhaps switch the order of some lines, but you'll remember the bulk of it without putting in any effort at all. Actors reread their scripts dozens of times, they put as great deal of effort into practice, and their success depends upon this effort, of course the end result will be more polished than baseline memory, but the difference isn't that big.

> Think about how many songs you know - there are probably hundreds if not thousands you could easily sing along to even if you haven't heard them in years.

If what you said was true, there would be no need for the lyrics display at karoke bars.

Years ago (25?) there was a game where you'd draw a card and then have to sing part of that song (I forget the actual game as it was long ago, but that is close enough). Everyone was psyched and it seemed like it was going to be fun. Then we found out none of us actually remembered the lyrics -- we could get part of the chorus and that was it.

No doubt there are people who are great at remembering lyrics, but I strongly suspect it is a small minority of people. I think people overestimate their recall ability because they are singing along to the song in their car (or wherever) and so if they have a moment's hesitation or any doubt, the song keeps going and they are quickly back on track. But without that unfailing guide, they'd quickly fall off the rails.

I have that experience all the time as a musician of moderate ability in a moderate cover song band. Everyone has the experience of learning a new song, thinking "I have this song wired -- I can play flawlessly along to the original" but then the band gets together and tries the song for the first time and it quickly falls apart. Any little bit of hesitation or doubt quickly grows and infects the other players and soon people start arguing if the drums come in after the 2nd or 4th repetition of some phrase, etc, etc.

> If what you said was true, there would be no need for the lyrics display at karoke bars.

You misunderstand what I'm claiming.

That is exactly the issue I was describing - you recall the bulk but you make small mistakes and the skill is in reducing the small mistakes and being able to power through them and get back on track when they do happen.

Playing instruments in a band is so much worse, it's not enough to know how the song goes, you need to be in perfect sync with other people, and any mistake is highlighted by the discord. In acting, there isn't another person saying your lines at the same time as you, and mild variation in pacing, intonation, etc from one performance to the next is not only acceptable but desirable. By analogy, you know what the Eiffel Tower looks like, you could probably sketch it accurately enough that someone else would recognize it as the Eiffel Tower, and they would probably be unable to tell you exactly what errors are in your sketch, even though you almost certainly don't know the count, size, and position of every beam.

> Finally, I think people grossly overestimate the difficulty of memorizing text.

This resonates with me. I did a lot of amateur acting in my early 20s, and while I remember memorizing the text having been a lot of work early in the process, by the we were doing daily runs hardly anybody had any problem with memorizing the text. I remember it being kind of nice having memorized the lines though, as holding the script on stage during practice can be kind of annoying some times, so I tried to get the task of memorizing the lines done as early as possible.

As a long-time Anki user (and memory enthusiast), I would like to offer some caveats for those transferring actors' memorization techniques to study techniques (programming languages, chemistry, math etc...)

> This deep understanding of a script is achieved by actors asking goal-directed questions, such as “Am I angry with her when I say this?”

1. Do embed emotions. For example: Go's CamelCase for exporting variables implies capital letters want to be loud.

2. Do invoke experience. Don't merely read and write code, teach it and activate multiple sensory inputs and multiple contexts!

> Deep, elaborative processing enhances understanding by relating something you are trying to learn to things you already known

3. Do chunk it. Instead of creating new standalone memories, chunk it with other programming languages' syntax.

In summary, while engaging with the material is important, it is not sufficient for passive tasks (how many times have you read a book and forgotten the main points?).

I wonder if/how this applies to memorization of long works that are not exclusively dialogue.

Growing up, I knew a pastor who had memorized the entire New Testament. It wasn't a trick. You could drop your Bible open at any page, start reading half a sentence, and he could continue on from there as long as you wished. He really did have the entire thing committed to memory.

When I asked him as a curious 12-year-old how he had done it, his answer was long on wisdom, but short on tactics. He said, "Don't overestimate what you can do in a year, but don't underestimate what you can do in a decade."

Maybe that's the difference? Actors need to memorize their lines quickly, while he had as much time as he cared to use?

I actually came here to comment on how this memorization "technique" or "strategy" reminded me of what is done in some religions. Catholic meditation, for instance, is structured around _lectio divina_ and _meditatio_: the former means reading a sacred text slowly and attentively, "listening to it as if it was spoken by God". The latter means, after that careful reading, to ponder the text, take the time to reflect deeply on its possible meaning(s).

I have no idea if your pastor had this kind of practice, but from the article, if he did, it might have helped him memorize the texts. And the memorization, in turn, moght help focusing more and more on the meaning, rather than the words.

Also note that, as far as I know, all texts in the bible (except maybe some parts of the new testament, I am not sure) were transmitted orally for periods ranging from decades to centuries before being written down, and are structured in a way that helps memorization.

We tend to think of memorization as unnecessary if we have unlimited access to the text, but this discussion actually makes me wonder whether memorization might be a powerful way to "unlock" the hidden meaning of some texts.

I'm sure he loved the texts for their meaning. He dedicated his life to this work, after all.

I find when I practice lectio and meditatio, though, I don't pay as much attention to the words as the images or sentiments or experiences that surround them.

I spent the first half of my life (so far) in Evangelical circles, with that pastor, and became a Catholic in the second half, so have experience with both extensive rote memorization by chapter and verse, and now engaging the texts more comprehensively. Obviously there's also the difference between being a child and an adult, but I find that now I remember the sense of stories when I refer to them, not the actual text, except when I call to mind some fragment of a quotation from my childhood.

I don't think either is necessarily better, and it's entirely likely to me that my overall growth in age and maturity would have led me to this deeper experience even if I hadn't converted. I just don't find it quite as helpful for memorization.

By way of tangential analogy, my current (Catholic) pastor regularly tells the parishioners not to take it when non-Catholics accuse us of not knowing the Scriptures. He pointed out that not once has anyone in the congregation been surprised at how the reading ended. He says Protestants and Evangelicals tend to know Scripture like a mailman knows a neighborhood. They know the street names and numbers and can easily find them on a map. But Catholics know Scripture like families who grew up in the neighborhood. They may not know what number house Mrs. Jones lives in, but they know the Smiths lived there until Junior went off to college, and wasn't that the same year Younger Brother fell out of the tree on the corner and busted up his arm?

Thank you, it is great to have the opinion of someone actually practicing this. I was indeed wondering if regular lectio of a text would lead almost automatically to memorizing it, but it seems not to be the case.

Still, I could imagine that the new testament is more easily memorized by getting "involved" in the story. I have this impression mostly by comparing with the pali canon (the oldest set of sacred buddhist scripture): buddhist pali texts (with a few exceptions, such as the dhammapada) are very technical and contain very little in terms of "story", and their structure contains much more repetition and structured lists than the bible. So much so that all written versions I know of abridge the repetitions, as it would otherwise be extremely boring to read. That biblical texts (or more poetic pali texts) did not have to resort to this makes me think that the meaning and emotional involvement with the text indeed helps in memorizing it.

The gospels and the Acts of the Apostles certainly have a strong narrative element; the letters rather less so. It doesn't surprise me that they could all be memorized in a decade, but not a year. I just think the techniques in this article might not be the way to do it, focused as they are on rapid memorization of dialogue.

My random thoughts : human memory is more like linked lists, rather than hash tables

At some point i was bored and wanted to learn by heart a pretty long poem (Lermontov, Demon). I was able to recite it for 15 min straight t normal talking speed, but if you d ask me to start in the middle, i wouldn't be able to. I had to come back to a known point, and go on from that

Random access is interesting. I have not used enough alphabet or months name to be able to place them right immediately. On other hand most numbers in 10x10 table come out straight or with pretty fast mental tricks. Or maybe some numeric things are just more memorable for me.

I can't find it right now, but there was a conference proceedings detailing efforts structuring human thought around cons cells.

This is also what I realized when memorizing Qur'an. It's really felt when there are some similar "nodes" that makes you confused on what should be the next node. Like if line 1, 16, 78 is almost the same, when you encounter one of them you'll be confused whether to continue to line 2, 17, or 79.

I also have problems continuing with the right verse after the chorus of pop songs.

You can get around this by creating memory palaces and breaking up the task into chunks and then inserting the chunks into places within your palace.

Then you have direct access to the start of each chunk, so like a hash table of linked lists.

To throw another anecdote into the bucket, whenever I'm asked for the last four digits of my ssn or phone number, I have to mentally say the whole thing.

I can remember the last four digits of either explicitly but I still say the whole thing back in my head as an error correction mechanism.

It’s like being an LLM: once I’ve got the first three tokens, the rest just flows out but if I remember the last four on their own, there’s a much higher chance of making an error.

This is my experience as well. I can memorize a long-ish text, in both English and Spanish, but I cannot start it from any random point. I must start from either the beginning or very precise "known" checkpoints.

Human memory like a linked list! I like this analogy.

This is my exact experience with learning piano. I could autopilot through a song but if I thought too hard about where I was in the piece I would leave my flow and not be able to continue.

As an aspiring actor in 1990, mastering the art of memorizing lines accurately has been a journey of both discipline and discovery. Initially, I struggled with the sheer volume of text, often feeling overwhelmed by the task. However, I soon realized that understanding the context and emotional underpinnings of my character was crucial. I began by breaking down the script into manageable sections, focusing on the motivations and relationships within each scene. I still felt repetition was my ally; I would recite lines repeatedly, both silently and aloud, until they felt second nature. Additionally, I found that visualizing the scenes and physically moving while rehearsing helped to cement the dialogue in my memory. Techniques like recording my lines and listening to them during commutes or integrating them into daily activities proved invaluable. Collaborating with fellow actors also enhanced my retention, as it allowed me to react organically and authentically during practice sessions. Over time, these methods coalesced into a robust strategy, enabling me to deliver my lines with confidence and precision, fully embodying the characters I portray.

I was reading this comment and thought it looks AI generated. GPTZero’s scan resulted in detecting 100% of this text as likely AI generated.

This reminds me of Borges’s short story Pierre Menard, author of the Quijote in which a 20th century author called Pierre Menard steps in the shoes of Cervantes so much so that he actually re-writes Don Quijote, line by line, not because he wants to copy it, but because it makes sense to him at the moment when he writes it. A bit difficult to explain but it’s a must-read! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the...

> Borges wrote the story while recovering from a head injury. It was intended as a test to discover whether his creativity had survived the severe septicaemia that had set in after his head wound became infected.

I never knew that part. Adds a whole new dimension to the narrative when you think about it.

Well, that seems intriguingly topical in the current era of LLMs & occurrences of their verbatim reproduction of training data... :)

Perhaps it's not mindless reproduction of the training data, rather, entirely mindful reproduction... :D

The Wikipedia page notes:

"Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship, appropriation, and interpretation."

But there is a huge difference between film acting and theatre acting. In film you just memorize your daily lines. What I find magical is how these actors go into character and deliver a line naturally for that character. I assume for serious work they practice with their own acting coach behind the scenes and then also practice during the shoot according to the directives of the director. Here Nuri Bilge Ceylan shows how to eat walnuts https://youtu.be/G6_pwltI85Q?si=2NXm1HP54YbAhepV It looks like the delivery of lines are the least important part. (In Turkish, but you'll get the gist of what he is saying.)

If you enjoyed this article I’d recommend checking out the book _Moonwalking with Einstein_ by Joshua Foer. Great read and fascinating dive into the lives and practices of individuals that participate in memory competitions.

Mmmm. I think I intuitively study like this, but I often have issues recalling the original word. For example - remembering “shy” for the dwarf “Bashful”, my brain will cycle through heaps of synonyms trying to pick which one is right (while not not making a fool of myself).

Those are the most revealing moments! When my brain goes to a synonym it tells me that I understand the scene, but not the character. There's something different about their perspective and mine: why did I think this, but they thought that? "Mistakes" like that are gifts.

(This applies far beyond acting. Why did a co-worker explain a concept this way, instead of that? It'll tell you something about their thought process - and yours - if you give it some attention and some thought.)

Thanks - such an awesome perspective! I’ll pay more attention to the character and see how it goes!

It will save a lot of internal frustration if I nail that!

It goes as far as you want to take it, because every detail counts. I've done some long, long runs, and the ~300th performance is more interesting than the first. You get down to where you're working at the syllable level - noticing, for instance, that moving on this word, rather than that one changes the whole dynamic of the scene. You have to be blessed with a good script, and cast mates who'll follow you down the rabbit-hole, of course, but there's no bottom to it. It's endlessly interesting work, and deeply, deeply satisfying.

> I've done some long, long runs, and the ~300th performance is more interesting than the first.

Your description really meshes with my experience playing classical guitar. It takes a few months of work to memorize the piece, but then the fun begins. I've played the same piece hundreds of times. Instead of it getting boring, I keep noticing some new thing in the piece every week, it constantly feels "new." Bring out the bass for these two beats on this measure; hold this melody note just a tad longer; the harmony in these two measures makes for a great descending line, make sure the notes connect. Stuff you don't notice on your first couple dozen plays, that endless repetition starts to bring out. It doesn't work for every piece, but for my favorites, it's really a bottomless hole, like you said.

I don't speak music (like, at all), but I've hung out with a lot of musicians at various points in my life, and it's so cool how we're able to relate to performance in the same way. I had a legit emotional reaction to what you said, so thanks for writing it.

Like I say, I'm a numbskull when it comes to music, but I love live shows. I'm able to pick up those performance moments - the nuanced attention; the communication within the ensemble, and with the crowd - and just let the sound wash over me. I've had incredible experiences attending concerts by bands whose music I hate on recordings. The Dandy Warhols come to mind: I literally can't stand the one or two tracks I've heard by them (godawful noise), and I've no idea what "music people" think of them, but they were so in sync that seeing them live was transcendant.

> You get down to where you're working at the syllable level - noticing, for instance, that moving on this word, rather than that one changes the whole dynamic of the scene.

That's an interesting perspective on performance for me as it parallels one of the aspects I enjoyed about performing stand-up comedy regularly for a time (primarily at open mics): getting to observe/analyse/theorize what contributed to whether a particular "bit" "worked" or not--both for myself and others.

For my own performances, I could choose a different word, phrasing, tempo etc and see how/if that affected audience response.

Equally, learning from observing the impact of when other performers did the same, refining their set over multiple weeks.

And, then, also seeing how other factors we had less control over (you know, such as the audience :) ) had an impact: sometimes same line, same delivery, might kill one week but got crickets the next.

Granted, my approach to comedy might lean a little more... analytical than some. :D

Right? An audience will teach you so much, and from inside a piece it's so hard to predict what their response will be.

One of the best directors I worked with had the dictum that "you can coerce a laugh, but you can't coerce a gasp." Like, if you know some basic stagecraft you can make something funny, which... ho-hum. (On a related note: God I hate corpsing. 95% of the time it's fake, and represents to me a failure of craft.) But a wholly involuntary reaction? That's gold.

The best performers, in my experience, are craftspeople at heart. There's an analytical level you have to reach in order for the magic to happen in a reliably repeatable way.

> When my brain goes to a synonym it tells me that I understand the scene, but not the character.

That of course assumes that the script writer is infallible. Maybe you do understand the scene and the character deeply, and the writer screwed up by choosing the wrong synonym.

I'd push back on that. If you're performing a script, then your job is to interpret those words. You've got to be humble enough to presume that the words on the page are as the author intended, and then do them the best justice you can. Judging something at the same time you're performing it is the best possible way to make it bad.

That's not to say there isn't bad writing, and bad shows. (God knows I've done a lot of both!) It's just that actors, at least for scripted material, are secondary creators. Our judgement, too, is not infallible - and we're in the worst position of all to judge.

I was curious: they all have two-syllable names except for Doc (leader).

The following remark in the article reminded me of one of the points raised in a video[0] on the "Answer in Progress" YouTube channel:

"Deep understanding involves focusing your attention on the underlying meaning of an item or event, and each of us can use this strategy to enhance everyday retention."

The AIP video is motivated by Sabrina's (video creator/presenter) frustration around having a memory that "sucks":

"I can't remember a lot of the things I have done. I can't remember a lot of the things I'm supposed to do..."

One of the points raised in the video was:

"The most important thing for memory when an event is happening is to pay attention to it."

Which seems to be consistent with the view expressed in the article.

If memory is a topic of interest to you, you might find the AIP video a worthwhile watch:

After investigating memory related research and conversations with people who have memorization related experience (both theoretical and practical) an attempt to memorise & recite 3,141 digits of pi in front of a theatre audience is made...

(And, even if it's not a topic of interest, Sabrina's approach to both research[1] and presentation generally makes the result both informative and entertaining.)

---- footnotes ----

[0] "i memorized 3,141 digits of pi to prove a point": https://www.youtube.com/embed/KAjkicwrD4I

[1] As a university graduate with a focus in math, economics, & statistics, who often develops software tools during video creation process.

I recently was asked to take over the role of Deputy Governor Danforth in The Crucible a week before opening. I accomplished it -- barely -- largely through rote memorization. Yes, I also had to imbue the words with appropriate intent and emotion, which I did not achieve by rote, but in a way it was comforting to have those specific words to start with, rather than make up some of my own that might or might not actually convey the proper intent, and almost surely not nearly as well as a luminary like Arthur Miller. As I see it, it's those words that establish my character, not the other way around.

I like how Patrick Stewart puts it [1], as "dead letter perfect", which is apparently the default expectation in British theatre more so than, say, film acting.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2007/jul/29/theatre2

At least some actors do do the initial memorization by repetition, which also tells us something about memory: the process is to try to recall lines 1-10, then repeat with lines 2-11, then 3-12 etc. At each step it may be necessary to look at a line but then hide it again before performing the act of recalling.

This illustrates two things about memory: attempting to recall is the thing that causes you to remember, and also that to enter longer term memory is necessary to recall from that, rather than short term memory. Which the above process does by thrashing short term memory with too much data to fit.

This doesn't get you to perfection, probably the process described in the article is necessary as there next step.

Someone recently told me that they couldn't remember and recite historical stuff because it wasn't like math, which they could reconstruct from first principles. I replied that if you can begin to understand something you can begin to remember it.

The bar isn't even all that high: your brain just needs a plausible story, but it doesn't really need to 'understand' anything.

So a complete bonkers 'understanding' of history might still be perfectly serviceable to help you memorise it.

When I was beginning acting, I was mostly afraid of this, memorizing the script. But then after getting experience from fellow actors and reading up on method, I realized how easy that part is. You anyway approach the script slowly, first maybe even using your own words. This way the words flow naturally later on. I was never afraid of the script, just about inauthentic acting, which really can happen. You have to deeply immerse yourself in the emotional world.

Interesting - as a singer I always memorize words by ... well, just by memorization. When I've been in (amateur) theatre stuff I've always been struck by how much more difficult it is to learn words that don't rhyme, but it never occurred to me that there might be other techniques apart from plain old repetition

Wow! Brilliant Read. I love how our mind loves to read and visualize scripts and it's like in between infinite thoughts going within. The time we repeat we think in some different way thinking "Oh yeah! Now I understand this more".

Curious to know from the people who have read a lots and lots of text or books or watched movies.

I have read a lot. And contemplative re-reading certain passages or re-watching scenes truly does activate further analysis. For your mind no longer has to decode the surface layer and then has time to search for other patterns.

The more you read or watch the faster this becomes.

The neat part is when you can do a double or even triple reading near instantaneously. It’s a little trickier for films, but still possible. I believe this is how your friends who are really good at just breaking down meaning on first watch are doing it —- they have gained media literacy skills that let them take in scenes in a blink of an eye.

Practice your memory, and you can also hold past scenes in your head as new scenes come up. New connections made there too.

Once I get started on a piece of fiction, I don’t exactly see the text anymore either — my brain starts constructing a sort of movie/diorama in my head and every subsequent sentence builds it more and more. Makes reading fiction great and emotional/symbolic analysis great but funnily enough makes me a weak analyst of the language and craft itself. Made my years in undergrad ironically challenging.

My experience with learning chess openings is comparable : repetition is necessary but not sufficient. You need to "work" on each line, thinking deeply about each one and trying to find associations either between them or with things you already know.

But do actors do this because it helps them remember the lines better or because it's essential in order for the delivery to sound natural and not memorized. It has to be something that the actor, impersonating the character, would have said without being prompted. So if you can internalize the character, then the script is a logical result of what that character would naturally say--reducing the amount of exact memorization needed. But I'm not sure that it's necessarily that it improves memory itself. (Not saying it doesn't but there's a confound here, from a scientific perspective, that isn't easily disentangled).

perseverence is necessary to establish perfection. it's just reps. about 7-8x a year I memorize and perform monologues, usually several minutes in length with complete precision and without notes, which I have less than a couple of weeks to learn. I've tried memory palaces and mnemonics, but there is no substitute for just repeating it. even with spaced repetition most people emphasize the spaced and neglect the repetition part.

just work harder, and when you're successful, give bad advice that knocks the ladder away behind you so people think you're a genius.

It makes me remember Pedro Pascal and how he memorized scripts: https://people.com/pedro-pascal-reveals-tedious-way-he-memor...

> "You use the first letter of each word in these sort of towers, these columns I guess," he said. "And then it's this very, very tedious way of making yourself learn the line."

Reading the comments here on HN, I think it's safe to say that you need a combination of mechanical repeating and learning by heart.

Funny. Perhaps that’s the only way to do it. At one point in my life, I was part of a theatre troupe playing small locations for obscure plays. On one occasion, there I was in the scene and my line coming up in 30 seconds. A twinge of fear as I realized I had no clue what to say. The fear rose steadily, culminating in abject terror till one of the other actors turned to me and cued me up - at which point it all just flowed.

Awareness of self outside of what you’re playing just destroys that flow state. It’s like that whether I think about the shuttle, the table tennis ball, or acting.

Somehow reminded me of how Michael Scott remembers things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSi41cNvmXQ

The tl;Dr is they do it by a massive investment in time and brainpower, mechanistically or not. Michael Caine contextualises it as living inside the characters mind.

We can recall bashful by context is true. The depth of context an actor has to carry is far beyond that, it seems to go to motivation, intent and meaning in deep ways.

The trope of an actor asking the director "what's my motivation" when they're a redshirt and die in scene 2 may actually be .. true: everyone probably has to know why they say what they say to remember to say it well.

I once asked a director "why do we spike the fine makeup station in three different fine places for the three backstage scenes?" and she replied "because the relationship between the younger actor and older actor changes between those scenes: in the first, the older is a mentor, and in the last, the younger has eclipsed him, so the angle of the station to the audience, literally upstaging the older actor, reflects his metaphorical upstaging during their careers."

Not only did that make sense, but it's an example of even the scenery profiting from learning its motivation.

It's absolutely true, in the sense that everyone on stage / screen needs a strong internal logic for why they're doing what they're doing in order for that world to come to life.

It's a basically satirical trope in the sense that only a bad and unprofessional actor would need to ask the director to tell them what it should be!

Generally the translation goes the other way. The director gives a external-result oriented note (like, "I need you to be more frantic, here"), and then the actor comes up with the reason why that would be the case.

This is interesting because I watch my wife who is a professional actor memorize long plays with truly mind boggling preciseness. Although understanding meaning is probably pretty important, for someone to truly be “word perfect”, meaning is not enough. You don’t want to forget small words that have little meaning. Her technique involves getting most of the way there then writing the first letter from all of her lines in a notebook and memorizing that. Kind of crazy

Oh, this is how you learn to draw. It's not copying or memorizing an arrangement of edges, it's learning how edges represent the shape, form, texture, and motion of an object. When you can draw something (particularly without reference), it's because you intrinsically understand that object's mass, volume, surface, and relation to other objects and its environment.

One glaring difference between acted speech and real speech is actors don't interrupt each other. Real conversations are often a bit of a mess.

Sometimes they do! (to great effect). I feel a bunch of Woody Allen movies capture this (real conversations) pretty well.

Oh MAN this is one of those things many script writers do (especially in video games) that drives me nuts. You can tell from the actor's line reading that the script read, "Don't tell me what--" to indicate that the speech was interrupted. But the actor reading the line just kind of awkwardly stops speaking after "what," instead of continuing the line and actually being interrupted.

It seems to me, not being a script writer, like an incredibly obvious thing to avoid doing. Like if it's this obvious to me, then everyone who touches that script should know not to do that. How did it make it through so many people (writer, VA director, actor) with no one saying anything about it? But it keeps happening, over and over, so there must be something in that writing & acting process that I'm not aware of.

I would imagine that in video games, it sounds so unnatural because the actors aren't actually performing together. The two people recorded those lines separately, so an interaction like that just isn't going to sound good.

Anecdotal: for the specific case of "freshly written standup comedy routine", mental palaces [1] have proven effective, at least for me.

Once you remember that "your next joke is about x,y,z", it's pretty easy to remember the joke itself.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Fortunately memorization isn't a requirement for stand-up or my stint performing it might've ended up even shorter than it already was. :D

Like general public-speaking, approaches used by individuals to prepare/perform stand-up do seem to vary based on personal preference/comfort/style.

(In a similar way I wasn't a fan of/good at "rote memorization" in my academic life either.)

So it seems like a corrollary of this would be that people do not remember what they do not understand and what they can not place in context, which could explain a lot of human behavior. If you do not understand something it mostly does not exist for you, you never remember it and never think about it. This is why complexity is used to hide and deceive.

Ok, so this interestingly connects in my mind with how older religions see it as important to teach their holy texts by heart (e.g., Jews learning the Bible, or Muslims learning the Koran): this article's claim seems to support the idea, that it should lead to a better understanding of the meaning of, and behind, the text.

In general, I did the same thing when I was learning poems. First, I immersed myself in the meaning of the poem, the story, the logic of the poem's construction, and the words would settle into my memory much more easily and quickly.

Tell a professional the goal, not prescribe the steps. It works for convincing dialogue between actors and effective product delivery from developers. You could stretch this to avoiding micromanaging.

Along similar lines, Louis CK said he does not write down his material (or at least, did not until recently). He explained that _knowing_ rather than _memorizing_ makes it come out more natural.

I wonder what the equivalent is for musicians who work without scores? Getting into the feel and emotional direction of the music you are playing?

The same strategy works for transforming a written essay into a memorized talk in front of an audience.

To remember the seven dwarves: "two 's's, two 'd's, three emotions":

Sleepy, Sneezy

Dopey, Doc

Happy, Bashful, Grumpy

The words "cart" and "horse" spring to mind, in that order.

Somebody needs to write a play consisting of random words as a test of this ;)

Somewhat related: there is an improvisation exercise in which two actors repeat one word only, back and forth, and follow the emotions they feel naturally. Frequently this results in what tonally sounds like a conversation, or an argument, etc., albeit free of semantic value.

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