This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.

My guest today is an author, critic, and theater director.

His most recent book, The Method, How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act, has been named one of the best books of twenty twenty two by The New Yorker, Time Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Vanity Fair.

Isaac Butler has studied acting since childhood, performing in Washington, d C's theater scene.

He is now an adjunct instructor of Theater History and Performance at NYU Tish.

Butler is also the author of the World Only Spins Forward, The Ascent of Angels in America.

His writing on theater and film has appeared in numerous publications such as New York Magazine, The Guardian, Slate, and The Los Angeles Review of Books.

I was curious to know Butler's opinion of the three great actors he mentions in his book, Lee Strasburg, Sandy Meisner, Stella Adler, and how he came to write The Method.

What I wanted to do with the book was, since I had never met Lee or Stella or Sandy or any of those people.

They were all, you know, dead before I went to college, was to really try to take as seriously as possible the opinions of those who knew them right, because I wasn't there.

And much as like when you're an actor trying to create a role, you know, you want to understand that role as deeply as possible, even if you don't agree with one hundred percent of that character psychology or the choices they make in a play.

I think most characters who are interesting are ones who we wouldn't necessarily make all the same choices they do, because plot comes from.

When you're playing.

You got to give it everything you have, exactly right.

And so I wound up having, you know, very complicated and mostly positive feelings about all of them, Do you know what I mean?

I mean Lee, who I didn't know, but by all reports was an incredibly difficult person to get along with, way did not ever say hello or goodbye, did not make a lot of eye contact, yelled at people when he very at the drop of a hat, unnecessary, very imperious, Yeah, very imperious.

And you know, at the same time, so many actors would say, even people who hated him personally, he changed my life and maybe the actor I am today, and so you have to respect both of those things.

It is certainly not the case that Lee's method is good for every actor.

And I think the big problem that Lee and to some extent Stella and some of the other people ran into is getting a little high on their own supply about that that there was one true way to get to the truth.

There's all sorts of different ways to get to the truth.

And Lee would give lip service to that.

Sometimes he'd be like, you know, Laurence Olivier gets to the truth by finding the right shirt or whatever.

He didn't really accept that if his students did it, you know.

And so I think that what actually is most important is that the student find the right teacher for them.

And what's been interesting since the death of that generation, or actually started when late in life, how many people would take classes from both Stella and Sandy or you know, would go to see Lee and then go to udhah Hagen or whatever and try to kind of get the things they were missing from each and create their own way of doing it.

Because ultimately, after years and years and years in a career, you found your own technique.

It might be based on their technique.

But there's stuff that's useful to you, there's stuff that isn't, and you find your own way.

I think for me, Strasburg was somebody who the number one thing, which they made the number one thing, and maybe they didn't emphasize it enough, maybe not enough of them completely grasp the necessity of relaxation.

Right.

You got to turn off all the pipes and vowels of your day.

You got to go to work, you can't talk to people, you can't be on the phone with your girlfriend breaking up with her.

You got to cut all that off and just be here now and sit in a chair.

And if you want to read a book, don't go to your trailer.

Go to your trailer when the scene is over and it's a break.

But we're during the shots of that scene said on the set, stay connected to this, all these things of connection, relaxation, concentration, and then you have a shot at the other things happening.

You have no shot if the other things don't happen.

Yeah, I mean, Stanislavsky was very serious about relaxation, you know, and Strasburg is adapting a lot of those ways that Stanislavsky developed.

You know, he started doing yoga.

He was very interested in breathing exercises, a lot of stuff that we associate today with like mindfulness.

You know, Stanislavsky was doing to try to figure out how to totally relax as an actor, because he was totally all about that that it was only once you were relaxed that you could actually do the work, because otherwise it's all getting contained in your body and it's not going anywhere.

You know, when you talk about a method acting performance, you're talking about Brando obviously, and Clift and I studied with Mirror Rostova, Oh amazing Cliff's teacher.

You know, she was in her nineties.

She taught in the living room of a friend's apartment and she would teacheck and she changed my life because she talked to me about how actors very often are playing the scene at the expense of the the act right listening, oh Jack Lemon thing where you have to be really really be very acute and you're listening and responding and so forth.

And she really changed my life because I was doing a soap opera, and soap opera acting is defined by an actor walking and going.

You know, you're not going to take over those shares of Paul my industry's day.

Let me tell you that right now, right, and the next time, the next scene, it's like, I love you, Mary, goddamn it, I love you.

You know, they play the same cadence and the same emotional register, regardless of the same right.

Was she a yeller to Mirah?

That's interesting because a lot of the Russians, I mean, where Strasburg and Stella yelled a lot too, right, And where they got it from was was this student of Stanislavsky's name Maria Ospinskaya of course, who's also very famous you know film actor.

Later, Yeah, the Wolf y.

You know, I just showed my kid The Wolf, Mam.

We're doing the Universal Horror and I was like, oh my god, it's Maria Osbanskaya.

And then, you know, my kid looked at me and was like, who's that?

Why do you care?

And I had to explained she was Moscow Art Theater, Moscow Art Theater, yeah, and then the first studio, and then you know, she was when the Moscow Art Theater came to the United States in the twenties, there was a group of them who had to stay behind.

They were fired from the company and exiled from the Soviet or from Russia, you know, because the political wins were changing, and she was one of them.

And she and another exile, this guy Richard Boloslavsky, who for any actors who are listening, as the guy who wrote acting the first six Lessons, the very first book in English about Stanislavski technique, Love It.

And he also directed Ospinskaya later in a movie.

But Richard Boloslavsky and Mario Ospinskaya were the two fundamental teachers at the school.

The American Laboratory Theater where was that it had a number of different locations.

It moved all around because it was here in New York, and it was this model that's actually sort of the conservatory model now, but not exactly where.

You know, you studied very hard for like two years, and then you joined the best of them joined the rep company that was associated with the school, and so they were sort of running all of those those different things.

And you know, Harold Klerman studied there, Lee Strasburg studied there.

Stella Adler's studied there.

You know, a lot of the key twentieth century theater makers study there.

Ospinskaya was a notorious dragon in scene study class.

She among other things, she was an alcoholic, and so she would have a bottle of what she claimed was cough medicine.

It was jin and she would drink medicine.

Yeah, but she would drink you know, table switch to be like, oh my cough is worse I need And then eventually she subbed it out with a pitcher of water that was actually gin and would just you know, like a little vermouth with my yes exactly.

And so I mean she would just devastatingly destroy people if she thought they were being lazy.

I think, like any art, and acting is of course an art as well as a craft at a job and all sorts of other things.

There's a kind of osmosis of the world around you that you engage in.

You know, like when I am writing a book, there's often like three albums of music I listened to while writing it, and even if they're.

Not, can you share what they are?

You've rather not.

A lot of the method was written to this piece of music called Canto Ostinado, which is a piece of mut music that it's a little difficult to explain.

It's sort of a minimalist piece of music.

It's about forty five minutes long, and there's a particular version on Spotify that's all Cello's doing it, And so there was that.

I listen to that a lot.

I have a playlist whenever I'm on deadline, I have a playlist of the most kind of loud, percussive guitar solo heavy songs by the Bandiola Tango or my favorite band, And so I listen to that and just words come.

Flying out, I thought you'd say, and not that I'm predating Adagio for streets right right, right right.

And then there's a jazz composer who I've worked with a couple of times named Darcy James Argue, who's a very close friend whose work I love, and so I usually have one of his albums.

This is the stuff that carries you over the threshold.

And part of it is just I've written to this stuff so much.

There's like a sense memory almost, you know, like now it's time to write.

You know.

It's like it just does something to my subconscious and then away we go.

But you know, if I was writing something sad, I might listen to sad.

You know.

I've definitely had those like, oh, this scene has this certain emotional feeling.

I'm going to listen to music that has that emotional feeling.

Not words.

Can never have words if you're writing for me anyway.

Yeah, for me in acting, I played the audio clips only of movies that make me sad.

Oh really, so there's a scene that breaks my heart, I'll play that scene in my ear.

I knew.

I interviewed one actor who told me to prep for a scene he would watch because it had a similar emotionality, totally different scene.

He wasn't trying to copy what DeNiro did, but it was just this that that feeling of total devastation, the scene where DeNiro's punching the wall of the jail cells and raging bull and he would just watch that.

And I've not a vast but a limited library of those scenes that I watched a trigger with certain emotion in me.

Yeah, that's like if you say, you know the de Niro thing, it's like Brando, you know, we see don't leave him lying here.

I'm gonna take it out on this skulls.

Yeah, when they don't leave me here like this CD when he finds Steiger's body who betrayed him, right, But I mean that makes me cry even out his brother betrayed him, but he's still it's his brother, you know what I mean?

He plays that like he just an inescapable thing.

You know what line?

And I'm not an actor anymore.

But the line that always, like, when I just even think about it, I start to get worked up is when Hamlet says I loved Ophelia forty thousand brothers.

That line about like forty thousand brothers cannot, with all their love makeup my son or something like that.

And there's just something so first of all, it's a shitty thing to say to a guy whose sister has just died, but it's also so emotionally overpowering that if I think about it long enough, it'll trigger something.

Same the littlest things.

Yeah, when you realize how deeply deeply individualized this is and subjective and personal, I'll never forget when Jamie Sheridan, the great actor he played Fortinbrass and the production that pap did of Hamlet?

Where is that the Diane ve noora one that thank you, This is really a treat we're gonna be come back with through two episodes.

No, seriously, because because Diane Venora plays the first female.

Hammi Joe puts it right.

I wish, I wish I saw it.

She was magical.

Yeah, she was absolutely wonderful.

She was the fact that she didn't go on from bird and have a great she played his wife right with Forrest Whitaker.

Yeah, now she does this and and when everybody's dead at the end, and she comes on and Jamie Sherion plus Fort and Bruston comes in and just the honor in his voice of a dead soldier, soldier to so he comes from the Battley comes in.

He goes, oh, proud death, and he's kind of eulogizing in his ordinary statement of this.

And I started sobbing when he said this, And whenever I think about it, I could have pushed me over the edge because it was so rich in that there was a context.

I got it.

Yeah, I mean one of the weird things.

And people said this happened at the actors studio.

Maybe you witnessed it as well, that there could be a certain fetishization of crying, right, It's like you just the actors just really wanted to cry.

And I think that's really fascinating because first of all, it is totally possible to be filled with devastating sadness and not cry.

There are all sorts of people who don't cry that much.

To cry or try not to cry is always more interesting than crying on camera or on stage, right, whether.

It's worth the take, it's the playing against right.

And then the other thing is that there are all sorts of things that we respond to with tears that aren't necessarily sad, because again, emotion is so individuated.

And I think part of what Strasburg, the thing that Strasburg was getting at that I think is really key and why it was so revolutionary, you know, that is the idea that each person responds differently to everything.

And so if you want to be not cliched, you need to harness what's individual about you and figure out a way to put it into the character.

Because the way that you know, Alec Baldwin tries not to cry and then cries is different from the way that I would.

What's one thing you thought about?

I mean, because you were acting and you talk about it well, First of all, talk about that when you go back into your college dormitory room and have a mini nervous breakdown after some of the work you did.

Oh my God.

That was the experience that it didn't put me off acting in terms of my interest in acting, but it made me realize I was not actually tough enough to be an actor.

And I think we think a lot of times of actors as not particularly tough people.

But there's a.

Unique toughness that being an artist requires, and there's a unique toughness that being an actor requires, which has to do with being vulnerable and then not vulnerable.

You know, you have to open yourself up to the world and you have to be able to shut it out.

You have to be able to get up in front of people an audition and you know, deal with that rejection and humiliation over and over again.

And you also have to be able to do this thing where, particularly if you're going in a kind of Methody Stanislavsky direction, you know you are plumbing often in a play, if it's a deep play, a serious play, into the shit, and you have to be able to get out of it.

You have to be able to turn it off, you have to be able to walk away with it.

And this is an example when I couldn't really do that.

I it was my freshman year of college.

I had had a couple years of kind of Stanislavsky ish education at like an acting conservatory run by a local theater in DC.

And I had been a professional actor as a kid, so, you know, I thought I was going to do that would you do as a kid?

I was.

I did voiceover for an industrial or two.

I was in a couple musicals and a play and stuff like that.

I was in the musical Falsettos, playing Jason the twelve year Old Boy, if you know that show.

I was in a musical about the AIDS Quilt that then performed at like the Smithsonian.

Do you remember when the AIDS Quilt came to d C.

Yeah, yeah, so we performed as part of that.

We were also at the University of Maryland.

And it was a life changing experience.

Among other things that it is what politicized me.

I mean, growing up in DC, you're always political, yeah yeah, but but in this case it was, you know, working in the theater and knowing gays and lesbians, knowing people with AIDS, you know, who are my friends?

Yeah, yeah, me too.

And started in the business of the eighties, it was all just royaling then, yeah, exactly.

That was really life changing.

I started going to protest, so I started really caring, you know, about something.

And so anyway, when we get to college, I was at Vassar, I was, you know, a month into school or whatever, and I got cast as the lead in Eric Bagosian's Talk Radio.

And uh, for anyone listening to this who doesn't know Talk Radio the play, the movie's actually kind of wonderful.

It's very panematic.

I forgot that you're in that's so funny.

Sign of age.

No, I just think of it as just as just Eric bagoshin and you sort.

Of forget play the station manager to do or no, no, you're the station manager right right.

Obviously not memorable.

But again, it's been a while since I've seen because I have a traumatic relationship to this material.

So I haven't seen the movie in a while.

And so for those of you who don't know the play, if you're playing the Eric Bagosian part and Talk Radio, you are on stage chain smoking for ninety minutes and then you have a three page long nervous breakdown.

That's the arc of the character, right.

And so it was two student directors, bless their souls, didn't know what they were doing, and so I just went.

Really I used everything I knew about how to go deep into the self right, which was not enough to be able to control what I was messing with.

I was messing with dark forces that you know, like a like an apprentice wizard, do you know what I mean.

It's like, you know, Mickey causing all the yeah and the brooms are just all my self hatred.

And on top of that, I'm literally chainsmoking during the play.

And I was a half a pack a day smoker at the time.

I've quit for over twenty years now, but I was smoking like a pack and a half cigarettes on stage.

So I was making myself physically and mentally ill on stage at the same time every night, and you know, like the performance would end, and you know, there was this girl I had a crush on, and I made sure she came and saw the show, and the only thing she said to me afterwards was I'm worried about you, right, And I would just go home and I smelled terrible, and I hated myself because the character hates himself, that's the core of that character.

And I would literally stare at the painted white or probably beige center block wall of my seven x ten dorm room, and I would just fucking stare at that wall until I could feel myself come back together, like I had obliterated myself and I had to come back together.

And one week of that was enough for me.

I was like, I can't believe anyone does this all the time for a living.

Now, the truth of the matter is, you actually get a lot of training, and you learn how to do that without destroying yourself.

Or you don't.

You develop a drinking probably, and it's called acting.

Yeah, exactly.

And so I was like, you know what, I can't do this.

And then I realized that I really liked telling people what to do, and I knew a lot about theater, and so I should try directing.

And so I called my parents to tell them this, Hey, I don't think I'm an actor anymore.

I think I'm a director.

And it was exactly like a coming out scene from like an early nineties play, do you know what I mean?

They were like, well, do you think this is just a phase?

And I was like, no, I think this is for keeps, you know.

They're like, well, you know, you might go back to it sometimes, like I don't know, you know, It's exactly like that, and then I.

Didn't think they would disappoint somewhat of you giving up acting.

Well, they had been so supportive of act.

You've done it for a while.

I've done it for a while, and it.

Really saved my life.

I was in a really bad place when I got cast in that play as a twelve year old.

I was I was bullied a lot as a kid.

It wasn't physical, but it was very you know.

That's where all those brooms came from.

That I Mickey style called up.

I was bullied a lot as a kid, and I just you know, and theater had really saved my life, and so I think they were worried that I was too casually throwing any siblings.

Yeah, I have three siblings.

I have three siblings.

I have an older brother, an older sister, and a younger brother.

My older two siblings both went to boarding school, so they were kind of out of the house by the time I was, you know, ten or whatever.

They were smoking a pack and a half a day.

And yeah, exactly exactly.

And then many of them in the business and entertainment.

No, no, no, not no, my younger but well, my younger brother's a like works for a nonprofit now doing a library stuff and educational stuff for kids.

And so I told them, you want to go to directing.

I told him I wanted to go in directing, and I just started doing it all the time.

I became like a directing monster.

And I loved it.

I absolutely loved it.

And also I felt like I could help actors, having gone through that experience and having had some training, you know, I could work with them in a way to try to bring out the best of them, in a way that wasn't abusive.

It was about creating a welcoming room.

So being a facilitator became more important to you.

It did.

Yeah, that was the opposite in the sense that I directed one film, and it was.

It was a horrible experience from a financial standpoint and from a business and production stamp.

But what did you realize as a director that you liked about directing?

Because I hated having to control other actors into doing what I wanted them to do.

No, I will say that part of it eventually grew tiring, do you know what I mean?

But I loved the sense of community.

I loved the sense of all of us.

Yeah, and I loved it film.

Yeah, And I loved the thing the thing I miss because there's there's things about directing I don't miss, right, the thing I'm having to tricks other people out of money and twelve people into coming into a room so that I can practice my art.

You know.

Now, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper, and I'm practicing my heart, you know, Like that was that was the grind.

The professional grind is the part that really wore me down.

But to me, the pleasure of like everyone thinking together in a room and solving these problems in real time, in physical space, in community together was so beautiful when it worked.

It doesn't always work, but it was so beautiful when you got there that it was worth the times where it was like, oh, this one actor is actually I didn't realize it, but they're drunk, you know, and they're calling me at three in the morning because they drink two bottles of wine when they come home from rehearsal, and they have lots of notes.

You know.

It's like it was you know that happened to me once I escape, it was it was worth putting up with that to get to this other thing, and that was really beautiful and I loved working with writers on their plays.

Is before I realized that I was a writer.

I loved giving, you know, giving no and hearing their notes to me and having them in the room.

And it's just kind of, you know, idea of a community of people making each other's ideas better.

Author Isaac Butler.

If you enjoy conversations about acting and the performing arts, check out my episode with Ellen Burston and Estelle Parsons celebrating the seventy fifth anniversary of the Actor's Studio.

And I say to Peter, the director, Peter, I have eight different things to go through here and no line.

And he smiles like the cheshire cat and says, I know.

I said, well, am I supposed to do that?

He said, think.

The thoughts of the character, and the camera will read your mind.

That's the best advice and the director ever gave me.

To hear more of my conversation with Ellen Burston and Estelle Parsons, go to Here's the Thing dot Org.

After the break, Isaac Butler talks about acting training today and his conversation with Ellen Burston on young actors.

I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the Thing, Isaac Butler has directed numerous productions throughout his theater career, including classic Shakespeare performances and new original works such as Real Enemies and The Trump Card.

I wanted to know what pieces Isaac Butler had most enjoyed directing and what he would like to direct in the future.

I don't know that.

They're probably not plays that anyone will have heard of because they were in you know, they were off off Broadway, their in basement.

So now I think if I was to direct again, it's actually, you know, classics I would want to do, or or lost backlist plays or whatever.

I mean.

You know, I teach Shakespeare.

I loved Shakespeare.

I'd love to take another crack at Shakespeare.

Haven't done that.

I haven't directed a Shakespeare play since college.

You know.

There's the Williams O'Neill's Shaw.

Yeah, I mean, I love all that stuff.

Shaw.

It's very hard.

I do not actually feel like I have the background to do Shaw, but I love all of that stuff.

You know, there's a lot of this.

Last semester I taught New American plays of the twenty first century, so it was only plays that had been done since the change of the millennium.

At NYU.

It was a dramatic literature class, but four Tish kids, right, And it was really fun to revisit those.

And there were some of them where I was like, I would I would love to take a crack at this play.

And then there were others where I was like, this play is too hard.

I don't even know how they did it.

What I especially loved, actually was when you were doing the second production of a new play, you know, like you had worked on it in a workshop or whatever, and you would learned all this stuff about it, and then you actually got to use what you learned, which came back you know, which doesn't necessarily happen if you direct, you know, if you direct a view from the bridge or what ever, it's like, who knows what.

You told me?

When I interviewed him about him doing repeated productions of Salamea and The Mammot American Buffalo, speaking of which I'm wondering, you're gonna know that Glengarry's on Broadway right now?

What do you think of Mammot and his very arch, very mammot.

I watched an interview with him the other day, really, and he was talking to somebody.

He says you know when someone comes in there.

You know he didn't say this, but it was along the lines of, you know, the guy comes in and he's your friend, Jeff's got a cast on, and you say, oh my god, what happened?

What do you need to prepare for that?

But he's not understanding is you don't have to prepare for it, for a lot of it.

But there are things you do have to prepare for, much of which contextually is not in Mammot's pieces.

People aren't going through and e canthartic emotional experiences Mammot's pieces all or it's cut.

What's that film?

Maintain you and his ex wife Lindsay Kraut House of House of Games?

So House of Games.

When I see that movie, even then, I thought to myself, well, this is obviously a kind of an experiment in the theater.

I mean, you're having everybody flatten out all those lines.

No, Bob, No, I won't do that.

I won't do that because and the cadence and the rhythms of it are something that is so arch.

But if you watch like State and Maine, which has you know you're in it, Philip Seymour Hoffman's in it, w H.

Macy is in it.

You know, there's actors who have a lot of experience, who work at a very high level, and they can really playfully bring those lines to life in a way that not every actor can, using the true and false that's the name of his acting book, using that sort of true and false methodology.

It is also true that, like you said, it's like, you know, his language, his dialogue is incredibly stripped away.

It's it's very you know, not only is everything you need in it, but he hasn't given you anything else.

No, do you know what I mean?

Bob enters, Bob, what time is it?

Exactly?

No, Bob wearing a beautiful cream colored suede jack, none of that shit?

Or what would those those those you mentioned Shaw?

You know, Shaw's stage directions are like seven pages long.

It's like Bob was born on a cow farm and you're like, what the you know, O'Neill does that lactose exactly?

Any Latergin does that too.

His stage directions are very novelistic, you.

Know, not that, but it's not really very useful.

Well yeah, I mean it depends, right.

I mean I think they're useful for him in creating the characters.

I think that if you try to do a lot of you know, fruit for All or whatever you want to say with Mammot's lines, it's going to be a disaster.

It makes sense why he doesn't like that stuff, do you know what I mean?

But if you try to do the incredibly stripped away Mammity way of doing Fagan or Shakespeare or whatever it's going to be, that's also going to be a disaster.

You're right, it would apply obviously to his his text because I think that, you know, actors can bring in my time of doing this, they can bring ideas, and you have to just understand how much of your ideas welcome.

Like if I were ever to work for Spielberg, let's say it's a salute and yes sir and no sir, because I'm very confident, I'm supremely confident he knows exactly what he wants.

But what I also do with people is don't tell.

I don't talk.

I say, let me show you, right, show, not tell.

I'm going to go out.

And but we got everything as written, you're happy, you got what you want.

Let's just do one more take and I'll show you a little idea I had nothing that changes the set or the budget or so forth of the casting.

It's all inside that template.

But I really really have become more subtle, but more and more management and collaborating with them, because I think that a lot of younger directors today, it's not so much that they don't know what good acting is, not that they don't know what they want.

The thing they're lacking, it's going to sound strange maybe is they lack the ability to communicate it to you.

Right, they kind of know what they want, They kind of have an idea what they want.

They can't get it out to you and make you understand that a way that's practical to you to speak actor, which I hate that idea.

I said to this one director, I goes, tell me the story of your movie.

Tell it to me as a story.

What happens.

There's the longest spouse you could ever imagine.

He goes, Oh wow, man, he goes, I don't think I could do that.

That's wild.

We're fucked.

Yeah, you know, there's it's an interesting iadd for a director once, and you know, the thing he didn't really do tablework.

You know, they weren't sitting all around people weren't sitting around making little backslashes in their script for the beat marks or you know, he just he didn't want to be intellectual about it, right, And part of what you're talking about here is that you want to avoid over intellectualizing your choices.

You don't want to get into a long, wordy, intellectual conversation with a director.

Yeah, but also you.

Wanted that day's work and get it done.

But it's it's it's so much easier actually to show the director than it is for you to get into an abstract conversation about, well, what if what he really wants here is blah blah blah blah blah, when actually what you're going to do is emphasize a different word.

Just emphasize a different word, you know.

And what he did instead of tablework was he was like, I just want us to go around and say, beat by beat, what happens in the play?

No, no feelings, right, Like, never say he feels blah blah blah, Just what does each person do?

That was all the book work we did.

I know that, but you know what, it was really hard to just do that.

You get so wrapped up and he feels X I did the.

Carol Churchill play Serious Money and Love Love Them, but someone's got to do that play again.

It's nine eighty eight.

And then did we did the American Company and they'd come here to the public with Gary Olb and Fred Molina to play the two lead roles.

So I replaced Gary and we go to Broadway.

This would when Pap Joe Papp was in that mood he head periodically to force write certain cultural Is that Max Stafford clarkter Bravo, thanks you.

Yeah.

So Max Stafford Clark who says to me one time, he who says to all of us were at the table, Kate Nelligan and all these other people, and he says, he says, I want you to write down along the margins of your scripts a transitive verb what you're trying to do in that scene.

And then he sat with us, all one by one and he sat there with me and he goes, now this line here, what do you think you're trying to do there?

And I go, I don't know.

Encourage He goes no, I go seduce no.

And finally he goes and he goes, I've got it.

Enlist You're trying to enlist them into your cause and I go, that's great, enlist I write, and we had to do that for every line.

Yeah.

He called that actioning, and that is Stanislavskis script analysis.

That's a very basic thing Stella Adler taught her students to do that.

You do it as an infinitive verb with Stella, But that was a very Stanislavsky script analysis thing that like, every line has an action behind it, and that's the thing you're trying to do.

And so write it down as you know, to enlist, to enlist, and try to keep those you know, those words, be really specific and keep the stake.

It was a great director.

So as you as you come into this business, as actors come into this business, and writers and directors and everybody having consumed a diet of other material.

I watched films as a child.

I was obsessed with films.

There was no cable back then, no streaming nowadays.

What people have out there to bathe in, to lather their body with and to try to get some essence of the of what movies are in acting is just abysmal.

I call it the training table of donuts.

Well, it's interesting that you say that, because you know I do often use the food metaphor when talking about one's cultural diet, right, and then it's like, you know, I like donuts.

There's nothing wrong with having a donut, do you know what I mean?

Medoships, Yeah, but a diet that was all donuts, I think we would all agree.

The other are in the potato chip business right now.

Yeah, yeah, I mean there's a lot of kind of flooding the zone with hastily made violent violent.

That acting is often very kind of surface y, you know, there's nothing required of it, there's nothing required of them.

I remember who was I talking to, may have actually been Ellen Burston and I were talking at one point.

She was talking about how little training a lot of the people she, you know, the younger actors she was working with, have, and she's like, you know, it's enough to get you a Netflix show, but it's not enough to make you a good actor, which I think the way that she phrased it, people today don't care about being a good actress.

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean some people do.

And I think those people who really care, I think.

That that they're less than before.

Totally totally, but like you know, my students, anytime I mentioned a movie this.

I had a really great group of students this semester.

They blew my mind with how amazing they was a school at YU.

Are you a Titian?

Yeah, are you really?

I'm in the dramatic studies departments.

It's like the liberal arts part of the theater degree.

So undergraduate for undergrads, for the for the BFA programming.

Yeah.

In your bick with they mentioned that new school.

That's because when the book was published, I was at the new school and she started just recently, like a couple years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah, and so they, you know, any time not just me, but anyone in class mentioned a movie that they hadn't heard of, they wrote it down.

I saw them do it.

Paths of Glory, write it down that Paths of Glory is an incredible movie.

We could turn this into your class.

Yeah, I'll come visit your class please.

Dude.

Oh, I'd love to tell my view of movies they should watch to improve their acting.

Yeah.

Yeah, no exactly.

And so you know, I do think there are people who are hungry for that, just like I think that like when you eat only junk food, like it's fun for a while, but you do get to a point where You're like, am I poisoning myself?

Or this is wrong?

But I think the business itself is not encouraging people to appreciate a history film acting, and so for the film in general, from an historical perspective.

You go out there.

Now, there are films now that when the Oscar you would never watch a second time.

Oh yeah, that never never.

I mean I am such a big fan of the Criterion Channel that I just started pitching them until they let me do things my Criterion lists.

Oh great, I did my Criterion list of ten movies.

That's great.

I'm actually doing an event with them tonight where I'm the interviewer.

So the interviewing Brian Cox.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's good.

I worked with Cox.

Hell the Nuremberg Trials for TT.

Yes, he talks about it, and he plays Goebbels, Yes, he plays Gourbls.

And you were the prosecutor, right, I was a Jackson, the judge who was sent by Roosevelt to go over there in form the ural right, right, amazing?

Yeah.

He talks about that in his in his memoir and finding that role.

And you know, how was it that Goring was able to sort of tap dance around the people asking him questions and you know, so how to get into the psychology of that person without judgment because you have to bring them to life.

And of course you see guys like them score late in their career.

He did that succession.

They're going to gasp of a look at him doing this TV show and just running the ball all over one hundred yards down the sideline with that.

I mean, he was really really took a lot of chances and he was great in that show.

I mean there's decades of history, right, decades of roles in that role, in getting in getting the logan, you know, in getting the logan role, And.

How are you going to play those roles if you're not playing the roles for decades.

I always say to people, I say, just give yourself a couple of years in the theater when you graduate, right, because if you graduate from college and you have a degree granting program from a university, I'm not so sure that the acting part of that is that pungent and that good.

If you want to go to class and work in a classroom for another year or two, great, But after two years of classroom acting, you're going to become clas get the fuck out of there and go and audition for shows, and you know in a show.

Bobby Lewis was very worried about that with regards to the Actors Studio.

You know, he felt like there were a lot of people with good reason.

Yeah, you know Bobby Lewis who was one of the founders of the Actors Studio, and then he and Kazan got into a He and Kazan had a falling out as Kazan was one to do with various people, and he quit the Actors Studio.

And that's actually why Kazan brought Lee Strasburgh in, because Kazan had originally iced Lee Strasburg out of the studio and did not want him involved because he had so they had sort of a father son drama relation, kind of very dramatic relationship, and so that's how he brought Lee in and how Lee wound up taking over the Actors Studio.

So a few years after that, almost Lewis gives this series of lectures called Method or Madness, which are collected in a book that isn't it's out of print, but it is one of the most extraordinary books about acting and in the Method or Madness lectures, Bobby Lewis says the problem with acting class and he says this as an acting teacher, is that you get stuck in classroom acting.

You only know how to do scene study, you don't know how to do you know, you only know how to do the big moments.

But actually, like seventy five percent of the actor's job is like, how do you pour a picture of glass of water out of a picture?

Nothing?

How do you do nothing and be comfortable with me?

Listen?

Right?

It's like, you know, there's that sort of running joke within the industry that we all know of the background actor who does too much because they know they're being observed by the camera and so like, I can't do it because background actors can't talk, they're not allowed to.

But they're making lots of faces, they're pointing there.

Yeah, I mean there's an amazing Saturday Night Live sketch about that with I think Fred Armison and Sherry Oh Terry, and you know, it's that thing of like how do you actually just be when you know you're being observed?

So simply and Strasburg actually had a lot of exercises for that private moment.

I'm sure you've had to do private moment in your time or some dance and stuff like that, and how do you And those were all designed to make you forget that the audience was there, right, But then you get to scene study and you're just doing the huge moments you never loved me mom right, as opposed to the like, oh your arm's broken.

Author Isaac Butler, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

When we come back, Isaac Butler talks about the original disciples of method acting and his thoughts on actors like Marlon Brando and al Pacino.

I'm Alec Baldwin and this is Here's the thing.

Isaac Butler's book The Method chronicles the history of Stanislavsky's method of acting.

The book details acting coaches such as Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, who refashioned Stanislavsky's method for the next generation of actors.

Both Stanislavsky and Strasburg would often say that the actor can only be ninety percent of the character.

I was curious as to whether or not Isaac.

But the regrees with this statement.

It's actually impossible to fully become the character.

That's madness.

I mean, if you were to fully become Hamlet before me right now, well, for one thing, you wouldn't be speaking an iambic pentameter.

That doesn't make any sense because no one speaks an iambic pantaminter.

But also instead of being able to cross the stage or whatever, you just be like, holy shit, my uncle killed my father.

What am I supposed to do my mother?

Yeah?

Yeah, exactly.

You wouldn't be like, oh that this two two solid flesh would melt thowed result of itself into a dw You know, you wouldn't be doing that shit.

You'd be like comatose.

So fully becoming the character is a form of madness.

Only you know that it's not actually possible.

Stanislavski's whole idea, this idea of what is translated as experiencing the Russian word is perishavanya, this thing where it's like the actor's consciousness and the character's consciousness meet and they sort of have a baby.

Do you know what I mean?

That's what you're doing.

You're really in the moment, you're feeling these things.

You're live to the imaginative reality.

But you're also not going to walk off the lip of the stage and fall into the orchestra pent or whatever.

You know, you're trying to fly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And also you're going to do the blocking you've been told to do, you know, because you've agreed to do the blocking.

So much of what you're doing is almost all with few exceptions.

I mean, even monologues have some context this way with inside the play, you're performing with other people on stage with other people.

And when you do that.

What I always try to do, not even recently, from not from the beginning, but as I was going further and further, is what was the disposition of the character?

Right?

And I always talk to people that about dispositional acting.

When you are you weak?

Are you strong?

Are you boo Radley where everything terrifies you and you're frail and fractal in the world and you're not brave and confident?

Are you boisterous?

Are you affable and backslapping?

What is the nature of that person terms how they talk, how they behave, are they happy, sad?

Are they strong?

Weak?

Whatever?

You got to kind of get that adjusted.

I think from the The word we use is authorization.

Yeah, for that I do want.

I need authorization if I go to see a surgeon.

I watched Hours of Surgery before I did the movie Mallie, why not to study surgery?

But the point, what were the disposition of these men?

Did they really yell at nurses?

Did they really throw the instruments on the ground?

Did they really play ac DC at seven o'clock in the morning, Yes, they did.

They had to go into another zone.

They had to empty their mind.

So then get in there and do stept couple bypasses at SEMN I can barely watch the Today Show at seven thirty in the morning, let alone do fucking stept couple bypassers.

You know that's interesting.

There's this play called Men in White, which births the hospital drama genre.

Right, it's where er comes from.

Really, if you think about it and the group it's a comedy, no, no, no, no, it's a legit play won the Pulitzer Prize.

It's the thing that put the Group Theater on the map.

Lee Strasburg directed it.

Oh, the Group Theater was, of course the company that Lee Strasburg and Harold Clerman and Cheryl Crawford founded that all of twentieth century American acting comes out of this organa Stelle is there, Bobby Lewis is there, Kazan is there, John Garfield's there.

Anyway, So they did this play called Men and White, and they would do these summer retreats.

Most of them were juice.

They were often in the Catskills.

They would do these summer retreats where they're rehearsing these plays.

Okay, so they rehearsed Men in White and they kept doing it, and they were sort of like, you know, they they went and they met doctors and nurses because there were doctors and nurses around this hotel, and they interviewed them and they looked at what they did.

And Lee Struser said, we're going to learn what doctors do.

Let's learn what doctors do, and let's bring those habits into the play.

And they were doing these run throughs and they're like, something is not working.

And I think it was actually Lee who figured this out.

He's like, doctors don't reveal this much emotion actors do.

Like, doctors are actually very you know, when they have a patient who's going to die that they're worried.

Is going to die.

They're not like, oh my god, he's gonna die.

They're like, we're losing him.

Bring me that ido the other room.

Right, they're not, And that's actually a thing.

The pit is really great at.

If you've watched that TV show that you know, there's a level of you can't get worked up about everything.

This happens to you every day.

You can't let this bobby the deck of the carrier.

And so it was through that little bit of withholding, you know, pulling back five or ten percent on the emotionality that allowed the play in its power to come to life because they had seen how those people really work in the world.

Now, let's talk about in a couple of minutes we have left about some of the disciples of method acting that people were.

I mean, I was a fan of Brando.

I was drawing.

He was a beacon to me like anybody else.

But as the years went by and I saw how much he was just sending up his career and other people, and he was so bad.

When I tell people what's the flame?

You know, when Pacina, I mean I could cry in this when John Randol was trying to put the shield on Pacino's chest, and surproco, here's your shield, Frank, and he's like, doesn't want it shot through the cheek.

Pacino was the one that made me want to be an actor.

Brando kind of then that ended, yes, because Brando's just you know, his antics just turned me off, whereas Pacino was the person that made me want to be a movie actor.

What do you think about Brando's contribution.

Well, I mean there's a point where Brando stops doing the wonderful thing that he can do, and it's after the failure of One Eyed Jacks.

You know, he was so mad about how that movie had been treated, which was his directorial debut.

And you know, he always had an ambivalent relationship acting anyway.

He wanted to be a jazz drummer.

It just turned out he wasn't a genius a jazz drumming.

He was a genius at acting.

You know, sort of almost dragged into acting.

You know, his sister was the one who cared a lot more about being an actor.

And so there's a point where the joy you're going to get from his performances is not the same.

You know, it's going to be like, wow, that's a really weird choice.

And sometimes it works, and that's interesting.

He did this movie called Missouri Breaks where his performance is insane.

I mean it is legitimate.

It's actually I find it brilliant and delightful.

It is not a conventional performance that works.

He is an Irish bounty hunter and then at one I don't know why he's doing an Irish accent, but he has a brogue throughout it.

And then later on he disguises himself as an American and does literally does the scene as Brando doing an Irish accent, doing an American accent.

It is breathtaking.

It's insane.

Why would you do that.

There's another scene where he's like dress up as an old woman.

It's almost like Looney Coconuto, you know.

And that movie is delightful.

It's delightful.

Is that conventionally good acting?

No.

I think he's someone who and again the essentiality here that he had the youth.

Yeah, he had the sheen of his youth.

He's a street cud, but he's twenty four years old on Broadway.

I had the street crum bro I was thirty.

That's ten years is a huge difference.

And you were the actual age of the character when he's too young for he was.

But the thing is, I think that he's someone who again with my lame analogies here in metaphors, they hand him the Rubik's cube when he's twenty four years old, and he looks at it for a minute.

Then he goes, zizit and he goes, you mean like that right, and they go, oh my god.

I mean he puts the pieces together before anybody.

You have to be forty right before, you know, but the time you old to play Hammick, you're too old to play hamm at that old line.

And he puts the piece together while he's young and beautiful, and he got bored, you know, I mean he got bored.

Yeah, I mean you can see, you know, his Julius Caesar when he plays the marc Antony, the film of that with a John Gilgood is he's great in that.

I mean he worked as ass off that there's a period where he's working and then he sort of stops working.

The early I am also really interested in, you know, a couple of other of that earlier generation.

One is of course Montgomery Cliff.

But the most natural screen presence of that generation, I think by far, there's that idea of public solitude.

Strasburg talks about that, Stanislawski talks about that that you're not you don't know your private or public to be.

No one is better at that than early Montgomery Cliff.

But the other one of that era that I think, you know, I constantly talk about and want more people to go back to is John Garfield, who is the first method actor.

He's the first actor trained by Strasburg to break out in Hollywood and be a star in his career is very sadly cut short, but first by Hugh act and then by his death of a heart attack after he was all but blacklisted, and he is an extraordinary screen presence.

In a sense, I also view method acting in the way that was among other things in that period the fifties, on a labor relation sense, but in a psychological sense that method i've can become the unionization of acting.

Right this, this is what we do.

We decide what we do.

Yeah, we You don't decide what we do.

We'll tell you what we do.

I'm going to go to work now and I'm going to educate the director.

Now, We're going to do this this way.

And I found that fascinating as it was almost like them kind of claiming in order to do good acting, in order to do better acting, more preciselycing, I couldn't rely on directors anymore to help me get there.

I couldn't.

It's the advent of what I call the self directing period of acting.

Yeah, I mean that makes a lot of sense, and that SUSPC.

I mean.

The other thing that's happening that encourages that is, right when method acting is emerging, the studio system is falling apart.

So you're no longer in this factory essentially making seven movies a year like Clark Gable did.

We're doing what they told you it was in your interest and paid back then you know, eighteen hundred dollars a week.

Right, right, right, fortune, right, So you're not on salary anymore.

And one of the things that the breakup of the studio system does is for the actors who are successful, it empowers the actors and especially their agents.

You know, that's a huge change in the industry.

When the studio system falls apart and method acting is totally wrapped up in that, right that it's like, well, now I actually do want to be a serious actor.

I don't want to sign a seven year Montgomery Cliff is like, I'm just going to sign a one year contract and I'm going to go back to doing place, because doing place what a serious actor does, and I want to be a serious actor or you know, whatever it is that maybe they want to live in New York, you know, maybe they don't want to be full.

Time in film.

Finally, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, And.

That's that is a huge change in the industry.

And method acting is right there helping the fuel.

In this online interview, I see a little clip of Merrill and she's saying to somebody, you know, the condition of the actor really is that life itself is so unpredictable and so uncertain, but especially so for actors.

Yeah, their lives are more uncertain than the average person.

Last thing, So Angels in America, your previous books.

Yes, I am of the mind that you know.

Obviously, great musicians, composers, writers, and so forth have a houseyon period.

Then they run a little dry as time goes on.

Now, I'm not going to suggest that Angels in America sapped Kushner of all of his creative abilities.

That's far from true.

But you wonder, did you get the impression.

You talk to him many times, so I admire him beyond anything.

He's just the most amazing individual, one of the most amazing people I've ever met in this business.

However, I wonder I sometimes look at Angels like, go, this must have nearly killed him.

Oh, I mean it didn't.

Only yeah, I mean Angels.

The story behind Angels.

You know, my co author Dan Koyce and I it's an oral history because we were like, there's no way that we can write better than Oscar Eustace and Tony Kushner and Joe Mantello and all these people can talk, you know, so we're just we're gonna interview them, We're going to range their quotes.

There's nothing we could possibly write in a sentence as good as something Tony says.

And so we did an oral history, and it's got interviews with two hundred and fifty plus people in it.

And what you learn is that that play nearly kills anyone who comes in contact with it.

I mean, it's the mountain, it is really the mountain.

It's Lear.

It's fucking leir, you know, like it's actually two lears, because it's you know, it's eight hours long and you know, the theater company that developed Angels in America, Eureka Theater that Tony Tacone and Oscar Eustace ran it basically went under in the process of doing Angels.

The original woman who played the Angel died of breast cancer over the course of developing the play.

You know, it.

Requires the totality of your being to do that play right, you know, to do both parts right.

It requires so much of you, and it required so much of him to especially finish the second part.

A lot of the interviews, the parts of it that were so difficult for him, had to do a lot with.

You know, the first part was a huge hit, critically acclaimed, Gonna Go to Brabba.

He hadn'tritten the second part yet, you know, figuring out how to finish the thing that he had started took.

Millennium was first.

Yeah, Millennium was first.

And you know, Millennium's like a perfect play, Like a high school production of Millennium is still delight.

It's not gonna be brilliant engage.

You're still gonna have a great time.

You know.

Parastrika is very hard.

It's a brilliant play.

It is incredibly hard to do.

If you do it right.

It's incredibly fun.

Wat Yeah, but it's you know, the interplay of ideas and imagery, and it takes so much of your theatrical imagination.

And you know, for the actor playing Prior especially, it's so hard.

And part of that is because of how difficult it was, I think for Tony to finish it, you know, because he's a guy who you know, he obsesses over every word.

Every word has to be the right word.

You know, He's really deep in the nitty gritty of everything.

And that's why that took so long.

You know, Lincoln took like a decade longer than he expected to to write, and it's because he really wants to do right by the things he's choosing to write about.

And I just find it incredibly admirable.

It is not how I necessarily approach my own writing, but it's just you can't argue with the results of it.

It's so brilliant.

How long did it take you to write that book?

The Angels in America book?

It started as an article, and so the article was originally we spent six months working on the article, and our first draft of the article was forty thousand words long.

But when we handed in was forty thousand words long, and they were like, are you nuts going yeah, and so we had to cut twenty five thousand words out of it, you know, something like that.

And so the only way we could deal with the heartbreak of that was to be like, we're going to turn it into a book.

It'll go in the book.

Don't worry about it, you know, don't delete it.

Put it in this file to put.

In the book.

And then the article was a hit when we were able to sell it as a book, and I think it came out a year or two later.

How long did it you to write the method?

Two ish years?

Two ish years.

I would have maybe gotten it done a little bit faster than that, but.

The pandemic happened.

The third part of the book was written mostly in my mother in law's basement during the pandemic because we had left the city and so we were in the middle of nowhere in Virginia, and I was sitting in the basement watching a movie every day.

And then you know, writing the third part.

And after the book came out, my mother in law, who I love very dearly, we have a very good relationship.

My mother in law said to me.

You know, when you were living in my basement, I kept thinking, I'm watching this guy's kid, and he's watching a goddamn movie, you know, every day, And now I get it.

Thank you very very much, Thank you so much for having me.

This was a joy.

Yeah, my thanks to Isaac Butler.

This episode was recorded at CDM Studios in New York City.

We're produced by Kathleen Russo, Zach MacNeice, and Victoria de Martin.

Our engineer is Frank Imperial.

Our social media manager is Danielle Gingrich.

Hi'm Alec Baldwin.

Here's the Thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio