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What on earth does "motivation" really mean???

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    What on earth does "motivation" really mean???

    We did some acting classes at film school today and I have a burning question... I've noticed that many actors/directors seem to say this overly vague term called "motivation" -- what is my motivation for my character etc etc. I've never understood "motivation", yet everyone talks about character in terms of this. Motivation sounds like a cookie cutter approach, almost a cheap shortcut to intellectualize why a character does a certain thing. Whenever I hear "motivation" I just turn off. If I was an actor, I couldn't explain what mine was, even if I knew every plot point.

    It seems motivation is purely related to past events (which works, at least in theory). If Bob kills Sam because Sam slept with his wife, you could say "Bob's motivation for killing Sam is because Sam slept with his wife."

    But a good director may say that the real reason Bob kills Sam (or flips out) may have more to do with something random Sam says to Bob that sets him off (insults his intelligence etc), rather then the murder being directly related to something earlier that happened in the plot. So this is why I disagree using motivation. It assumes a flawed 'event C happens just because of event B and event A' theory, and I think it's a cop out of getting what you want from an actor.

    I could be wrong.
    I just use objectives/goals and 'action verbs' instead. Am I barking up the wrong tree or the right tree? Interesting to see what you all think...
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    #2
    Originally posted by rc444 View Post

    But a good director may say that the real reason Bob kills Sam (or flips out) may have more to do with something random Sam says to Bob that sets him off (insults his intelligence etc), rather then the murder being directly related to something earlier that happened in the plot. So this is why I disagree using motivation. It assumes a flawed 'event C happens just because of event B and event A' theory, and I think it's a cop out of getting what you want from an actor.
    And that director is therefore giving a motivation for Bob killing Sam. Motivation doesn't have to come from the plot, it should come from the character. Bob killing Sam for some random reason will affect the way the actor (if they're a decent actor) plays the character not just in that scene, but in every other scene.

    Motivation gives a performance depth. And goals are also a motivation. However, basing a performance on "action verbs" will give you a two dimensional character that's just "going through the motions".

    My 2 cents worth :-)

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      #3
      I agree with Ozhair, I think you are confusing motivation for reason.

      Every scene can be played in an infinite number of ways. An actor can completely subvert the literal meaning of the words on the page.

      Motivation just allows you to establish what point you are tyrying to get across and how you do that.

      For instance the dialogue may be all about a screwdriver while two people are fixing a car, but what is really happening is that the lead is about to kill the other guy. The motivation may be to lull the other into a false sense of security so that the killing comes as a shock or it could be to intimidate the other to build the suspense.

      The words would be exactly the same, but the motivation would change the entire way the scene plays out.

      I would saw that motivation is almost the exact opposite of what you are saying. It is related to future/present events. Not the past ones.

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        #4
        For an actor 'motivation' is a specific way of asking why. "Why am I doing this?" The term is derived from Stanislavski's technique and is one of a million questions you should be asking yourself to help you NOT intellectualize your role. It shouldn't be confused with 'objective', which is what you want to achieve. Or, how you do something, which determines character.
        The term 'motivation' is probably the most misused and abused term based on Stanislavski's technique, a widely misunderstood method in itself.
        A lot of actors are uncomfortable with speaking about the inner workings of their role. This may be part of what you are experiencing. Also, the method you use to create a character will depend upon your psychology. If you subscribe to developmental psychology your motivation will be from past events. If you subscribe to cognitive psychology, your motivation will be derived from desired future events. This is one reason why it is so difficult and potentially counter productive to 'talk' too much about internal elements that reveal character.

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          #5
          Originally posted by Ozhair View Post
          Bob killing Sam for some random reason will affect the way the actor (if they're a decent actor) plays the character not just in that scene, but in every other scene.
          Hi Ozhair. You actually spelled out the very problem that I was getting at - motivation assumes a 'this happens because of that theory'. This would maybe work if you are telling a crime story. But I totally disagree that the reason Bob kills Sam will effect him in every other scene after that -- this assumption is too simplistic. What happens if Bob the murderer has a complete reversal at the end of the story and finds God instead? In this situation, Bob would completely lose the guilt that he experienced at the start. This is why motivation is flawed. Yes, people do stupid things and feel the consequences of their actions, but consequences do not have a domino effect on someone's life. This is why I have a problem with motivation.

          Also, I disagree that without 'motivation', your performance will be two dimensional. The story does not hinge on motivation. No ones knows what motivates a character. If we knew what did, we wouldn't be telling stories. But if you just work on giving your actor clear goals as well as giving them encouraging action verbs, that is enough to produce an interesting result. You don't need to go into motivation, it's too intellectual. Action verbs are only bland if you are non-specific, e.g. "to be livid" is a better action verb than "to be angry." Of course, if you go about a murder scene saying "your action verb is to be angry", obviously you are going to get two dimensional results.

          This is a difficult argument and you cannot describe one thing without getting into semantics over something else. Motivation does exist, but to me it's kind of a half-theory that produces predictable results, kind of like emotional recall. It would work well maybe for explaining the backstory of a complicated plot-intensive film like The Prestige or a Sherlock Holmes film.

          Yes performances should definetely be deep, but there are more practical ways of getting what you want from your actors than using motivation.
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            #6
            Originally posted by DecadenceFilms View Post
            I agree with Ozhair, I think you are confusing motivation for reason. Motivation just allows you to establish what point you are tyrying to get across and how you do that. For instance the dialogue may be all about a screwdriver while two people are fixing a car, but what is really happening is that the lead is about to kill the other guy. The motivation may be to lull the other into a false sense of security so that the killing comes as a shock or it could be to intimidate the other to build the suspense.
            I think it's important for there to be tension in a scene, and for the actor to play against the literal interpretation of the dialogue. I just find the term 'motivation' confusing because it is such a loose term. No one can explain what motivates a character. If we did, we wouldn't need actors.

            Using action verbs and goals/objectives alone is enough to establish what point you are trying to get across, without intellectualizing with motivation. For instance, using your screwdriver scene idea, maybe it goes like this:

            * Clemence and Rhett are fixing a car
            * Clemence is trying to find a missing screwdriver.
            * Rhett kindly offers to find it, and gives it to Clemence.
            * Clemence is lulled into a false sense of security "Oh Rhett, you are so helpful."
            * Rhett then clubs Clemence with the screwdriver.

            In this sense, if you're directing Rhett you could say "your goal is to kill Clemence and you acheive this by using the action verb 'to befriend him' by being the friendly neighborhood mechanic." You don't need motivation here. Maybe if you wanted to go into detail about why Rhett is such an *******, but improvisation is usually enough to give the actors enough inspiration for why characters do things they way they do. Motivation is kind of an easy way of telling the actors how they should think.
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              #7
              In an interview with Roy London, famous acting coach, he made a very specific, but informative example.

              He provided the motivation for a very big, "larger-than-life" character. He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "You become so big because you feel so small." In other words, he told the actor not to focus on the character's action, but what evokes that character's action.

              In his example, a large character takes up a lot of space because, psychologically, they feel like a small person. It causes them to expand outward in order to compensate for how small they feel internally. It wasn't the plot or even an action in the movie that provided that character's action, but just their view of themselves.

              The way a person looks at the world is the first and most important defining aspect of their action at any given time. A person who feels X about Y is more likely to act X when Y happens. But the reason they're more likely to feel X about Y is because of this. You follow it back to the root and then you can see its path throughout the years.

              For one of my characters, his father's job and his lifestyle caused serious conflict for a young boy throughout his childhood. Those cause the mental disorder he has as an adult, which influences the decisions he makes in the movie. When you follow it back to the root of why the character is the person s/he is when s/he reacts to what happens, that's the motivation. That's how I use it to coach my characters.

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by rsbush View Post
                A lot of actors are uncomfortable with speaking about the inner workings of their role. This may be part of what you are experiencing. Also, the method you use to create a character will depend upon your psychology. If you subscribe to developmental psychology your motivation will be from past events. If you subscribe to cognitive psychology, your motivation will be derived from desired future events. This is one reason why it is so difficult and potentially counter productive to 'talk' too much about internal elements that reveal character.
                This is why in my last film I tried to stay away from talking about motivation altogether. I usually try to establish motivation through alternative methods, such as establishing motivational urges by defining character relationships directly through improvisation. For instance, running an impro scenario where the characters interact a year before the story (as the audience knows it) begins.
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                  #9
                  Originally posted by mrWr0ng View Post
                  You follow it back to the root and then you can see its path throughout the years.

                  For one of my characters, his father's job and his lifestyle caused serious conflict for a young boy throughout his childhood. Those cause the mental disorder he has as an adult, which influences the decisions he makes in the movie. When you follow it back to the root of why the character is the person s/he is when s/he reacts to what happens, that's the motivation. That's how I use it to coach my characters.
                  Absolutely. Character motivations can be a direct result of unhappy childhoods or how a family member influenced someone 20 years ago. But motivation can also be caused by present events that have no bias on what the character did in the past.

                  A character sees a watermelon-flavoured ice cream for the first time. He could decide to eat the ice cream out of happy past memories (he remembers how his granny used to bake watermelon pie on the farm when he was 5 years old), or, he could eat the ice cream due to present reasons (I've never eaten a watermelon-flavoured ice cream before, I might give it a go).

                  You could take it a step further and say that his reason for eating the ice cream is for future reasons (he wants to deliberately grow fat enough to fall in love with a fat girl to ask her out). We are getting into psychology here, but as you can see, motivation is hard to define into a box. Hence I try to avoid the 'whys' with characters, I just define the 'whats' (objectives) and 'how he does it' (action verbs).
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                    #10
                    Don't get hung up on semantics of differing techniques or make it more complex than it needs to be. Motivation is simply WHY you are doing what you are doing. It doesn't have to be overly psychological, it could be because you're hungry or cold. If an actor isn't asking why they are doing what they are doing, they're not doing the work and it will surely lead to generalized acting at best. They don't need to be able to verbalize or even pin down a reason, but they need to ask themselves why.

                    A director doesn't need to provide a character's motivation. That's the actor's domain. If they need help then you try to provoke them in the right direction, and there are an infinite number of schools of thought on how you should do that. In Bertolt Brecht's theater in Germany it was absolutely taboo to question an actor on the inner workings of their role, all adjustments were suggested through outer physical direction, "say it like this", "move your arm higher", "push your chest out". At the very same moment in time in England and the U.S. if you tried this approach you'd have a mutiny on your hands.

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                      #11
                      I feel that if a screenplay is written extremely well, the question of "motivation" should come up very rarely, if at all. The actor should be able to determine the motivation from what's written (not just in that scene, but the totality of the screenplay). Of course, this is a matter of communication, and any number of factors can impede that communication. But if, for instance, the screenplay is pretty explicit that A is attempting to kill B, out of revenge for events that happened earlier, then for an actor to say "What is my motivation" is a clue that the actor isn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier...

                      This whole thread reminds me of the quote attributed to good ol' Hitch: when an actor asked what his/her motivation was, he responded, "Your pay check."

                      Comment


                        #12
                        As an actor, I don't take very well to the term "motivation"either. It seems at once too specific (do I really *need* to think about *that* in particular?) and too vague (so many possible answers - which one is best?).

                        As I continue to learn the craft I've found that the key consideration for me is usually "objective", which may sound synonymous, but to me it isn't. I break the objective into two parts (which are similar in many ways to some of Stanislavsky's basic teaching in "An Actor Prepares"):

                        First, what I call the "life objective" of the character - the reason, to put it over-simply, why the character gets out of bed in the morning. For example:

                        If all the actor's been given is that his character is a barber who kills a customer because he complains that he hates his haircut, you can still construct enough to play the role well. We of course, must presuppose that the barber would have to more than a little unbalanced to commit such an extreme act.

                        So, I'd imagine a barber, who in the absence of any other clues in the script, pursued his craft with single-minded zeal, pride and determination. What gets him out of bed every day is the prospect of delivering yet another magnificent example of his hard-earned expertise - a perfect haircut. He has invested the great bulk of his life's work to this pursuit, to the point that his very identity is entirely absorbed into it. This, in a more balanced way, is pretty common in people - we define ourselves largely by what we do - "I'm an architect" "I'm a banker" "I'm a schoolteacher" etc. We don't say I *do* (the job)...we say I *am* (the job). To our disturbed barber though, the idea that a customer might *hate* his work is unthinkable to him, given his lifelong obsession. Heresy, even!

                        So our barber's "life objective" is thus.

                        Then there's the "scene objective", sometimes referred in acting training as "what the character wants", although again, I find "objective" a better term for the same reasons I mentioned at the beginning.

                        So the barber's objective in the scene might initially be to give the customer one of his stellar haircuts, proving his magnificence once again, but it quickly changes once the customer starts to complain (utterly unjustly of course, in the eyes of our barber). Then the real objective kicks in which might be to destroy (which is a strong "action word", again as often taught in acting classes) the misguided, unappreciating, wicked customer.

                        It's at this point that everything kicks in - the barber's "life objective" (his entire reason for living) collides with the customer's "unjust" disapproval and creates the "scene objective" (kill the customer). By inserting the barber's warped life objective into the scene, the scene objective becomes clear. In his addled mind he has every reason to kill this infidel of a customer, so he does.

                        Semantics are a tricky thing of course, so one actor's "objective" could be the same as another's "motivation", but for me, the life objective/scene objective combination fits so well together, one informing the other, that it's pretty much all I need to think about aside from staying in the moment and making it all as *actually real* as my imagination can muster.

                        The only exception I've found to this process is when a character doesn't have nearly as much of his own *deeply personal* life objective invested in the scene, as the crazy barber would. I recently played a reporter in a White House Press Conference scene, and in rehearsing it on my own beforehand I found that trying to play any deeper life objectives gave the character too much emotional baggage. Newscasters are supposed to be pretty dispassionate "messengers of truth", right? I needed to be more detached.

                        So decided to play it very simply, and even somewhat shallowly, as just *a character*, going very little below the surface emotionally. Newscasters are only a tiny leap away from being actors anyway, I think, and news conferences are pretty formal events. So I tossed out the deeper objectives, put on a "news broadcaster voice" and thought of myself as a dispassionate servant of the public - a straight-ahead, non-personally (but certainly professionally) invested news messenger if you will - which is a pretty shallow objective, but it worked. Now when asking the Press Secretary those burning questions my news guy sounded like Brian Williams or Tom Brokaw - not someone too immersed in the heart of the matter. For me it was an interesting little step in my acting processes.

                        Sorry for the rambling post...hope it was worthwhile to someone : )
                        Last edited by Ted Spencer; 12-05-2007, 09:40 AM.
                        "Behind the shelter in the middle of a roundabout
                        A pretty nurse is selling poppies from a tray
                        And though she feels as if she's in a play
                        She is anyway"

                        From "Penny Lane" by Lennon/McCartney

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                          #13
                          Great discussion; I learned a lot.

                          Just like to add that as we shoot movies in a disjointed fashion, sometimes actors forget where they're coming from. I think many times they're given their lines (which may even have been rewritten) and they're asked to do a scene. There's nothing wrong with asking, "What's my motivation?"

                          It's a director's job to help the actors in general. If you're a director, love your actors and love directing them.

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                            #14
                            Originally posted by filmman View Post
                            Just like to add that as we shoot movies in a disjointed fashion, sometimes actors forget where they're coming from. I think many times they're given their lines (which may even have been rewritten) and they're asked to do a scene. There's nothing wrong with asking, "What's my motivation?"

                            It's a director's job to help the actors in general. If you're a director, love your actors and love directing them.
                            Absolutely. Well, after reading a few of these posts, I've actually come to appreciation motivation more. Sometimes as a director, I was told off for being too "wooly" with my motivation. So usually when I talk about it, I talk about it in terms of a concept, rather than a lecture. E.g. "Betty's motivation for killing the cop is that the cop put her father in prison." The thing I find is the more detail you give them, the more confused actors get.

                            Actors work off simple instructions. This isn't to say actors are stupid, but their ability to process complex directions is finite. After all, they have a million different thoughts going through their hends each take, on top of what you say to them.
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