I’m looking forward to the rehearsal period for a film I haven’t written yet.  This is technically known as ‘getting ahead of yourself’, but I never saw the harm in anticipation.  And it’s reassuring that the director in question is keen on the rehearsal process too.  Some filmed projects don’t allow time for it, but I believe it’s a valuable part of the business of making any script come to life.

I’d strongly recommend any writer to get actively involved in rehearsals of their work.  Only, go along with the intention of helping your precious script change for the better, rather than believing your presence will inspire the actors to perform it word-perfect.  Those words might be just dandy on the page, but if an actor can convey the same meaning with the curl of a lip, or a momentary glance, then go with that option and avoid your words being redundant.  Besides, you’ll get the credit for your lean and psychologically insightful script if you do it this way.

The Sandfield Centre in Nottingham, where I did scriptwriting classes, was home to actors and writers learning their craft under the tutelage of professionals from RADA and other noted institutions, and it was an amazing resource.  I was seemingly the only writer there to put 2 + 2 together and realise that student actors plus student writers would be well advised to collaborate, and that led to some valuable early lessons in writing for and working with actors.  As such, I spent just as much time with budding thespians as wannabe wordsmiths, and learned a lot about the differences between the two. 

One weekend, I had lunch Saturday with the writers, and Sunday with the actors.  The writers said little, and got on with the business of eating their modest packed lunches (cheese or ham sandwich, crisps, apple and a can of drink) while reading a book.  For the actors, lunch was a social occasion, each of them taking the opportunity to flourish ‘a little something I found in the fridge’ (Persian style chicken legs and tri-coloured rice salad) and share it with their chums, who were happy to reciprocate with chunks of runny Camembert they had knocking about the place, smoked salmon that would have otherwise been thrown away, and so forth.  Hmm.

Where film is concerned, I recommend getting on set if you can, though some directors like to be the sole voice of authority at that point.  I still wince when I catch one dialogue exchange in a short film I scripted, rewritten to take shooting practicalities into account, which was devised jointly by director and actors.  It features one of my pet hates; reference to a past situation framed by ‘remember that time when..?’; a kind of flashback in disguise that I’d have patched over more elegantly had I been on set at the time.  Instead, I was in the production office surrounded by cans of Red Bull and boxes of KP Crisps, which some enterprising production person had blagged, and phoning through a list of 150 potential extras to see which of them could commit to being in the audience for the boxing match scene we were shooting that weekend.

It’s fascinating to see the way that different performers prepare for their roles.  In a production I put together that used a couple of dancers, they went through their moves at high speed together to get them wired into their bodies: a lot of performance skills require that kind of muscle memory.  Actors will similarly go through their lines as fast as possible in rehearsal, just to be sure they actually know them.  The less a performer has to consciously think about the content of what they’re doing, the more they can deliver it with finesse.

And why stop at watching others deliver your lines?  Taking even a basic acting class will open up the issues involved in making lines on a page come alive, and going to improvisation classes will present you with the problem of how to engage fellow performers and an audience with nothing beyond bodily movements and concepts you can conjure out of thin air.  In either case, you’ll be learning what it’s like to utilise space and movement as part of your repertoire, and in doing so feed that understanding back into your writing, which gets better as a result.