Method Acting (and Chapter 27)
Article from here:
OAN Messes Up Lohan's & Leto's Method Acting
New York, Jan. 20, 2006 - More contention on the set of Chapter 27, this time caused by yours truly here at Open All Night. Barred by police from standing on the public sidewalk outside The Dakota apartment house, the scene of John Lennon’s murder, the subject of the film, someone called in high profile attorney Norman Siegel, former executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, to negotiate. The NYPD relented, and agreed that photographers could approach the movie set in shifts of two at a time. Siegel departed, and we went first. Jared Leto, looking straight at our man, complained to a production assistant that because he’s a method actor, he couldn’t concentrate with the press around. The P.A. told police officers, who made us move. NYPD officers also related that Lindsay Lohan told them that she flubbed her lines because of us. Later, Lindsay smiled and waved to us from across the street.
And from Wikipedia:
Method acting is an acting technique in which actors try to replicate the emotional conditions under which the character operates in real life, in an effort to process an acting role. "The Method" requires an actor to draw on his or her own emotions, memories, and experiences to influence their portrayal of a character.
Origins:
Mainly an American school, "The Method" was popularized by Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio and the Group Theatre, in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s. It was derived from "the Stanislavski System", after Konstantin Stanislavski, who pioneered similar ideas in his teachings, writings, and acting at the Moscow Art Theater (founded 1897).
Strasberg's students included quite a few of America's most famous actors, including Paul Newman, Al Pacino, James Dean, and many others.
Technique:
Method acting is considered one of the most difficult acting techniques to teach. It is characterized by the lack of any specific or technical approach to acting; it usually forms an antithesis to clichéd, unrealistic, and so-called rubber-stamp acting.
Depending on the exact version taught by the numerous directors and teachers who claim to propagate the fundamentals of this technique, the process can include various ideologies and practices such as "as if", "substitution" and "emotional memory".
Sanford Meisner, another Group Theatre pioneer, championed a separate, though closely related, school of Method acting. Meisner broke from Strasberg on the subject of "sense memory" or "emotion memory", one of the basic tenets of Method. Meisner's theory revolves around fully immersing oneself in the moment of a character, and experiencing all sensations as the character would, while his contemporaries used their own experiences as springboards into the emotional life of the character that he or she plays.
Stella Adler, the coach famed by the success of her students Marlon Brando and Robert DeNiro, as well as the only teacher from the Group Theatre to have studied Acting Technique with Stanislavsky himself, developed yet another form of Method Acting. Her technique is founded in the idea that one must not use memories from their own past to conjure up emotion, but rather use circumstances from their imagination. She also emphasized, like Sanford Meisner, the all-importance of "action" within the theatre. As she often preached, we are what we do, not what we say.
Contemporary acting teachers, like Jason Bennett, combine the acting theories of the last generation of American acting teachers. These methods utilize the actor's imagination fully, while calling on the actor's life experience whenever needed. Bennett's work also incorporates tools from psychology, such as awareness of and the use of human archetypes. Archetype work has its roots in Jungian Psychology and in the acting work of Michael Chekhov. Chekhov was closely associated with Stanislavski, but as his work evolved, broke away from Stanislavski, Strasberg and the original members of The Group. Many people believe that later in life, Stanislavski increasingly recognized Chekhov's work was extremely important in the development of modern acting theory.