The Intent to Live: Achieving Your True Potential as an Actor

by Larry Moss

This technique will help you discover unique active

intentions and different nuances and tones for a scene rather than settling for choices that are mundane.

choosing one active verb that you think is right for ...

then find all the sy...

the thesaurus for ...

try out the dialogue as one by one you play the differ...

This is what the Van Gogh fence is about: all the different tones of color you can choose from to bring something to life.

your character’s stakes.

As you explore a script, ask yourself, how far would my character go to achieve their

goals?

film Lady Sings the Blues

Plaza Suite,

See how fate dealt this boy the heartbreaking blow

of his parents’ divorce followed by his mother’s death. Imagine yourself going through that and then being watched by the

world to see if you measure up. You’ll have more comp...

Private Lives,

Affliction,

Streetcar

Named Desire.

We in the audience have to feel that we’re watching a life being lived in

front of us.

The Grifters

Tootsie

superobjective, obstacle, and intention.

an objective is what you want and an intention is how you get it. But

internal life

cellular resonance.

Inner imagery is the thing that makes the audience plug in to their own unconscious.

Tennessee Williams’s play Sweet Bird of

Youth,

Angela’s Ashes,

Winterset,

Winterset

When I was four years old we climbed through an iron gate, my mother and I,

to see my father in prison. He stood in the death-cell and put his

The actor’s job in performance is to send

the ideas to this young woman, and because you’ve created and worked on the inner imagery as though you’ve actually

experienced it, your eyes will play the movie and she will read that and it will be an ...

In performance, you don’t do an acting exercise to call up inner imagery,

you play the intention to achieve your objective.

you build your inner imagery and it’s there. Just as in life when you say “I went bowling with my friends last night and we had a blast,” you don’t first stop and say to yourself Oh, now I’m going to think about

that experience of bowling. You’ve lived it, so all you’ve got to do is say “I went bowling last night with my friends and

had a b...

If a play or film requires you to have a reaction of

grief or shock or hysteria and nothing in the script provokes you to this intense emotion, an “as if” will solve the

pro...

You can’t

stay clean and tidy and be an actor. You’ve got to use imagery of things that upset you, things that make you laugh, things

that arouse you sexually, things that crash through ...

you either have to create from your imagination the imagery that the writer gives you, make that real and