Line Readings

Earlier this week a long-time feature animation director talked to me about working with actors on recording stages ...

"... If I have twelve takes of a line, I always figure I have more than enough to work with. Lots and lots of takes you don't need, unless the actor just isn't getting it. Years ago, I started marking the takes we liked up in the booth, while we were recording. We'd circle the good ones. We didn't wait until we listened to them later. Saved us time ..."

Some animation directors like lots of takes. I've known a few who got up into triple digits, and that can work okay, but there's the danger of listening to thirty or fifty different deliveries of a written line and being a little, ah, bewildered:

Why did we have him read it that way? ... What were we thinking? ... Take 22 sounds a lot like 34 ... Shit, so does number 16 ...

Woolfgang Reitherman, Disney animator and director, used to have story artists and animators gather in his office to pick voice takes. He would whittle the number down a little and then people would vote on their favorite readings. ("Who likes take 12? Who votes for 16?"). Woolie thought nothing of taking half of one take and half of another to get the shadings he desired. (That part was all right. But the town meeting aspect, with all those votes, seemed to me a little bit overkill.)

Director John Ford was famous for doing one or two takes and moving on. William Wyler owned the nickname William Forty Takes Wyler" for a reason, but actors in his pictures won a lot of Academy Awards. In the modern era, Clint Eastwood has little patience for actors who want beaucoup takes ("Why do you want to waste everybody's time?")

Most certainly, there is no single "right" way to make a good movie, but I'm in the "less is better" camp. As Mr. Eastwood famously said: "You've got to have the picture there in your mind before you make it. And if you don't, you're not a director, you're a guesser."