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1. Creating Emotions
• By far, the most common question that people
ask me about acting is, “How do actors create
emotions?”
• In fact, psychologists are now looking at how
actors create emotions in order to understand
human nature in a new way.
• By analyzing the cognitive capacities that
acting draws upon, psychologists have come
closer to understanding why realistic acting is
so convincing.

2. Creating Emotions
• This question transcends the scope of this
course and delves deep into the psychology
behind acting.
• However, a little primer can be helpful to us as
lawyers.

3. Creating Emotions
• Audiences have become impatient with
stylized acting and demand to really believe
what they are seeing.
• The trend toward realism in acting emerged in
the mid-twentieth century due to the
influence of Russian actor and director
Constantin Stanislavsky, who urged actors to
strive for “believable truth.”

4. Creating Emotions
• As noted on PBS.org:
–Stanislavsky first employed methods such as
“emotional memory.” To prepare for a role
that involves fear, the actor must remember
something frightening, and attempt to act
the part in the emotional space of that fear
they once felt. Stanislavsky believed that an
actor needed to take his or her own
personality onto the stage when they began
to play a character.

5. Creating Emotions
• Subsequently, heavily influenced by Stanislavsky,
actor and director Lee Strasberg interpreted his
teacher’s philosophy for an American audience
and emphasized affective memory – a key
component of what is touted as method acting,
or simply, “The Method.”
• As noted by Pamela Kareman, executive director
of the Neighborhood Playhouse School of
Theatre, the field was forever changed.

6. Creating Emotions
• The Neighborhood Playhouse teaches its
students according to the principles of the
Meisner Technique, an offshoot of Stanislavsky’s
work developed by Sanford Meisner – a one-time
friend and contemporary of Lee Strasberg.
• The two parted ways on one very controversial
principal: Strasberg was much more interested in
actors working from their real lives and real pain,
whereas Meisner thought that was
“psychotherapy and had no place in acting.”

7. Creating Emotions
• Meisner thought that the biggest gift an actor
had was his imagination, which is limitless,
while one’s real life and real experiences are
quite limited.
• He also discouraged, and I agree with him, the
romanticizing of traumatic experiences for art.
• Ruminating on negative events has been
shown to consistently predict the onset of
depression.

8. Creating Emotions
• As Deborah Margolin so eloquently states,
“There’s this whole thing about suffering for
your art and I think that’s baloney. I tell my
students not to worry about the suffering.
Suffering will find you – seek the joy.”

9. Creating Emotions
• So, if you experienced something traumatic in
your life, such as the death of a close relative
or a near-fatal car accident, Meisner never
wanted an actor to use that as it was
unhealthy.
• According to Kareman, “You might be
subconsciously colored by that, but your
imagination could bring up something else.”

10. Creating Emotions
• Another criticism of emotional memory is that
the meaning of the past changes over time.
The winning of the public school state hockey
championship doesn’t elicit the same
emotions in me today as it did when I was
seventeen years-old. Too much time has
passed.

11. Creating Emotions
• Can you remember the last movie you saw where
you cried your eyes out?
• For me, this was when the mangled body of Hayden
Christensen’s character, Anakin Skywalker, was
engulfed by lava while lying helplessly on the edge
of an embankment on Mustafar; when his human
flesh burst into flames; and when he was burned
alive.

12. Creating Emotions
• The screeching cries and wailing groans that
Hayden let out did not come from the script –
the script did not have tears. Nor did they come
from the sorrow of another, such as a stunt
double.
• Instead, they came out of Hayden’s own sorrow.
Had he never cried before, Hayden would have
never known his own sorrow. And he would
never have been able to seer the most tragic
scene of the movie – if not the series – so vividly
in our minds as to leave a lasting impression.

13. Creating Emotions
• To do this, Hayden had to find the essence of
that particular emotion within himself. When
an actor genuinely marries his emotions with
that of the character and grounds the
material to himself, something magical
happens: the actor’s emotions erupt like a
volcano and the character comes to life. As
acting instructors teach, the recipe for
creating a character is rather simple: start
with yourself.

14. Creating Emotions
• Bringing this example back into the legal
realm, Hayden’s heart-wrenching cries and
agonizing pain can be understood as his
argument.

15. Creating Emotions
• And this is where the creative world of acting
overlaps with the courtroom. By arguing out
of his own sorrow – out of his own experience
– Hayden did so acknowledging that we, as
the audience, have experienced sorrow as
well. Had we never experienced sorrow
before, the scene would have been an
abysmal failure.

16. Creating Emotions
• Similarly, the jury has experienced emotions
similar to those of your client. With the insight
of how it was experienced, the jury can
understand and relate to him on a deeper
level. This will make them sympathetic to his
plight.