Where's your motivation?
Sophie Tedmanson
October 29, 2005
ON a stiflingly hot weekday, dozens of people are sitting in a small theatre in a converted heritage-listed church, writing the same sentences over and over on pieces of paper: "I need you to love me [blank], I need you to protect me [blank]." The blanks are to be filled in with whoever pops into mind: lovers, family members, friends, enemies. There is silence but for the scratching of pens and pencils on paper, and the concentration is as thick as the heat in the air.
The exercise, writing an "emotional diary", is part of the Chubbuck Technique, created by Hollywood acting coach Ivana Chubbuck.
Chubbuck, who cites Halle Berry, Charlize Theron, Jim Carrey, Brad Pitt, Radha Mitchell and Kate Bosworth among her present and former students, is in Australia to conduct a week-long masterclass for 32 actors and many more observers at the Sydney Actors Centre.
No Shakespeare or Arthur Miller works are recited. Instead, scenes from well-known movies - including Closer, Monster, American Beauty and Pulp Fiction - are read by pairs of students and analysed by Chubbuck, who deconstructs the emotional make-up of the students in confronting ways.
These acting classes defy the cliches: they are not about learning lines and saying them loudly enough for people to hear in the back row, or acting like a tree to conjure up a character.
At one point, Chubbuck makes the room blush in unison when she asks one student to imagine her scene partner - whom she has met less than an hour before - in her sexiest fantasy. Other times she urges the actors to reveal their innermost fears and emotions in order to pour their feelings into the character, to use their own pain "to win their character's goal".
It feels more like eavesdropping on a therapy session than watching a class in progress. One actor cries while talking about her bad relationship with her mother; another discusses his relationship with his abusive father; a third relates a frightening sexual encounter with some men in Japan. It's an uncomfortable yet fascinating experience. They must feel exposed.
"No, it's not confronting for me," says Jemma Wilks, a 20-something yoga and qigong instructor who has sung in musicals and played a martial arts-trained assistant in the 2003 Nick Giannopoulos comedy, The Wannabes. With her scene partner, Felicity Jurd, Wilks was the first to read in front of Chubbuck on the first day of the course and was reduced to tears after five minutes of questions about her family relationships.
"It's OK, because that's who I am, I'm an actor, and I'm not afraid to actually talk about myself," she says. "It was probably cathartic."
Chubbuck's technique is detailed in her new book, The Power of the Actor, which has just been released in Australia. Subtitled "The 12-step acting technique that will take you from script to a living, breathing dynamic character", the book is full of easily assimilable dot-pointed guidelines.
In the book, Chubbuck describes her method as helping actors to "find a way to psychologically personalise and feel their character's drive as if to win their own".
Most acting techniques are derived from the method created by Russian acting master Constantin Stanislavski. He created the famous approach known as "the Method" at the turn of the 20th century, challenging traditional stage techniques and encouraging actors to take their own personality and experiences on to the stage during a internal process of character development.
The Stanislavski method inspired the methods of many other famous acting teachers, including Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, Uta Hagen and Michael Chekhov. In the 1950s, film actors such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Paul Newman - who had all studied at Strasberg's Actors Studio - brought the approach to the moody Hollywood new wave. The lineage can be traced to many acting schools - including Australia's National Institute of Dramatic Art - that now teach a mixture of these and other European approaches, encouraging students to try different techniques and settle on one, or a mixture, that suits them.
"We always take from the best of them and we go from there," she says. "It's like Jung was a student of Freud's, and he started off with a base of Freud and then created his own thing. There's always going to be a base of a previous master or masters that you use, and I think there's good stuff that comes from them, including Chekhov, Meisner and Uta Hagen. When I first came to LA, I was an actor so I was trying different classes and I was learning all sorts of different things."
Her students - including Australia's Anthony Wong, who was in The Matrix: Revolutions among other films and attended Chubbuck's workshops in LA and Sydney - say they prefer the Chubbuck technique because it's a much more rounded approach.
"What I like about Ivana's approach is it brings all the other techniques together in the one place," Wong says. "Some of the others are really strong about how to elicit emotions, or how to analyse script, but [this] works because it's drawing on our own life experience and your own emotions, and it's readily available."
Chubbuck says her background in psychology and behavioural science, which she studied at university, helps bring a more anthropological approach to her teaching.
"In order to recreate human behaviour, you have to go to the source of what makes a person behave," she says. "I use that as my background, to look at the psyche of the character and figure out how that person, and the script, negotiates life.
"It's a pragmatic approach; it's an absolute way of getting to the place that you want to get to ... instead of a cosmic approach, which I find doesn't work."
Chubbuck, who began teaching 25 years ago, lives in Los Angeles with her film director husband, Lyndon Chubbuck, and teenage daughter Claire. She won't reveal her age, but, according to an old report, she could be in her early 50s.
Her hair is neatly coiffed and she is usually immaculately dressed in typical actor's style - dark jeans, dark top, and a sweater tied loosely around her slim waist. She talks loudly and has a crude sense of humour; she was the singer and tambourine girl in a political rock band, White Trash, in Detroit in the 1970s.
Now she is motherly, nurturing her students, yet she doesn't hold back when, for example, she says someone is acting woodenly. She brings her own experience of life into her lessons, referring to her dysfunctional father and her physically and emotionally abusive mother, which immediately earns the students' trust. They, in turn, can reveal their own demons.
On stage and off, her conversation is littered with references to her famous students. There's the story about how she helped Elisabeth Shue find her connection with Val Kilmer in The Saint: "A terrible film but they had great chemistry." Or how her 30-hour intensive workshop with Halle Berry, in preparation for the 2001 drama Monster's Ball, helped her win an Oscar for her performance; the actor thanked Chubbuck in her acceptance speech after winning the best actress award for the role.
There are month-long waiting lists for Chubbuck's classes, which are attended by up to 400 students a week. In between classes she gives guest lectures; earlier this month, she spoke at the famous Juilliard School in New York. She is also producing her husband's next film, October Squall, which is to star Berry.
Chubbuck gives private lessons to her better-known students, often on set, which takes her all over the world, including Australia. Earlier this year she coached Eva Mendes on the Melbourne set of Ghost Rider, then flew to Sydney to help Kate Bosworth become Lois Lane in Superman Returns. And while conducting her Sydney masterclasses earlier this month, she was also helping Australian Calvin Klein-model-turned-actor Travis Fimmel and his co-star, Stephen Moyer, on the set of Guests.
Now she is back in LA and has taken former Destiny's Child singer Beyonce Knowles under her wing, helping her prepare for her role as a Supremes-style singer in the upcoming musical feature Dreamgirls.
Asked if she finds it surprising that Oscar-winning actors such as Berry still call on her for help, Chubbuck shakes her head. "It was Jon Voight who told me, 'An actor never stops studying'," she says. "Pacino, De Niro ... all these people are constantly doing it. You never stop learning."
