film craft vs stage craft (vs craft services? haha no): a meditation

I've been thinking about the differences between acting for film and acting for the stage. I've read in interviews with film actors who started out in theater that doing theater is the best possible training for an actor, and I think that's true, because on stage you can't fake your way into a good performance. Whereas on film, you can, sort of. Acting is, ultimately, the lie that tells the truth. But the kinds of lies you can tell on stage vs on camera are different. From a directorial perspective theater, especially in it's contemporary form, has to be at least a little bit inherently meta. Whether you explicitly acknowledge that meta theatricality and make it part of your aesthetic or try to leave it alone as much as possible is a personal choice, but a stage actor has to be at least somewhat aware of the audience, and you as an actor have to convince them to accept that even though you are on a stage, this story is really happening. This comes down to communication and relationship, I think, that you are actually talking to the person who is on stage with you and not just reciting words which you memorized to say in a memorized way, but authentically reaching them. Stanislavksy called this "truth". Stage actors and directors talk a lot about that kind of shit, you maybe probably know that. Film directors and actors don't necessarily! It's funny that as a mode for naturalistic story telling, film has theater completely beat, but somehow theater is still more real because real things are happening on stage, moment to moment, whereas a film is completely constructed through editing and everything else. You can't fake authentic communication on stage, and I've been taught that if you try to force an emotion onto a moment on stage it will deny the possibility for authentic communication. You can force emotion on film, though, and have it work, I think. This is why method acting became so prevalent and so many method actors are such successful film actors, if you ask me. If the story the audience experiences on film is of you losing your best friend, and you think about losing your dead dog, the camera will read the remorse or sadness or whatever emotion you are creating in your interior life through your eyes and the audience will accept it. You really need to get there, though. It's hard to fake that kind of stuff on film, because the camera really sees everything in a way a theater audience doesn't. In the theater they see if you are connected, on film the camera sees everything else.

Do you see what I mean? Does that make sense? These are things I've been thinking about, especially as I grapple what medium to throw myself into as I move forward with my career. I really love theater, the immediacy, the connection but film is fun too in it's own way, and you can get away with things you can't get away with on stage. You often have more freedom, because the director is not so beholden to the intention's of the writer, but has much more free reign interpretively and is more likely to share that with you, as long as you make good choices or in my case really, funny choices. Excuse me while I go back to my day off. You know what that means, laundry!