Up: Acting

The scene objective is the answer to the question: What do I want from the other character(s) in the scene? What do I want them to do? How do I want them to feel?

Requirements of a good scene objective (paraphrasing Chubbuck¹¹1 Ivana Chubbuck, The Power of the Actor (East Rutherford: Penguin Publishing Group, 2005). ):

• The scene objective must always serve the overall objective.

• The scene objective is active, i.e. something that the character can actively pursue.

• The scene objective must elicit a response.

Examples:

• To make you tell me that it will be okay.
• To make you submit to me.
• To make you grant me a loan.
• To make you admit that you were wrong.
• To make you apologize.
• To make you give me the job.

Hauser and Reich²²2 Frank Hauser and Russell Reich, Notes on directing: 130 lessons in leadership from the director's chair (New York, London, Oxford, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2008), p. 43.  describe an objective as follows:

1. What do you want?
2. What are you doing to get it?
3. Is it working?
4. Where’s the resistance?

More thoughts:

• Even if the scene objective is impossible to achieve, work towards it anyway; expect to win.

• A response ca be either a verbal response or an action. The purpose of an interaction between characters is to affect each other.

• The scene objective is never “to make you leave” / “to get away from you” or something similar. If it were, there wouldn’t be a scene; the scene is the interaction.

Open questions:

• What about very long scenes? A two-hour film can have 100+ scenes and a two-hour play can have 6. Does this change anything?