The Power Of Improv

The film, a sometimes painful, always graceful exploration of the limits of love, is focused on three siblings who are searching desperately for ways to express that which they struggle to even put into words.

You never know what’s going to happen next in any Cassavetes film, but that’s particularly true of Shadows. There’s a blurry, formless feel to the narrative, the perpetual sense of something going on just a little bit longer than you would expect. Emotional beats are being strained; futures are being directed and reshaped in the spur of the moment.

There’s no filmmaker who has worked quite that strangely, with that much independence and flexibility. It’s magic realism of a sorts, a hyperfixation on the world that manifests itself as a roaming camera, and an eye trained to pick up on tiny shreds of tenderness; a shared look after a disastrous argument; a drunk steadying themselves against the bar.

Improvisation unlocked that focus on the macro, allowing the director to pull his attention onto moments that no script could entirely nail down. Cassavetes was not the first artist to use improvisation in that way, of course — free-wheeling stories that generate their own momentum as they go on are as old as the art of spinning narratives itself, dating back to the oral tradition of the Ancient Greeks. But it was Cassavetes who pushed the antic energy of a tale being made up on the spot to its very breaking point, upending pre-conceived notions of emotional order, and letting the human heart reveal itself in all of its ugliness, and power.

Cassavetes would never improvise another film again. He had already nailed that technique — had already moved on by the time that Shadows was released. But other filmmakers would quickly draw their own energy from what Cassavetes had done, pushing improvisation in new and unusual directions.

Lars Von Trier, for instance, the provocative director who has spent his entire career tearing up traumatised people, used an improvised camera technique on Dogville. That film, which follows the residents of a small town as they unravel following the arrival of a strange visitor, Grace (Nicole Kidman), was shot on a stark soundstage, markings on the floor used to indicate the walls and streets of the titular Dogville. Actors never knew where the camera would be; would find themselves dancing around the crew, unsure as to which angle their breakdowns were being filmed from.

Blue Valentine, Derek Cianfrance’s heartbreaking horror story of two people gradually and painfully pulling apart, was improvised as well. Cianfrance had worked on hundreds of versions of the script for almost a decade, collaborating with his two leads in the process — Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling — but threw away the final version the night before shooting started. He let Gosling and Williams do as they pleased, making up their howled arguments and their wordless moments of love.

Mike Leigh, the acclaimed British auteur, took that process even further over the course of a career spent telling the stories of those living their lives in the margins of society. Leigh would rehearse for months prior to shooting, giving his actors strange and compelling homework tasks — asking them to decide what their characters’ favourite colour was; what they had dreamed about the night before.

These tiny choices, most of them never referenced directly onscreen, allowed the performers to fully flesh out their own interior worlds, adding a life and complexity that can be seen in their every move. Ironically, Leigh was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for his film Vera Drake, a towering story of a woman who provided abortions to young and desperate girls during a time where they were against the law. “Actually the screenplay that was nominated doesn’t exist,” Leigh said at the time. “The film is the screenplay.”

Some actors have adored this process of settling into their roles the way that you would settle into a warm bath, taking a greater authorial role in the spinning of their stories. But not all performers have historically found it quite so fulfilling. Terrence Malick, the reclusive American auteur whose films have the potency of Biblical stories, is so unstructured in the way he uses improvisation that he will frequently shift the entire focus of his stories halfway through the production — famously, Adrien Brody arrived at the premiere of the film The Thin Red Line, in which he believed he had played the lead, to discover that he had been cut from the entire running time. 

This was too much for Christopher Plummer, the legendary actor, and one of the stars of Malick’s re-telling of the Pocahantas story, The New World. During one sequence in which Plummer delivered a humane and raw monologue, the performer noticed that Malick had directed the camera operator to move away, and train the lens on a nearby flock of birds. Furious, Plummer later wrote Malick a letter, calling him “boring” and telling him he desperately needed a tighter editor. “I’ll never work with him again,” Plummer said in one interview, simply.

But for every actor who has found themselves burned out and exhausted by the process, there is another who has found themselves wonderfully lost, following rabbit holes inside themselves into strange and beautiful places that a script would not have allowed for. In Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, for instance, Leonardo DiCaprio smashed a glass in fury in an entirely natural, unforced moment – when he raises up his hand again, that’s his blood, dripping down his closed fist. That’s the heart of improvisation. A single, unscripted moment, printed deeply onto the screen, with human blood.