By take twelve everyone on the floor had an opinion. The director wanted less. The DP wanted me a foot to the left. The script supervisor, very politely, wanted the line said as written. I gave them all of it, one take at a time, and none of it landed.
What changed on take nineteen was not the acting. It was the second AD finally closing the stage door, so the draught that had been lifting the pages on the desk all morning stopped. The scene is about a man who cannot bring himself to read a letter. For eighteen takes the letter kept trying to read itself.
Most notes about a performance are really notes about the room the performance is happening in.
What I took from it
When a scene will not come, check the room before you check yourself. Sound, light, a prop that keeps moving, a mark that is six inches too close to the lens. Fix the room and the acting usually follows.
