Beyond Truth!

Learning to be vulnerable is hard. But it is the only way for artists to communicate.

Recently, I connected with a few actors and actresses online. They told me they heard good things about me from our common friends. That makes me very happy — it proves my style is working.

Today, I want to share something I recently became aware of.

I often hear directors ask their actors to "be truthful". But real human beings are not always truthful. We lie. We conceal. We manipulate. We downplay. We avoid.

That’s REAL.

My psychologist friend told me even has a name for it: impression management.

Many times in the past, I noticed that "truthful" performances still feel artificial. The emotion may be honest... but the behavior is too clean, too direct, too emotionally available.

Real human beings rarely express exactly what they think and feel the moment they feel it. We suppress things. We disguise things. We test people. We hold back. We pretend we're okay. We say one thing while feeling another.

Human behavior is layered. When we hide something, we get rigid. Our speech patterns compress. We over-compensate.

And often the most compelling moments on screen happen when the audience senses what is underneath the words, not just the words themselves.

That is something the TV commercials world never taught me - Commercials need clarity; Narratives needs complexity. That's why I am still learning how to not ask an actor or actress to be truthful, but to be real.

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