8 Urban Myths About Movies You Probably Believe

By Callum Mcleod / May 7, 2013

Tacit assumptions are both the plague of and the creator of everyday conversation. You'll have noticed this; someone will say something inane like "There are 9 planets in the galaxy!" and someone else will say "There's 10, actually." This will be disagreed with, thus creating a debate and in this way, the time with your friends becomes infinitely more profitable than the turgid silence in which you would otherwise languish. Urban myths are the same; someone will blurt out some ad-hoc belief like "That building over there is haunted" and you will fulfill your end of the deal by calling them a smelly tramp, thus debate, thus joy, happiness, goodness, existence. Cinema invites such assumptions, being as it is one of the popular media of the 21st Century. You see, the more esoteric the interest, the less opportunity there is for myth to arise; in quantum physics, for example, if you are able to have a decent conversation with someone about quantum physics, then you are both likely to be intimately familiar with the subject. Film, however, is not esoteric; there is a reason why, in every parody you have seen of speed dating websites, "going to the movies" is always on the list of interests. And so, many assumptions arise. You, however, dear reader, perhaps fancy yourself a cineaste. You have heard of Kieslowski. You watch the DP/30 interviews on Youtube. You use the word 'anamorphic' more regularly than many of your friends. You could host your very own Movie Geektacular! podcast with another dude who is as equally alone as yourself. However, in the words of Emile Zola, j'accuse! You, too, sir slash madam, assume, and make an ass out of you and me in the process! Perhaps you don't; I hear your stomach filling with bile to spit at me in disgust. But give me a chance to illustrate a few urban myths you might believe in, and we'll see if you are still as keen to bile on me afterwards. Here we go...!

8. Method Actors "Live In Character"

The most prolific and the most easily debunked myth surrounding the movies concerns method actors, that most bizarre and exotic of movie creatures, and the belief that they live entirely in character through the duration of film shoots. This belief exists largely thanks to the gargantuan talents of Daniel Day-Lewis, to my mind the greatest actor alive. Day-Lewis became noted for his method in which he stayed in character during an entire film shoot, speaking to people as his character, with the accent, changing his gait; during production for In the Name of the Father, he went so far as to try and sleep in a prison to recreate the experience of Gerry Conlan. On the UK chat show Parkinson, Day-Lewis explained his method by saying that: "That game involves, say, the power of self-delusion... I suppose at the centre of it I have to try and kid myself that I'm living a life that isn't mine, because if I can't do that there's no hope that I'm going to kid anybody else." Of course, this style of acting was made notorious, accidentally, by Heath Ledger, who famously died of an overdose shortly after having lived as the Joker for The Dark Knight for several months prior. And somewhere in the media, a quiet assumption that the event and the lifestyle were inexorably linked sprang forth. The myth here arises from conflating the exploits of the most famous method actors with the method itself. The method, as taught by Stanislavski, Lee Strasberg and others, is a complex system wherein actors tap into previous emotions in order to explore their characters. The method takes on many different forms; on Marathon Man, for example, Dustin Hoffman slept rough for several days prior to a scene in order to recreate the experience of his character in the film (inviting Lawrence Olivier's famous if rather glib rejoinder: "My dear boy, why don't you try acting? It's so much easier!). However, he did not live in character during the shoot; if you spoke to him, he was Dustin Hoffman. There are as many variations on the method as there are method actors, and it is the complexity of the theory and the confusion which surrounds it which allows for such exaggerated claims to be made. Some method actors, like Day-Lewis and Ledger, lived in character. Others, like Mickey Rourke, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson, Marilyn Monroe etc, do not.