How Kevin Smith Hilariously Failed To Give Alan Rickman A Line Reading In Dogma
When Kevin Smith shot "Clerks" for $27,575, he'd received a small amount of film school training but was a babe in the woods when it came to the crucial aspect of directing actors. It shows in the movie, which is so stiffly performed that I've never been able to connect to it. The screenplay is undeniably hilarious and wise in the ways of the workaday convenience store world, but Smith's actors seem so oddly strangled. It's not the kind of acting you get in a poorly rehearsed community theater production where you can see the actors struggling to remember their lines; it's more like you're watching people who've been unnaturally directed. Their performances are really those of their director, not their own.
The off performances in "Clerks" and "Mallrats" began to make sense years later when I heard that Smith had a penchant for committing the cardinal sin of directing. Be it theater, film, or television, you never, ever give actors line readings — i.e. you do not, under any circumstances, speak a line of dialogue and tell the performer to do it exactly as you just said it. Are there exceptions to this rule? Not really! If you've unfortunately cast an unmotivated, unfocused actor who won't take direction, you replace them. Otherwise, you're on the hook for the actor's casting, and it's your job to get the best performance out of them without disrespecting their process. This can be the most exciting part of directing, in that you can guide a performer to a breakthrough where it all comes together for them, and suddenly, you've got magic.
There is a whole vocabulary a director builds during their training and early works that will allow them to achieve these breakthroughs. If you skip that process, though, you're setting yourself up for a rough ride with your actors. And when that actor is a master of his craft like Alan Rickman, you're lucky if all you get is embarrassed.
Kevin Smith learned the hard way not to give actors line readings
/Film's Ethan Anderton recently attended a 25th anniversary screening of "Dogma" that featured a candid Q&A with Smith, and the director self-deprecatingly addressed his history of giving his actors line readings. According to Smith, "When I started the job with 'Clerks,' I would do a thing that I didn't know what it was called, but when the actors weren't nailing the line, I would be like, 'Just say it like this,' and I would say the line."
Smith learned this was a frowned-upon practice when he gave Shannen Doherty, an experienced actor, a line reading on the set of "Mallrats." When Doherty wasn't delivering a certain line the way Smith heard it in his head, he stepped in and told her to say it a certain way. Per Smith, "[S]hannen stops dead and she goes, 'Did you just give me a line reading?' And I was like, 'Is that what that's called? Yes, yeah, can you do it the way I said it?' She's like, 'Kevin, you're never supposed to give an actor a line reading. I know you're new at this, but like, you never give an actor a line reading.'"
Smith was not chastened, in part because he was used to giving his on-screen partner Jason Mewes line readings. In Smith's defense, if he did it on the set of the very personal "Chasing Amy," it worked because he got terrific performances out of Joey Lauren Adams, Ben Affleck, and Jason Lee. But when he got to "Dogma" in 1999, he was apparently still prone to giving live readings. And he inexplicably felt emboldened enough to tell Rickman had to do his job. As Smith recounted to his Chicago audience:
"We were working, and [Rickman] did a line, and it didn't sound like the way I had written it. Like, it didn't sound the way I heard it in my head when I wrote, so I was looking for the delivery in my head. So I jumped in. I was like, 'Alan, can you say it like this?' And I gave him a line reading. Alan goes like this. [Kevin slowly, menacingly turns his head acting it out.] 'Did you just give me a line reading?' I said, "Yeah," and he goes, [points to himself with both hands], 'Royally trained.' And I go back to work."
"Royally trained" means the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. That's the Everest of theater schools. While studying at RADA, Rickman was a dresser for Ralph Richardson and Nigel Hawthorne, two of the greatest actors of the 20th century. He was Hans Gruber. Perhaps Smith gave Rickman's onscreen partner Bruce Willis a line reading on the set of "Cop Out," and that's why the director had such a lousy time working with the movie star.