For fans of “The Room,” the goofy cult classic often considered the worst film of all time, James Franco’s “The Disaster Artist” may come as a shock. Based on Greg Sestero’s memoir of the same name, “The Disaster Artist” follows the troubled production of “The Room” as well as the uneasy relationship between Sestero, a co-star of the film, and director Tommy Wiseau. In one scene, Wiseau refuses to provide his cast and crew with water, air conditioning or adequate breaks, despite being trapped inside an overheating Los Angeles apartment. The film clarifies this isn’t a financial limitation — Wiseau has spent millions of private wealth to fund his passion project. Eventually, an older crew member passes out. If this weren’t bad enough, we later see the creation of the room’s infamous sex scene, where Wiseau appears to have sex with a co-star’s belly button. During production, Wiseau refuses to have a closed set and, shortly after filming begins, he explodes at his co-star for a slight patch of acne, calling her “disgusting,” and telling her to “fix it.” When the cast objects, he reveals that he’s been watching camera footage of the filming process— he knows the team has been insulting him secretly and accuses them of disloyalty.
Lest one think James Franco’s rendition is sensationalized, Juliette Daniel, the actress in question has described the Disaster Artist as a mostly faithful account of “The Room’s” production. Tommy Wiseau, abusive, controlling, yet chronically unable to recall lines of his own script, is a parody of the stereotypical auteur. In a 1954 essay, Francois Truffaut, co-founder of the French New Wave, described auteur theory as the policy of the authors. Instead of merely staging a film, true auteurs exert complete control of every aspect of production, revealing their virtuosic, artistic vision. Now, auteurs like Hitchcock and Kubrick are also remembered for their poor treatment of actors. Allegedly, during the production of “The Shining,” Kubrick intentionally tormented actress Shelley Duvall to evoke more realistic performances to the point she began to lose clumps of hair. Actress Tippi Hedren (“The Birds”) has accused Hitchcock of sexually assaulting her on multiple occasions. In one interview, Hitchcock glibly remarks that “a director should treat actors like cattle.”
Remarkably, “The Disaster Artist” ends with a celebration of Wiseau. During the film’s final scene, “The Room” debuts to a laughing audience, joyously consuming the train wreck of footage. The camera cuts back and forth between the actors of the film as they learn to enjoy it. Sestero and Wiseau reconcile and continue making movies — despite the fact Wiseau never apologizes.
The uncomfortable conclusions of the film represent larger convictions in the performing arts: art demands suffering. In the acting world, this conviction is often expressed as a zealous adherence to Method acting. Christian Bale lost 100 pounds and then gained it back for “The Machinist.” Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison liver for “The Revenant.” The Atlantic contributor Jordan Kisner briefly describes her own time at a New York acting conservatory in her review of Isaac Butler’s history of Method acting. At age 20, a teacher instructed “the tallest, strongest,” boy in class to constrain Kisner to the point of tears in order to fuel an adequately distraught performance. Unable to stop crying, “the performance was deemed a breakthrough, if a little ‘uncontrolled.’ ”
According to Butler, Method acting has its roots in Konstantin Stanislavski’s “System,” which popularized perezhivanie or “living a part.” At this point, the System emphasized full psychological commitment. Stanislavski, like Leo Tolstoy, believed art was “a means of communion” whose ultimate purpose was “to unify humanity.” Under this framework, the stakes of the acting process become world shaking.
The American Theatre director Lee Strasberg was quick to adopt these teachings, ultimately using them to create the Method. In particular, he emphasized the importance of “emotion memory” — finding real past experiences similar to the demands of a current role. Strasberg himself recognized the precarity of this technique, arguing that “the basic art of acting is a monstrous thing because it is done with the same flesh-and-blood muscles with which you perform ordinary deeds, real deeds.” Monstrous or not, Strasberg went on to found the prestigious Actors Studio, from which he would train generations of acting heavyweights such as Dustin Hoffman, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro and Elia Kazan. Since 1951, almost half of the Academy Awards for acting have gone to Method actors of some sort.
As one of the country’s top performing arts colleges, questions about the fraught nature of Method acting and the art form in general, permeate the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. According to several students I talked to, the Music, Theatre & Dance School emphasizes the importance of understanding multiple styles of acting — Stanislavski’s system, Strasberg’s Method, classical acting, Viewpoints — and finding what works best for them. Music, Theatre & Dance senior Kate Cummings spoke to me about the potential dangers of emotion-memory acting techniques like Strasberg’s Method. Noting horror stories like Heath Ledger’s extended isolation during the production of “The Dark Night,” she emphasized the difference between imagination and experience: “You don’t need to experience harm to understand harm.” Cummings also referenced a time in high school where she was acting out trauma which she had also experienced in real life. Hoping to enhance the performance, she drew upon her own pain, but in the end, “it was just harmful.”
Daniel Cantor, associate professor of theatre and drama, commented on the emotional challenges of depicting characters in emotionally challenging situations. While he encounters many young actors who believe they need to “enter a synonym” of the character’s emotional state, Cantor believes this is unnecessary. Instead, an actor should “live off the vapors of it.” In 2022, Cantor performed in Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” which centrally explores the Holocaust. During an audience talkback, he was asked if it was difficult to constantly reanimate the horrors of the Holocaust. A method actor drawing on emotion memory might think so — Cantor, who lives off the vapors, disagreed. Auschwitz was an immovable historical fact. But by performing “Leopolstadt,” the cast offered “an organized and artful way to grieve.” Referencing Amiri Baraka’s seminal study of Afro-American music “Blues People,” Cantor also distinguished between “the blues as such,” and “the blues as music.” The former is the trials and tribulations of life; the latter is the joyful exorcism of those pains through art.
One of the most common criticisms of Method acting is its apparent egoism. In an infamous New Yorker profile, Michael Schulman describes the alternately awe-inspiring and alienating techniques of Jeremy Strong (“Succession”). While Strong doesn’t consider himself “Method,” he is a fierce devotee of Daniel Day-Lewis, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino, who all swear by Strasberg’s techniques. Apparently once in college, Strong even bankrupted his acting organization for a chance to meet Al Pacino. During production of “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” Strong asked to be attacked with real tear gas — which director Aaron Sorkin rejected due to the risk it would pose to the large cast and crew. During “Succession,” Strong apparently repeatedly demanded personalized props from the crew, who described him as an annoying gnat. To the frustration of the rest of the cast, Strong often refused rehearsals. In response to allegations he is difficult to work with, Strong stated, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work.”
On a broader scale, actors like Viola Davis, winner of the Triple Crown of Acting, have criticized Method acting for relying on privilege — the excesses of total immersion would be professionally intolerable from anyone but a cishet white man. On another level, the excesses of Method acting are also largely American problems. Brian Cox, Strong’s co-star in “Succession,” said, “It’s a particularly American disease, I think, this inability to separate yourself off while you’re doing the job.” When the British actor Laurence Olivier found out Dustin Hoffman stayed up three nights to appear exhausted for a scene, Olivier asked, “my boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
The Music, Theatre & Dance students I talked to, while not Method adherents themselves, saw it as a valid personal choice. Ultimately, they believed the most important principle was adhering to one’s personal boundaries and a safe environment on set. To this end, Music, Theatre & Dance productions now employ an intimacy choreographer, Raja Benz, who helps students explore sensitive material safely, conscious of the evolving boundaries of all parties. Music, Theatre & Dance senior Lenin Izquierdo, spoke to the importance of these measures. Last year, performing in “Intimate Apparel,” he participated in a sex scene for the first time. Izquierdo does not like randomly touching people and worried about possibly disrespecting his scene partner. However, thanks to Benz’s coordination, he developed an understanding of how to depict these scenes safely: “You treat those moments not like moments of passion but like rehearsed dance moves.” Ultimately, Izquierdo believes this resulted in a performance that was more real and more authentic. In the past few years, the Music, Theatre & Dance School has also implemented “check in” and “check out” procedures that offer actors a chance to consciously engage and disengage with characters at the beginning and end of rehearsals.
Of course, the actors I talked to were under no delusions about the nature of the professional acting world — each interviewee knew they might work on sets without safety mechanisms. In Hollywood, for instance, it’s still disappointingly common to have sex scenes without any intimacy coordination. As Cantor explained, the reason intimacy work exists in the first place is because of backlash during the #MeToo movement. One working actor, 25-year-old Jerome Manning, spoke to me about these professional difficulties. While he believes making money through acting is achievable, early on “sometimes the journey of making rent can take over from (the craft).” While Manning spoke highly positively about his recent experience as a swing for Blitz Bazawule’s “The Color Purple,” he also criticized certain features of the larger industry. “The standard [for actors] is straight, white, skinny, and young.” For anyone else, roles focus on “what is othering you.”
There were moments when the sheer optimism of the students I interviewed was unnerving. Is this how Greg Sestero felt when he arrived in Hollywood? Early in “The Disaster Artist,” Sestero’s career seems promising. He’s receiving regular audition calls and looks like perfect leading man material. He even receives an offer to act in “Malcolm in the Middle” — but when Wiseau forces him to shave, he no longer fits the bill. That “The Disaster Artist” is so uncritical of Wiseau’s actions as late as 2017 seems like a bad sign for the acting industry. In her article, Kisner discusses the pervasive presence of “cattle cuts,” where actresses will line up and be cut from auditions based on looks alone. Has anything changed?
But COVID-19 has sent earthquakes through many industries, acting included. In what some news outlets dubbed a hot labor summer, several unions, including SAG-AFTRA and WGA shuttered their operations. By the end of negotiations, SAG-AFTRA secured an immediate 7% wage increase, streaming bonuses and limits on artificial intelligence, among other key wins. The message is clear: Actors are refusing to be treated like cattle. Method acting, like auteur theory, may be an important part of film history, but their cruel excesses and commodification of actors’ bodies are far from necessary. In the same way that the blues that Baraka discusses revolutionized American music, so too can new cultures of care revolutionize the trajectory of the performing arts world. When Izquierdo tells me about his experience working with intimacy coordination or Cantor tells me about the organized grief of Leopoldstadt, I know what I am seeing. This is the future.
Statement Correspondent Awmeo Azad can be reached at awmeo@umich.edu.