Onscreen Restraint

I've been thinking about the balance of silence and dialogue while watching my son navigate film school. He's directing student actors who all grew up on Glee and high school theater productions — you know the vibe, big expressions, playing to the back row, wanting every line to be their moment.

Here's the thing about screen acting that these theater kids don't always get: the camera is right there. It sees everything.

We evolved as face-reading meat machines. Way before we had words, our cave-dwelling ancestors were scanning micro-expressions – tiny eye twitches, subtle shifts in how someone stands, that half-second when someone stops breathing. In the age of IMAX and 4K, this evolutionary skill becomes even more powerful – the audience can see everything.

For my son's actors, this means learning a new language – the language of restraint. Theater trains you to project, but film asks you to contain. It requires trust that the camera will catch what you're feeling without you having to telegraph it to the cheap seats.

Effective screen performances often employ strategic stillness. Think about Rooney Mara stirring that coffee in Carol. Or Denzel washing his hands in Flight. Or the way Steve McQueen literally does not react to anything in Bullitt. These aren't moments of nothing happening – they're moments where everything is happening beneath the surface.

Sometimes a non-reaction can say more than a paragraph of inner monologue ever could. These moments create space for the audience to connect with characters on a deeper level.

On an adjacent tangent, I think film is mostly about restraint in performance, but TV — even the most ambitious, boundary-pushing TV — verges more toward verbal clarity.

During my years of network scribbling, I was taught that viewers needed to understand what was happening even while folding their laundry. The mandate was for more telling and less showing. Dialog had to convey story even when the audience wasn't looking at the screen.

Working on shows like Lost and Hannibal taught me how to balance more emotive visual storytelling with narrative clarity, demonstrating nuance and exposition could coexist on TV.

Stillness, when you nail it, is like a tractor beam for eyeballs. Give the audience just enough crumbs for their brains to do what they were built for – observe, puzzle out, feel stuff. Don't overwrite emotion. Don't explain the look. Just set up the moment... and let the face do its thing.

I've shared all this with my son and I hope his cast of eager theater kids will discover the power of doing less, trusting the lens, and finding those perfect moments where stillness speaks onscreen.