But what effect did all this play on the director's part have on the onlooking cast? The director's personality and individual mannerisms were displayed in every role. Thereafter the actors endeavored to imitate him not to enact their parts. The hero merely gave an imitation of the director giving an imitation of the hero. The ingenue gave an imitation of the director imitating the ingenue. And so on through all the parts.
The results, it need hardly be pointed out, were not natural. In the end all the players gave bad imitations of the director. On top of this they endeavored to effect his mannerism and tricks of expression. As a consequence there was absolutely nothing distinctive about the completed picture. It was the director's and no one else's. The director, being conceited to a great degree, was naturally delighted with the result. But he was the only one delighted with it as is testified by the fact that he is not in the art today.
This method has gradually been forced out of the studio. There are few directors who insist on acting every part out nowadays. There are some left but not many. A few more years and they will all disappear and then we will have still better pictures.
Mr. De Mille evidently believes that a good many directors of the present day still adhere to the old fashioned method. It is to be hoped that he isn't altogether right.
“Too many directors,” he says, “consider it their duty to show an actor just how to play every scene in the picture. This type of director insists on acting out every role and demands that his cast shall mimic his action before the camera. The results are woefully wooden, unnatural and characterless.
“In the perfect photoplay each character must be distinctly itself. It must be sharply differentiated from all other characters in that particular play. This result can only be achieved by permitting each actor or actress to work out his or her own interpretation of a role.
“If I show an actor how to pick up a paper or a book in a scene he will consciously strive to imitate my actions. Now, what may be perfectly natural for me may be unnatural and awkward for him. At the best his attempt to copy my model will be but a poor reproduction of Cecil B. De Mille on the screen. If I carried that program through with respect to each player I would have just as many weak versions of Cecil B. De Mille as there are characters in the play.
“If, on the other hand, I explain to the actor what the action of the scene is and what idea or emotion I want him to convey to the spectator and then permit him to work out his own interpretation of the scene I have a distinctive, natural and far more powerful piece of work from that actor. I assume that every actor is better at creating than mimicking me.
“My task comes in in my effort to perfect his interpretation by helpful criticism and suggestion but not by example.
“Before beginning actual production on a picture I make it a rule to call together the entire cast and the technical staff. At this meeting I tell them the story with all the detail of characterization and atmosphere that I am capable of putting into it. I do not read them the continuity scene by scene. I try to make them see and feel the story and the characters and, as everyone in the production art knows, the straight reading of a continuity is an uninteresting and tedious proposition.