The English-speaking small group at the two-week ZEGG "Summercamp" I often attend is most often led by Kastor Stein, who has the reputation of being one of the most skillful facilitators for the Zegg "Forum" process.
Once when I asked him what he thought his secret was as a Forum leader, he told us about his father. Kastor's father, he told us, is conductor who specializies in traveling and working with various orchestras around the world. He has, Kastor said, the reputation for being able to make an average orchestra sound very good.
On being asked by an interviewer for the secret of his success, Kastor's father said, "I let them play."
Whereas most conductors start rehearsing a piece of music by working out a particular interpretation and then instructing the orchestra members on the basis of that interpretation, Kastor's father starts by consulting with the members of the orchestra on how they themselves think the music should be played. And the results are apparently very good.
This story made a big impression on me. And it seems to me that it's something that applies in many different fields. Not only in the arts but even, I suspect, even in the business world.
In cinema, there are many examples of outstanding scenes which were the result of improvisation among very talented actors. In "Midnight Run," for instance, one of the most brilliant scenes in the movie was the results of Charles Grodin misreading a line in the script and saying, "As your accountant" rather than "As an accountant." Robert De Niro picked up on Grodin's misreading and then the two actors just ran with it for quite a while.
Robert Altman is famous for demanding this sort of improvisation from his actors. For many scenes, instead of presenting his actors with a script, he simply tells them what the general story line is and then lets them take it where they want to. And if this results in the film moving off in a new direction, so much the better.
I believe that this is one of the things that makes some of his films so alive.
But on the other hand, some actors are just no good at this, and in this case Altman is left to make a rather lackluster scene more interesting by resorting to tricky camera work, as he did with Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye.
But some directors make excellent films by being complete control freaks and apparently giving their actors almost no freedom. Stanley Kubrick and Woody Allen are two well known examples.
And so is John Sayles, who has always thought of himself more as a writer than a director. In my opinion, "Brother from Another Planet" is one of the most wonderful movies ever made. (I believe it was John Sayles second film.) For me, it has that same aliveness that one finds in Robert Altman's work. And yet Joe Morton, the star, said that every line in the film was delivered exactly as it had been written in the original script.
Normally when one works one a film, one starts by being given a script, or a partial script, printed on white pages. Then within a few days one gets revisions, printed on paper of a different color. And by the time the shooting is over, one has a whole rainbow of different colored pages. With John Sayles, at least according to Joe Morton's account, there are no revisions. The original script on its white pages is what the audience will hear.
In any case, I believe that the let-them-play principle applies even to the writing process itself, in the sense that many writers work by giving this sort of freedom to their characters. I myself am convinced that this was true of Shakespeare. In a way, Shakespeare started out with what would seem like a very uncreative approach to playwriting, since his goal was simply to retell an existing story, usually mixing together two or more stories.
But to me as a writer (if I can call myself that), it is quite apparent that fairly quickly his characters stop following the game plan, and the story starts moving off in a completely unplanned direction.
In Hamlet, for instance, Shakespeare seems to stumble around quite a bit at the beginning, unable to find his way, giving us the interactions between Polonius and Laertes and between Polonius and Ophelia which may be very fine scenes in their way, but where Shakespeare seems to be taking the play in a very different direction from what wound up as its final form. (Of course we know that not the whole text was presented in the actual performance, since Shakespeare, like all subsequent Shakespearean directors, did substantial cutting.)
King Lear is to me another blatant example, where Shakespeare starts out to tell a story about the cruelty of hypocritical flatterers and then winds up with a story about the nature of humanity.
Of course there are zillions of different critical theories for Shakespeare. For my part, I am totally convinced that my perceptions are correct. But then I imagine that all the other critics are too.
But there are many modern writers who have provided us with their own accounts of their creative process. And some of these writers, including some very good ones, do seem to favor the Stanley Kubrick-Woody Allen approach, or at least that's what they claim. And many others, Stephen King for one, simply put their characters in an interesting situation then then "let them play."