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The Crying Game
How do actors learn to sob on cue? Oprah’s acting coach, a soap star, a famous clown-class graduate, and others explain.
Or the fact that, for decades, it was considered normal for directors to psychologically torment their actors in the hopes of getting them to break down on-camera — think of Stanley Kubrick torturing Shelley Duvall with impunity during The Shining or Alfred Hitchcock throwing live pigeons at Tippi Hedren on the set of The Birds. Hollywood’s craven obsession with crying is perfectly dramatized in a scene early on in Damien Chazelle’s1920s Golden Age period piece, Babylon, in which wannabe starlet Nellie LaRoy (Margot Robbie), yanked onto a movie set at the last minute, jump-starts her career by sobbing on request with near-chilling exactitude, pausing effortlessly each time the cameras stop rolling to flash a self-satisfied grin to the roomful of stunned industry pros. Ford, a skilled conversationalist, gets me comfortable and talking at length about one of my favorite movies that always makes me cry: Meet Joe Black, the highly polarizing ’90s Martin Brest film wherein Brad Pitt plays Death, as well as a doctor who is hit by two cars at once, and does Jamaican patois.
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