"The problem with a lot of directors is that they don't know how to rehearse, and they're a little bit afraid of the actors," Tarantino says.
A modular aluminum frame outlines a few deceptively quiet images: a wheeled armchair; Hamlet sitting in the armchair, reading; three video monitors facing out into the theatre and replicating bits and pieces of the actor and the stage; a wide stepped platform, stage left; and, behind it all, a large movie screen on which the curtain is about to rise on Richard Burton's "Hamlet".
A motion-picture performance can be synthesized bit by bit, by the joint efforts of the actor, the director, the cameraman, and others.
"He is a little bit of an actor, he looks in the camera all the time," he said.
He's nominated for Best Supporting Actor for "Silver Linings Playbook," a David O. Russell film that's a bit of an actor's favorite (it's the only movie to produce nominations in all four acting categories this year).
When he was still a very young man, he could greet Dickens in the street and then, in a few words in his journal, he could pin down the physical appearance of the fifty-year-old author: a dandy, a bit of an actor, vain of his slender figure, his hat tilted on his head.
Celia Darker, his teacher, told the Guardian in 2012: "He was also a bit of an actor.
He was a bit of an actor in some ways, without really trying to be an actor.
He was quite an unpleasant bloke: he fancied himself as a bit of an actor, so he'd learn Shakespeare and get his wife to test him.
'Anyway, my character's a bit of an actor herself, so if she was feeling her way, why shouldn't I?' Though Donna was the first blind person she's played, she's one of several memorable mums Collette has played over the years.
