Gene Wilder on the Importance of Physicality in Acting

Gene Wilder: Stanislavski, do you know who Stanislavski was? The great Russian teacher and director of acting. At the end of his career he came to the point in rehearsals where he relied mostly on finding the psychological physical actions that told the story. As it turns out it’s made for movies that formula, it’s not a formula, but that principle. When you saw the silent movies, except for the legend at the bottom of the screen, they were telling the story with pictures, then later on the pictures began to talk. I think the best combination was in the Marx brothers where you had brilliant dialogue and fantastic physical action. But too much later on...Hitchcock used to say he stopped going to movies because he was tired of watching photographs of people talking. And that’s what that came out of...that quote of mine, and that’s how I feel. If you tell a story where the audience...my teacher Lee Strasberg used to say, “What if they cut the soundtrack? Would the audience know what’s going on?” And that’s what I ask myself on every page, “Will the audience know what’s going on?”