#bad ethics

For some actors, this kind of thing is helpful, especially if they have an easy job stepping in and out of character and they have a constitution that lets them just go, "Phew! Alright, that was crazy. What's for dinner?" If being tied to a chair for twelve hours in order to film a torture scene is something they want and need? Sure, knock yourself out. Let us know what you need to do your job the best way you know how.

For a lot of actors who are trained in live performance, unless they were trained with the American Method—which has since been deemed dangerous after the loss of Heath Ledger—aren't going to need twelve hours tied to a chair with no breaks in order to deliver a good scene.

The training we receive focuses on giving us the tools we need to wholeheartedly believe what isn't real, because when it comes to live performance, there's no editing, and we have to relive the same experience as often as eight times a week like it's the first time. So when we're stuck in one scene for twelve hours, living it over and over again, we can have a hard time stepping out.

My previous post went a bit into explaining how our breath and vocal training helps to intensify our emotional experiences, and allows us to expand them outward so that every last person in the theatre believes we are feeling what we're feeling. When a director tells us to go somewhere, we follow, we give everything, we go there.

A lot of people (including directors) believe that the job of the director is to push and challenge the actors to go to these deep, intense, sometimes frightening places. And that's partly true, we need someone guiding us, holding the string that leads us back into the real world so we can find our way back out.

That is why it is also the responsibility of the director to help the actor get back.

Any director who is going to push the limits of their actors as a direct, personal, and professional responsibility to help them come back into the room and leave the scene behind. And there are SO MANY TOOLS that exist, both in the performance and the mental health worlds, that can help an actor come out of an experience like this if anyone bothered to learn them, or better yet bring a professional onset and do a proper clearing. We need aftercare after something like this. We might be professionals, but we're still human beings, and there's only so much we can take for so long before we need someone's help.

Regardless of whether or not Batey was able to take a break (which I believe would have been possible), his mental and emotional health are the responsibility of the people challenging them, pushing them, stretching them.

There are people saying "That's why he's paid."

Bullshit. You think this kind of thing only happens to actors who get paid a lot of money? You think this ethical catastrophe is the result of people sitting down and saying, "We're paying him X amount of money, so we're able to do X amount of damage to his psyche"???

Hollywood sets the standards for the rest of the industry, going all the way down to fucking childrens' theatre and independent studio productions who see what the big leagues are doing and think that's normal. Independent theatre companies that don't pay their actors, student films that pay $50 per day of shooting because Hollywood is too busy hoarding all the money, leaving the rest of us to grovel for government grants.