Film sets can be volatile and sometimes dangerous places for actors and crews, especially in big blockbusters.There are numerous lists online of tragic fatalities on film sets. It is for this reason that safety is such a priority in film. However, accidents can happen in film which are not dangerous for cast and crew but can have an impact on the creative process of shooting a film, it is imperative that directors use these to their advantage instead of letting it inhibit their films.
One example of this could be an actor forgetting their lines and going off script or merely choosing to ad-lib lines instead of following the script. While it is very easy for a director to call ‘cut’ and re-shoot the scene with the correct dialogue, this can be detrimental to the feeling of a scene and it is often the actor who has prepared hard to get into a role who knows what a scene needs best. Improvised lines such as the famous “You talkin’ to me?” in Taxi Driver can make up the most memorable and influential lines in a film and it is therefore the role of the director to delineate the creative freedom of an actor and embrace the unplanned, accidental moments in film. However, discretion is obviously essential and that is where there is a grey area: just because a line is improvised, it is not automatically profound and just because a line is not in the script, it doesn’t mean it won’t aid the scene. To use these unplanned gems and filter the mistakes of actors is the job of the director, if they are planned or not. What must be remembered however, is that the one line an audience may have remembered from a film may not have even been in the script and could merely be an ‘accident’.
Craft skills blog 