Elia Kazan
Use of “method” acting

As a product of the Group Theatre and Actors Studio, he was most noted for his use of "Method" actors, especially Brando and Dean. During an interview in 1988, Kazan said, "I did whatever was necessary to get a good performance including so-called Method acting. I made them run around the set, I scolded them, I inspired jealousy in their girlfriends... The director is a desperate beast!... You don't deal with actors as dolls. You deal with them as people who are poets to a certain degree." Actor Robert De Niro called him a "master of a new kind of psychological and behavioral faith in acting".

Kazan was aware of the limited range of his directing abilities:

I don't have great range. I am no good with music or spectacles. The classics are beyond me... I am a mediocre director except when a play or film touches a part of my life's experience... I do have courage, even some daring. I am able to talk to actors... to arouse them to better work. I have strong, even violent feelings, and they are assets.

He explained that he tried to inspire his actors to offer ideas:

When I talk to the actors they begin to give me ideas, and I grab them because the ideas they give me turn them on. I want the breath of life from them rather than the mechanical fulfillment of the movement which I asked for... I love actors. I used to be an actor for eight years, so I do appreciate their job.

Kazan, however, held strong ideas about the scenes and would try to merge an actor's suggestions and inner feelings with his own. Despite the strong eroticism created in Baby Doll, for example, he set limits. Before shooting a seduction scene between Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker, he privately asked Wallach, "Do you think you actually go through with seducing that girl?" Wallach writes, "I hadn't thought about that question before, but I answered... 'No'." Kazan replies, "Good idea, play it that way." Kazan, many years later, explained his rationale for scenes in that film:

What is erotic about sex to me is the seduction, not the act... The scene on the swings (Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker) in Baby Doll is my exact idea of what eroticism in films should be.
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