How can actors cry in movies

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The best improvisers are those who can intuitively act and behave onstage as though they are in a real situation. Additional techniques are explained in the wikipedia article - an interesting read.

Not wanting to detract from Nobby's excellent answer I's like to add that very often directors don't use techniques in that sense, but just rely on their actors to know what they're doing. I was impressed by this young actress's professionalism. Contrary to what actors usually do, meticulously go through a scene prior to shooting it, she told him not to talk about it in advance, but to just let her suffer the rape as if it really happened to her.

He said that between the cuts she was still crying. Many actors can turn tears on and off at will. Others struggle with it and need the right kind of assistance and sometimes get it. Jackie Cooper in Please Don't Shoot My Dog tells how they pretended to shoot his dog to get him to cry for a scene in Skippy David Hollander born told how once when he was too happy to do a crying scene he made himself unhappy enough by destroying one of his treasured toys.

When you see a scene with crying or other intense emotions you have no way of telling how easy or hard it was for those particular actors to act that scene. In an interview with Jimmy Kimmel, director Wes Craven known for Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream said he would tell a young actor "Your mother's dead" and then quickly walk off the set.

Said it worked every time. Some actors are just naturals, as other answers have mentioned. Here's Henry Thomas's audition tape for the role of Elliot in E. The tears start to flow right at the mark. As someone who does community theatre and has certain emotional triggers, I really channel into the things that set me off and work with them.

The best one is songs, songs that are sad and that I know make me cry. I listen to them a few hours before going on stage and during my performance, replay the song in my head and relate it to how my character is feeling.

This generally sets me off to the point where after I got off stage, I had other actors asking me how I did it and if I was alright. What I am trying to say is, the key to acting is how you can trigger your emotions and what pushes you buttons. That is how you can get the best out of yourself and create a convincing performance.

I developed the ability to cry on command. I can keep a straight face and just let tears pour out so I guess it's easier for me. One method that tends to work is yawning.

If you can yawn while keeping your mouth shut your eyes will tear up. So being tired will help with those emotional scenes. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams?

Learn more. Details of these methods are described below. Actors can draw on personal experiences that make them want to cry. For some people, thinking about a certain specific moment always makes them cry. For example, it could be. For example, when year-old Henry Thomas was auditioning for the role of Elliott in E. However, there is a side effect to this approach. Angelina Jolie stated that when she had just started acting, she used to put herself into these brutal, traumatic, emotional states trying to have every negative thought she could so that she could give a sincere performance.

She also spoke about how that took such an emotional toll on her that sometimes one scene would require her to be out of commission for days afterward because it would take her that long to recover from the emotional trauma.

She later said that, as she got more experienced as an actor, it was easier for her to express certain emotions without reliving them, which leads us to the next technique.

For example, Julianne Moore has just always been able to draw on emotions and instantly feel things. By the way, you might notice that, when you try to smile genuinely for a while, you actually do end up feeling a bit happier than you were before.

You can learn to pretend to be sad enough to cry in a similar way. For example, when laughing, some people notice that they shake their shoulders, and then they can trigger laughter in themselves by shaking their shoulders.

Like how throwing up can be triggered by tickling the back of your throat. With crying, you might notice how your breathing is different, the way you suck in the air with an irregular pattern. It all depends on you, however, because different people cry in different ways. To make such pretending easier, some actors also have tricks to achieve red, puffy faces and water eyes. For example,. An actor might be able to portray the emotion but if physical tears are required for a specific close-up, sometimes a makeup person will just put some eye drops in your eye.

Some people might consider this cheating but remember the logistics of being on set. You might be doing the same scene from five different angles, three to four times per angle. You may have brought real tears on the first take but, after the 9th or 10th take, perhaps you might just want to complement your sincere emotional delivery with a couple of eyedrops.

Additionally, actors can apply chemical eye irritants to produce tears. It looks like lipstick and is applied under the eyes to irritate them into crying. You can see from the reviews that actors do use it. However, this is simply not true.

Take these words to heart: acting is not crying.