Alex is 14 years old and attends Drama classes at Step On Stage. In the past she has also been a member of our Musical Theatre department and she also regularly performs as part of our youth theatre. Alex wrote this piece early in September.
Summer has been and gone. Being bored because you had nothing to do, to now being bored because you find the class hard; having all the time in the world, to now having to cram a week’s worth of homework into one night; spending all night on your phone, to wishing you had got more sleep. These are the pros and cons that our generation struggle with on the first couple of weeks back to school.
Most of us would have spent our 6 weeks of holidays going abroad or having fun with friends or even staring aimlessly into space contemplating life. But not me. I decided to fill my spare time with old school, retro films as well as new blockbusters. Yes that’s right. I had a 6 week movie marathon! The thing I like most about movies isn’t the actors playing the characters - as half of the old school ones I didn’t even recognise, but it is the stories which actually haven’t changed over time. There is still the one hero or the girl next door or the funny naughty boy and the high school drop-out. In fact that you don’t even have to watch a film in English to cry (that may have happened to me)!
But what fascinates me the most, is when you watch a film that is an adaptation of a book you have read. These films are normally, in my opinion, one of the best as you already have in your mind what the characters will look like and you feel a strong connection with them but now you have a personality and a voice to go with it. This is also how I like to choose my favourite actors - the ones who can play multiple roles but who play them the way they were supposed to be, or at least how I imagined them to be.
One of my favourite childhood books, Wonder, is about to premier in the UK soon. The enthusiasm amongst my friends that their childhood hero, Auggie, can be loved by future generations as he is firmly immortalised in film is enormous. Jacob Tremblay, who is starring as August, now has over 1 million Instagram followers just because people were amazed at how someone so young can act better than they ever imagined. Another example is one of my other all time favourite books, To Kill A Mockingbird. The film is in black and white but watching it now, teleports you right there and it almost makes it worse seeing poor Tom Robinson. These are two examples of when ‘page to picture’ has succeeded but we all know the horror stories of when a book you truly enjoyed has been made into a film which didn’t get the message across the way it should have been. I mean, we have all angrily tweeted a director or at least seen the tweets!
What I am trying to say is that not only is acting itself an art but the production of a film and keeping the audience intrigued is so much more interesting than everyone makes out. From a teen in this day and age who loves watching Dirty Dancing and The Breakfast Club but does enjoy a modern rom-com, I can confidently write that there is a secret to getting a ‘page into a picture’ and it only is a certain few can do it well …
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