Arts & Entertainment

Frost/Nixon: Read-through & Staging Rehearsal

Lesson time 20:23 min

A director’s job is to narrow the seemingly endless staging choices. Here, Ron offers a rare opportunity to watch his directorial process in action.

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Topics include: Read-through • First Staging Rehearsal

Ron Howard

Teaches Directing

Ron Howard teaches directing, editing, and storytelling in his exclusive video lessons.

Preview

Yeah I think we can really figure out what this scene is about, the blocking-- Actors. Hey. Hi, I'm Ron. Brian. Gavin. Trevor. Earl. Pleasure. Nice to meet you. Thanks for doing this today. I'm looking forward to it. We're using a scene from Frost/Nixon, which is a movie I directed. In fact, we have the original shooting script over there. I almost opened it up and looked at the scene that we're going to rehearse today, and then I said, no, let's let it be our scene. What I want to try to do is a kind of an exercise, treating it as though it was a rehearsal day on a movie. I want to try to connect with your thoughts about the character. If you have any questions about it, we'll flesh those kind of things out. Then begin to work on the staging. I'll stage it in a number of ways. So be patient. I may want to stage it from a couple of different perspectives, keeping in mind different factors. Time. You know, there might be a simple way to stage it, and a more ambitious way. We'll explore that. Using lighting. Perhaps different things with ideas with camera work, and so forth. So we'll just work through it. Before we get started reading the scene, which is the way I'd like to start, I'll just kind of explain. When we would shoot it, it would be on a practical location. It would be a real garage, with a little alleyway. When we made the movie, we found a practical location that had those couple of features. So we're sort of emulating that here for our rehearsal space today. [MUSIC PLAYING] Let's see, so who is playing who, again? I am Reston. You're Reston, the journalist. Sam Rockwell played your part. David Frost. David Frost, Michael Sheen. You have an accent? I can try it, if you want. Beautiful. That'll help. That will help. I like it better already. I'm playing Bert. Bert, right. He eventually wound up being a Lord, and ran the BBC for a long time. I'm playing Zelnick. Zelnick. Oliver Platt played your part. OK, great. Well, let's read through it. You guys sort of know roughly where this is in the story. There's just been an interview, an important early interview where Richard Nixon seemed to more or less control the whole thing. He didn't really let David Frost get the questions in that you guys have been preparing. So you're the journalists. You have been preparing David Frost for this vitally important television interview. David comes in, feeling like he's done a hell of a good job. And you guys are very concerned that he's oblivious. So without moving around or anything, let's just read through the scene a couple of times. Crash. Frost, Birt, Reston burst out of the house. What revolution, David? You just let Richard Nixon claim the country was in a state of revolution with protesters bombing...

About the Instructor

Ron Howard made his first film in 15 days with $300,000. Today, his movies have grossed over $1.8 billion. In his first-ever online directing class, the Oscar-winning director of Apollo 13 and A Beautiful Mind decodes his craft like never before. In lessons and on-set workshops, you’ll learn how to evaluate ideas, work with actors, block scenes, and bring your vision to the screen whether it’s a laptop or an IMAX theater.

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Ron Howard

Ron Howard teaches directing, editing, and storytelling in his exclusive video lessons.

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