With the preparatory homework completed and the shooting schedule underway, the actor expands her empathy-soliciting efforts beyond the script-based intrasubjective work to accommodate the industrial circumstances of film production. The actor’s wholehearted commitment to the collaborative process of film production relies heavily on her habits for soliciting empathetic connections while navigating the film set’s industrial culture. These immersive habits help the actor to become “in the moment,” not only despite the flurry of industrial constraints but also because of their habits’ creative affordances.

This chapter explores how the on-set empathy-soliciting habits of professional screen actors navigate film production’s industrial culture while simultaneously producing the necessary intrasubjective, intersubjective, and performative empathetic bonds. Although hardly an exhaustive account of all the possible habits that an actor may use on set to transform industrial constraints into empathetic affordances, the habits described here had sufficient consensus among the interviewees as viable practices to warrant their inclusion and analysis. Generally speaking, this chapter examines some ways in which actors navigate the cognitive ecology of a film set’s industrial culture, collaborate with the camera, and then mobilize that collaboration to establish and configure their empathetic bonds.

Actors and Production Culture: Inductive, Ecumenical, and Self-effacing Practices on Set

Whereas industrial circumstances like shooting schedules and budgets are important details for a given production’s on-set culture, the interpersonal collaborative politics of production culture shape actors’ on-set work industry-wide. John Caldwell suggests that the industrial culture of film production manifests in distinct patterns of activities through which the entire filmmaking crew “theorize[s] through practice” as to how film ought to be made. Specifically, what Caldwell identifies as the inductive, ecumenical, and self-effacing patterns of practice resonate well with my interviewees’ experiences of how actors collaborate with production staff on set, which inevitably shapes the culture in which the actors perform.

The inductive practices of invoking ideas from well-known pieces of literary theory, historical analogy, aesthetic philosophy, and other intellectual references, emerge within the creative collaboration between the actor, screenwriter, and director. For example, MacFadzean’s anecdote from Chapter 4 about playing an “interesting” defense attorney instead of a stock caricature demonstrates this inductive production logic through his skillful play with the genre conventions of police procedural television.