Christian Bale - Dialogue without Dialogue

Whilst watching The Big Short again the other day I was blown away by how good the acting was. One scene in particular really grabbed my attention and got me thinking about acting without dialogue.

It's the scene in which Christian Bale's character Dr. Michael Burry is negotiating a deal with Goldman Sachs in order to short the housing market. 

Have a watch of the entire scene below:





A really good scene, Bale is super interesting to watch. So there is a point in the scene where the camera rests on Bale as he is waiting for the other two to finish negotiating. He isn't listening, just waiting in my opinion. His acting here is so genius i love it! Watch the clip below again which should play at this particular point (2 minutes in):





SO GOOD. By acting the way that he does Bale gives the character depth and dimension. In animation we constantly strive for this kind of unique acting instead of the generic cliched stuff.  So the question is, what exactly is Bale doing that is so interesting and how does he do it?

Let's allow Bale to explain to explain that himself:





Niiiice. So what he's getting at is even though he doesn't have any dialogue on paper, he has dialogue in his head which informs his acting choices which we see on screen. This whole interview is super interesting and worth a watch. I've pulled out some of the quotes below:

"If you're silent in the scene you have an internal converstation that never stops"

"What i'll do sometimes when beginning a film [is] write dialogue for the silence"

"You can convey almost everything you need to convey without saying anything"

Now, with what we've just learnt we can look back at the scene from The Big Short with fresh eyes and try to decipher what Bale's inner dialogue might be...

This is a really simple concept but when done right it really brings the character to life.


Just briefly Michael Caine also talks about this method for listening in a scene (it applies whether someone is listening or not as in Bale's case) too. Again this whole Workshop is worth a watch too:






So, how does all this apply to animation? I think it's especially useful for those quiet scenes where a character may not be doing much . It's tempting to over animate these as a cheap way of trying to keep the audience interested. But by constructing this inner dialogue we have a structure on which to guide the performance. And this in and of itself it makes the character seem much more alive. Which is ultimately what it's all about! Hope this helps :)