By Stephen Hale (writer, producer and lead of “One Too Many Mornings”)
(from the 2010 Sundance Film Festival)

“This is not a character, this is you. Think like the character. Be the character. Live the character.”

Those are all things an acting teacher once told me. Not just told me, but screamed at me. I remember these words so well because, as he screamed, he was also spitting on me. Beads of spit landed on my chin, so close to my mouth. I will always remember those words — if for no other reason than the fear that his spit at any second could have landed in my mouth.

I got into acting because I honestly love to portray different people. I love to be in situations that I will never have the chance to be in for real. I also love to give people that hope or sadness or laughter or whatever emotions from seeing me act. I want people to feel what I am feeling. I want people to think what I’m thinking. Even if what I am thinking is, indeed, acting.

Acting is wonderful because I can dive headfirst into someone else’s world: I can be attacked by aliens, I can sleep with beautiful women, or, as was my case in “One Too Many Mornings,” I can party party party. You can portray anything you want and at the end of the day, go home and be yourself.

Or so I thought.

In “One Too Many Mornings,” I play a guy who lives in a church. The character has low aspirations — he just has to turn off all the lights, lock the front door, and he can live there for free.

Well, in real life, I really do live in a church. For free. In exchange for turning off the lights and locking the front door.

When you’re making an independent film like ours, with hardly any money, you use whatever locations you can get for free. This meant we were shooting in my church apartment. The problem: The character’s life was so upside down, the apartment needed to look like an absolute shit hole. So we transformed my entire apartment into my character’s apartment.

It looked amazing — kind of like a messy storage closet. My walls were wall-papered horrible patterns. I had empty boxes everywhere. There was a fake Christmas tree in one corner. Several empty bottles of liquor on my shelves. There was even some type of three-foot-long steel bingo cage lying in the middle of the floor.

Lucky me. Since we could only afford to shoot the movie on nights and weekends, I had to live in this shit hole for a year and a half. A YEAR AND A HALF! How the hell was I supposed to do this?

As I said before, I love being able to dive head first into a character. But this, this took that one step too far. You make sacrifices when you make a small, no-budget film, but I felt lost and completely out of it. Not just in my acting, but in real life; it really affected me having to live in this. It made me angry. And upset. And I wanted to fight my director a lot because of it.

And he, of course, didn’t care, because the longer we shot, the more in touch with my character I was forced to become. My teacher’s mantra could not have been more true: “This is not a character; this is you. Think like the character. Be the character. Live the character.”