Was Meisner an authoritarian presence?
Very much so. He followed the premise that he was there to teach something and we were there to learn it. (Laughs.) I feel the same way. I’m an expert in this particular area and I’m here to teach you and you’re supposed to be here to learn. And that’s the agenda. But on the other hand, Sandy Meisner was extraordinarily sensitive toward good work and also in understanding the nature of the young artist’s struggle—that actors should feel entitled to struggle, to fail. That’s very important. He used to say it’s okay to fall on your face—endlessly—as long as you’re falling in the right direction, diving after the right thing. I always tell students this story about Thomas Edison: At one point, while he was trying to invent the light bulb, he had gone through 1,700 different substances trying to make a filament that worked—and none of them worked. A friend of his said to him, “How can you keep pursuing this, in the face of all these failures?” And Edison said, “Failures? These are not fail
