Is there some special method to remembering an entire play or movie without having to refer to your lines? I can barely remember one paragraph of lines to the tee, let alone hundreds of pages of lines. Thanks!
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Part of it is just reading and re-reading the text, and just plain memorising the words. You just have to grind it out.
Part of it is _studying_ the text, thinking about what you’re reading and understanding it. If the writer is any good, your character has a voice, a personality. You can make sense of how your character feels in that scene and how they would phrase things. E.g. If you’re a Marvel fan, you’re probably able to say whether a line is spoken by Tony Stark or Steve Rogers just by looking at it. Or Hermione vs Harry if you’re a Harry Potter fan. This makes the memorisation part _much_ easier.
Then, the writer has a voice of their own too. A really _really_ famous example is Shakespeare’s use of iambic pentameter, which gives his writing a very particular rhythm. Again, because you know that the text has to fit that rhythm, it becomes much easier to memorise.
In film and TV, you can “cheat” — you don’t have to memorise the whole script in one go, you can revise before filming a scene, and maybe take a couple of takes if you’re not happy with how it came out.
Finally — sometimes you _don’t_ perfectly memorise your lines, and just improvise something on the spot when you can’t remember the right line. If you’ve been good about doing your homework, studying the character and the text, there’s a decent chance that the audience won’t notice (on stage), or that the director decides to keep. You won’t get away with this when you’re doing something really well-known like Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy, but there’s loads of YouTube videos about improvised lines that made it to the cinematic release, especially in comedy.
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