No. You Still Can't Memorize Your Lines. Beat It Out!

I had to shoot a self-tape for a psychological horror feature film. It required me to say lines in Russian and Italian—two languages I didn’t speak. To say the very least, learning lines in two foreign languages isn’t easy—and I already speak four languages. I learned the meaning of the words and phonetically memorized the lines. I had worked on my 9 Questions, but the foreign words on the script just wouldn’t come to me when I needed them to. When they did come, they were flat and mechanical. I had been working on my scenes for two days in this manner, but time was running out. Then I realized I hadn’t done one important step—I forgot to break down the scene into beats .