How Lloyd Bridges Inspired a Family Tradition That Led to ‘Acting: The First Six Lessons’ Film Adaptation

Not long into a 40-minute Zoom interview, Beau Bridges adjusts the camera to bring into view a painting hanging high on the wall overhead. Painted by his brother, Jeff Bridges, the artwork features the face of their father, legendary actor Lloyd Bridges. “There he is,” Beau says while seated next to daughter, Emily. It was a fitting reveal that tied in perfectly to the topic of conversation, Beau and Emily’s collaboration on the feature film adaption of Acting: The First Six Lessons. Based on the classic book from master acting teacher Richard Boleslavsky, Beau and Emily go toe-to-toe in the film with Emily making her directorial debut from a script they co-wrote.

It likely would not have happened had Lloyd, who passed away March 10, 1998, not gifted the text to his sons who, in return, kept the tradition alive by passing it to their children. Considered a must-read by actors in the decades since it was published in the ’30s, the book covers “lessons” like concentration, memory of emotion, dramatic action, characterization, observation and rhythm. It took on special meaning for Emily when she rediscovered it during her days studying theatre at Fordham University.

Not long after, she and her father started tinkering with an adaptation, first for the stage and later, the screen. The final product features the intimate acting scenes cut between interviews with many of the Bridges — Lloyd, Jeff, Lucinda, Jordan and Dorothy, to name a few — making it a true family affair.

Beau and Emily spoke to the The Hollywood Reporter, detailing how Boleslavsky’s book became a film, what it was like to work together so closely and whether there’s more directing in Emily’s future.

Beau, we should start with you, because you received Acting: The First Six Lessons from your father. What is it about the book that inspired a family tradition?

BEAU My dad was my teacher and my acting coach, and he gave me all the tools to try it as a profession. I feel so blessed that I had a dad in this business, a business that’s so hard to get that first gig and to have a shot. He gave me that opportunity and he also gave me that book. I enjoyed it immediately because it was a book about the craft and how to prepare to be an actor. I also enjoyed so much the relationship between the teacher and student who he calls the Creature. Most of us have teachers and coaches in our history that mean so much to us and that’s true for me.

My dad also believed, and so do I, that a lot of these lessons about acting can be applied to life; concentration, memory of emotion, rhythm, all of these things impact us in our daily lives. So, I passed it to all my kids. My dad also gave it to my brother Jeff and my sister Cindy and they gave it to their families. It has a lot of meaning in our family.

Emily, do you remember the moment he gave it to you?

EMILY I was first introduced to the book when I was in middle school, so probably about 12. It was the same year my grandfather passed away, who I loved dearly. In our family, which you will see as part of the film, there’s a lot of overlap between what was play, what was just hanging out and what was performing. My grandmother was endlessly playing little games, asking us to pretend a teacup was something else…

BEAU “Make a happy face…”

EMILY Yeah. “Make a sad face…Make love eyes…” It was all of these games that I thought were normal and apparently are not. My grandfather, on the other side of that, always took things quite seriously. As a little kid, I remember being in the third grade and doing a community theater production of Alice in Wonderland, and knowing that I took it so seriously, and he worked with me on the part. He said, “OK, we’re going to talk about who is she? Where is she from?”

We developed character histories and all of this kind of fun stuff, and I always appreciated that because he’s a person who worked with kids, raised kids and loved kids. He saw us as other fully fleshed-out human beings with ideas and creativity. I remember coming to the book at a time at a time when I lost my grandfather and although I didn’t understand the book very well, I was able to revisit it again and again and connect with him in that way.

BEAU And there he is. [Beau adjusts the camera to show a painting featuring the face of Lloyd Bridges that is hanging high on the wall.] Jeff painted that one, he was about 16.

What a great way to grow up. Did you ever consider a profession other than acting?

EMILY There are a lot of days where maybe I wish that I did, but no. It wasn’t ever a thing that we were pushed into doing. But we grew up going to film sets with my dad and he’s always been good about saying, “Hey, do you want to try this out? Why don’t you audition and we’ll see if they’ll have you in it?” We apprenticed and got to do a little bit here and there and then a little bit more. It’s been a unique experience and a really strange thing because a lot of us are in the business and yet, it’s such a hard thing to get work in.

I’m very mindful of the fact that I’m in such a strange situation, being the family that I’m from, but also so grateful for the opportunities we’ve had to work together. My dad once wrote out a list of all the times that any of our family members have appeared together in a film, and it ended in the hundreds. There have been many times when we’ve intentionally wanted to work together, like this piece, and others when it was like, “Gosh we really need to find someone who likes like a younger version of so-and-so.” The answer was, “Well, we got one of those.”

Beau, tell me what that was like welcoming your children into your world in that way?

BEAU My first job was by myself. I was a little kid carried through a movie by John Garfield, but I didn’t have any lines. When I worked in my dad’s show, Sea Hunt, he said, “I can help you get this job, which is a very difficult thing to get, but you’re going to have to really work hard. There are a lot of people who want these jobs and they’re all going to do their best to get it. So, you have to go the further yard to win the part.” He made it clear that it was not an easy business. Rejection was like the sun coming up, and I think I probably told Emily a lot of the same things, but working with family is a tradition that my dad started a long time ago. Once my brother, Jeff, and I got our careers going, he would call and say, “Hey, I hear you got a gig, anything in there for me? Anything in there for your cousin or your brother?” He loved working with family, and we’ve done that all along.

Emily, let’s go back to the book. It is a family tradition that apparently resurfaced while you were at Fordham University studying theater …

EMILY Yeah, I got reacquainted with the book in college. That was probably my third real encounter with it. There was the initial moment and then I kind of peeked at it throughout high school. Then, again, in college which felt like, an official New York City theater major thing to do, studying this book and all the things that came with it. I really did a deep dive on it the way a 19-year-old who’s become obsessed with something can do.

My dad and I had always talked about the way it’s written, like a conversation back and forth. We talked about how interesting it would be to see it as a play with characters talking to one another. At Christmas during the year I graduated college, I typed out Boleslavsky’s work into a Word document. I gave that to my dad for Christmas, and I said, “We’re going to start editing this. We’re going to start playing with it, and see what we can come of it.”

Later that summer, when I finished school, I was doing repertory theater in [Topanga Canyon] over at Theatricum Botanicum. I stayed with my folks that summer and my dad and I started playing with the document. We wrote new scenes, took things away, brought them back and just played around. Ultimately, what we came up with was mostly Boleslavsky. His words are like poetry, and we just made it breathe a little bit, in terms of the characters, and then we performed that at Theater West in L.A., and we workshopped it for a while. We published the play with Samuel French in 2011, and then just started performing it wherever we could. We’ve done it at different places all over the country, really. Early on, we would do it at libraries, wherever someone would listen to us, just until we got it how we wanted it. And so that was the initial manifestation of this project.

Then it became this film that plays almost like a masterclass from the Bridges family. It also features interviews that were filmed by your brother, correct?

EMILY Yes. My brother, Casey, directed all the interviews. Dad, do you want to talk a little bit about how we got into as a film?

BEAU Right around 2018, I was invited to Ringling College to teach a master’s class in directing, which I did. My host there was a man named David Shapiro from New York. David has a company there called Semkhor, and he was a wonderful host. We got along really well, and at the end, he asked, “We want to make films here at Ringling. Do you have any projects?” I handed him Acting: The First Six Lessons, and he really liked the play, but he said, “It’s a wonderful narrative play,” he said, “but what really interests me is how your family is involved in this book, and how important it is to your family. What if you combine a documentary approach with the narrative and introduce your family to talk about what the book means to them?”

I liked the idea and wondered how the heck it was going to mesh together. But I trusted my director right here, Emily, who did a good job. The rest of the family — my brother, sister, son — all came in to take part in these talks. They really are talks, not like interviews.

EMILY It’s not like a formal interview setup. I love how my brother Casey did the interviews because they take place in my parents’ living room or my uncle’s living room and the viewer can feel like they are there with us. It’s a lot of fun.

Emily, your dad gave you a nice compliment. I have to ask, it’s one thing to be in front of the camera as long as you have but another to direct. What was the biggest challenge?

EMILY It definitely was a really natural fit because we’ve spent over a decade with these characters, and even longer than that with the story. The original production at Theater West was directed by Charlie Mount, who was just wonderful to work with, and he really helped us early on in finding our feet with these characters. I feel like I had a lot of early mentorship from him. Obviously, working with my dad and getting to talk constantly about what we wanted it to be. I think it’s really fortunate to have such a strong vision of what you want the experience to be, and I have never had that before, so I think that was a great jumping-off place for my first time as a director.

It was also really interesting because there was a lot of life imitating art happening here. Because of this unique partnership with Semkhor and Ringling, we worked with students in key positions on the film. Our cinematographer, Jack Patterson, our set designer, Alexis Dolfi, a lot of really important positions were led by people who were just finishing up their time in film school. Certainly, my dad and I have been on lots of professional film sets, so we’re offering some of that mentorship, if you were to call it that, to these young filmmakers, but also, they are all up on the tech…

BEAU They taught us a lot …

EMILY … it was just a lot of art imitating life, imitating art, imitating life over and over and over again, until everybody gets dizzy.

BEAU Emily had another big challenge: She gave birth to our grandson, Clark, right before she went to direct the movie. She had the mom thing going, and my wife, Mimi, stepped in and made it all possible by taking on Clark.

That’s so special. Beau, what was Emily like as a director?

BEAU It’s a pretty unique situation, a daughter directing her father. I directed my dad several times in our careers, and that was always interesting. I directed him in a Disney movie called The Thanksgiving Promise. It was a true family story because I had all my family in it and my wife was pregnant with Emily at the time. My dad, who also had an important part in it, had never directed a movie in his life. He directed some theater but always wanted to do more. We were working a shot where all the important characters, eight in total, were talking around a truck outside. I had a plan for how to shoot it and while we were doing it, I see my dad shaking his head a bit. Then he starts shaking his finger at me and disappears around the corner.

I said, “What? What is it?” He told me that I never would be able to finish the scene the way I was doing it because I needed a crane. I said, “Dad, this is a Disney movie. They don’t have money for a crane.” But he told me I would cost them a lot more by not getting it done in time. “You need a crane. Order it for tomorrow,” he said. I was kind of pissed off, because I knew all the crew saw him take me around the corner and everything, but he was absolutely right. I tried to do the scene. I couldn’t do it. I ordered a crane the next morning. I finished this whole scene in an hour.

Emily: Oh my God.

BEAU After that, every night I finished work, I’d call him and say, “Okay Dad, this is what I have planned for tomorrow. What do you think?” So, I’ve experienced that kind of relationship before with my own father, so that came into play with Emily. I have four sons and a daughter, and I don’t think she’s ever raised her voice to me or gotten angry with me. My boys all have. But I think I can see it in her eyes. There’s a certain kind of …

EMILY Apparently, I glare.

BEAU She glares at me, and that’s all she needs to do to crack the whip. We had a lot of fun on it, though.

EMILY We’ve worked on this project, really since I was a teenager. I’m not a teenager anymore and I feel that our collaborative relationship has really evolved. When I was younger, I had something to prove and really had to muscle my way with stuff but now, I have a greater sense of gratitude for this time and the experience we got to have together. We found our groove, and my dad had a lot of faith in me as a director, which was incredibly helpful. If he did have an idea and if he spoke up, I knew that I should listen, because he wasn’t going to speak up if it wasn’t something that was important.

Emily, what’s the most important lesson you’ve learned from your father?

EMILY The concept that was drilled into our heads as kids is respect, respect for yourself, for the people around you who are working with you and respect for the craft. It goes back to what he learned from his dad and it applies to all aspects of life. I think I appreciated that on a certain level as a younger person but now as we’ve worked together more, it’s something that has become really important. It makes the work better and gives you a sense of appreciation for the opportunity to do the thing you need to do to express yourself creatively.

I’ve learned that from my dad. You always show up, learn your lines, greet people on set, recognize who’s doing what, and try to move forward as a group with everybody working together. Something that Jeff talks about in the movie is how every single person on a film set is working towards the same goal. We can either approach work as this is just my job and here I come, or you can approach it like this: Isn’t this cool that we get this amazing opportunity to create something together that’s never existed before? That way, you treat it with the respect it deserves.

Is there more directing in your future?

EMILY I hope so. This was such a unique project in so many ways that I can’t imagine what the next one will be but, yes, I hope so.

You mentioned Jeff. How is he feeling these days?

BEAU He just got through filming a major fight sequence in his new series, The Old Man. Every time I talk to him, he seems to be really enjoying getting back to work. He’s feeling great. He was really challenged but our family is grateful for his incredible recovery.

Freestyle Digital Media will release Acting: The First Six Lessons on VOD platforms on March 8. 

Interview edited for length and clarity.