Why Emma Thompson’s Love Actually scenes hurt (and what the data sees)

Last week I was watching Love Actually, and this scene came on. This is Emma Thompson, one of the finest actors alive, giving a performance that we still talk about 20 years later. Her character is realising that her marriage is falling apart, and then pulling herself back together so that her children don't notice. It is extraordinary. But it wasn't enough to just enjoy the scene, I wanted to go full CSI and try and work out, can I measure great acting? And yes, yes I can. And to be clear, we already know this is great acting. What I'm about to show you is not about proving it, it's about understanding what makes it great, and then seeing what else we can do with that information. Hi, my name's Stephen Follows, I'm the Film Data Scientist, and I come up with new movie records for Guinness World Records. But today, I'm going to go on the hunt for truly great acting. What you need to know is that Karen is married to Harry, and they have two kids, and she's worried that Harry is cheating on her with his new sexy assistant. Boo! Last week, Karen found a gold necklace in Harry's coat pocket, and assumed it was her Christmas present, thereby proving that actually he still loves her, and that all is well in the relationship. Yay! And then this scene starts to play, and she realises that the present was not for her, and that he's lying to her and cheating on her. Such a moving scene, top-notch acting. Let's see if we can work out what's going on. It's time to... To try and understand more, I extracted every frame of the film, ran a facial analysis engine that tracks 20 individual facial muscles, 68 landmark points, and 7 competing emotions simultaneously, 24 reels per second, and then matched each face to the actor using a neural network trained on 10 million faces. Give me a hard copy right there. Here we're isolating Emma Thompson's performance from everyone else's, so we can watch her emotional state shift frame to frame. Do you mind if I just absent myself for a second? All that ice cream. Darling, could you make sure the kids are ready to go? We're watching a brilliant actress play a woman who is desperately trying to act. She's performing everything is fine for her children, whereas Emma Thompson is performing everything is not fine to us. Two performances running in opposite directions at the same time. And this shows up when we isolate emotions data. When Karen is with other people, Harry and the kids, the readings are quite messy. Happiness and sadness fight for each other. Joy spikes at the same time as anger. That's putting on a brave face, where Emma Thompson is showing Karen, the character, trying to hold it all together. But the moment she's alone in the bedroom, the mask can drop. Pure sadness takes over, and Emma Thompson shows us a character starting to properly process waves of grief. No competition. And then, watch, look, she pulls it back in. The sadness drops to neutral. Karen, the actress, takes over, and she straightens the bed, getting back into her motherly duties, fixes her face, and walks straight back out to say her line. The data literally shows you the moment that Emma Thompson has decided that her character has decided to stop feeling. To truly understand what makes this performance so great, we need to zoom out, consider the other performances in the same movie. All right, time for a quick primer. For those who haven't seen it, this is Love Actually, released in 2003, and it was written and directed by Richard Curtis. How do I best explain this movie? Love Actually is basically... There are multiple storylines working on different levels, each with its own rules, different locations... Oh, actually, they're all happening sort of on the same level in London, pretty much in the same postcode. But, like Inception, it bends time. It... Wait, no, it's entirely linear. It starts in December, it ends later that same month. That's the timeline. But in Inception, there is a team of specialists, each one recruited for a unique, indispensable skill. In Love Actually, they have no skills. They're just... Look, it's just British people at Christmas. I admit, it's nothing like Inception. Hugh Grant is the prime minister, Colin Firth proposes in broken Portuguese, Bill Knight takes his clothes off, and a horny man flies to Milwaukee because he can't get laid in Wandsworth. Some of this movie is very smart, some of it's very emotional, and some of it's pretty dumb. I mean, there have been plenty of dumb movies since. In fact, if you want to find out if movies have got dumber since Love Actually, then check out my last video. The results will shock you! Anyway, because the film's an ensemble piece, it has many major actors, but they're all working for the same director, same cinematographer, same editor, and they're in the same film. So the difference is to the characters and how the actors have chosen to portray them. By using face tracking, we can see that Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman are the third and fourth most seen characters on screen, behind Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. We know that being a star is about being seen, but being an actor is about using that time well. We previously saw Emma Thompson's emotional complexity, but there is a second dimension, volatility. How fast the dominant emotion changes from frame to frame. So if we plot every actor on two axes, the cast splits into four groups. Top right is where Emma Thompson lives, the performers. High complexity, high volatility, lots of emotions changing fast. We've got Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, and Bill Nighy. Across all of Emma Thompson's performance, I tracked 2,223 emotional transitions, which is roughly one every four frames. So her face is in constant controlled movement. The only person that beats her on that measure is Laura Linney, who has an amazing character. Her character, Sarah, is permanently torn between duty and desire. And that means her face never settles because her character can't. For what is worse, she also says sorry more than any other character, despite having literally nothing to apologise for. Which if you think about it, is a pretty smart way for the filmmakers to tell us that this is the one character who's not going to get what she wants. I don't need to be a data scientist to understand exactly what Richard Curtis gave us the breadcrumbs. It's the Da Vinci code all the way down. You just need to know a way to look through the maze. Here are the most common words in the screenplay, and when they're read in order, they make complete sense. See what I mean? Interesting. What's more interesting is Bill Nighy. Bill Nighy is a prime example of what happens when a great actor is also very funny. This role could easily have been forgettable, but because he's a great actor, the complexity nearly matches Thompson's. His top emotions are disgust and anger, with happiness just 4.8% of the time, the lowest of any of the leads. You could say that Bill, Emma and Laura are the only live action entities in this cartoon, but that would be mean, so I won't. Back to the chart. Bottom right, we have the Brooders. Deep emotions, but not much change moment to moment. Characters like Liam Neeson's sit in their feelings and stay there. Bottom left, we have the Anchors. They know exactly what they've been cast for. Everyone had so little screen time that you needed to subliminally know, that's Hugh Grant part, that's a Colin Firth part. You just didn't have the time to set them up as characters, really. You just had to dive straight in. They deliver a clear performance that serves the moment and helps the film hit its comedic and emotional beats as intended. Rowan Atkinson is a computational minimum. Lowest complexity, lowest volatility. Apparently his character was created as a literal angel, but that detail didn't make it into the final edit, so it's just a character that goes on and changes some of the plot points some of the way through. It barely reads as human, which is kind of what it was intended. Finally, in the top left, we have the Reactors. Chris Marshall has the highest volatility in the cast, but he's cycling through a more limited set of emotions. It's perfect for the time given, but a little cartoony. Alan Rickman is not that far away from Toontown himself. That famous measured delivery is all voice, and it's worth pausing on Rickman for a little bit longer because his character, Harry, is hiding an affair, and on Christmas morning, he's doing his own version of what Karen, Emma Thompson, is doing. He's performing Happy Dad on Christmas morning while at the same time knowing that he's done or that he's transgressed, and the data catches it. Across the film, Rickman's face reads at 55% disgust and anger combined, the second highest of any of the characters. His happiness is only 6.2%, the lowest of any of the leads, but 88 minutes in, Christmas morning, opening the presents with the kids, his happiness suddenly spikes. This is the highest sustained complexity on his face the entire film, and for the first time, happiness becomes his dominant emotion. What we're seeing is a man trying very hard to look like everything's fine. Sound familiar? Ah, yes. By the way, before you conclude that Rickman's face is just naturally negative, in Sense and Sensibility, he plays Colonel Brandon, one of the great romantic leads in English literature. Same resting grump face, but a completely different experience. What we're seeing here are the actors choosing how to take their instrument, who they are, and change it for their character. So one of the things we all need to consider when tracking great acting is looking across an actor's career, the extent to which they change who they are when they walk into the room. In Love Actually, when on Christmas morning, joy becomes the dominant emotion on Alan's face, we can tell how hard the character has had to work to smile, meaning it reads as false, or at least constructed. Classic fool. Giving this kind of performance is really helped when an actor can make it personal. You've made the life I lead foolish too. Darling! Emma Thompson has previously publicly talked about how this scene connected her with her own life. She was married to Kenneth Branagh until he had an affair with Helena Bonacarta. Emma Thompson said, I had my heart badly broken by Ken, so I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn't meant for me. And she also said, which kind of really sticks with me, I had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom and then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them into a drawer. Emma Thompson is a gifted actress who has lived the thing her character is going through. She's felt the grief, swallowed it, walked back in the room, and smiled. And Richard Curtis knew this. And that was an extraordinary day because I didn't have to do anything. You know, she actually was and is a genius. And we just put the camera, you know, three different sizes and she did what she did nine times in a row. And I just remember thinking, oh, you know, I didn't have to say a word. In the edit, they let it breathe. Love Actually has just under 2,000 shots spread across two hours, 15 minutes, meaning the average shot lasts for about four seconds. But not for everyone. Hugh Grant, the biggest star of the film, gets some of the fastest cutting, 3.4 seconds per shot. His storyline runs on pace and comet timing. Rowan Axson gets even faster, 2.3 seconds. His jewellery wrapping scene alone has 94 shots in three minutes. That's pure physical comedy and it needs quick cuts to land the gags. At the other end of the spectrum, Laura Linley has 5.4 seconds per shot and Emma Thompson 4.7. The two actors with the highest emotional complexity also get the longest shots. Curtis and his editor, Nick Moore, are giving the most complex performers more time with shots to do their work. They're not cutting away to reaction shots. They're not rescuing anyone with editing. They're just trusting the actor. Yeah, absolutely. Free as a bird, far away. And the bedroom scene is an extreme case. 30 shots across three and a half minutes with the average shot length of seven seconds, nearly double the film's average. If he had cut every two seconds the way he does in the comedy scenes, you'd lose all of it. At the end of the day, we know what a great performance is because we feel it. The data just provides some pretty graphs to show what's apparent. That said, we could use this in other contexts. Just imagine for a second that there are movies that are not love, actually. We could have a look at the same process as... What? Really? Oh my god! I'm going to try this method on other movies and see what great acting looks like. Maybe we can discover who's the bestest actor of all time. That's going to take some research, so like and subscribe. You can join me on the journey and in the meantime, check out some of my past videos, like this one on people saying I love you in movies. But most importantly, please, can everyone stop cheating on Emma Thompson, you absolute monsters!