A beautiful mind

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

I choose to analyse ‘A Beautiful Mind’ as the storyline is about a professor (Russell Crowe) who has schizophrenia. It presents clearly how people live day by day with this disease. The main protagonist John Nash has paranoid schizophrenia. This is the same type that our main character will have in our short film. The film has given us an insight into how we can get our actor to act in a manor that is a true representative of a person living with schizophrenia.

The scenes (from the video on the right) are majority from the parts of ‘A Beautiful Mind’ where he talks about his disease or shows the effects the disease has on him in his daily life. There are a lot of close up shots used throughout this montage. This is because they are effective in the way that the audience can really get a look at what he is feeling. His facial expressions show a lot about what he is feeling and they way he is trying to think about the questions that are being presented to him.

The scene in which John Nash is talking with his wife and his doctor, it shows that sometimes schizophrenics don’t like to talk about their disease. In some cases, like John Nash, admit that they have a problem but they can sort it themselves and don’t need any help. Nash states himself that because he is a professor and can “solve problems, [he] can solve this one as well”.

Furthermore, his mood changes very quickly. This links to our short film as one of the parts of the story is that he has mood swings daily and in 10 minutes he can be in a complete different mood to what he was before. This is shown well in a scene in ‘A Beautiful Mind’. Therefore, we can use this as a basis to make sure that our portrayal of a paranoid schizophrenic is right and that our actor has a clear idea on how he can make his role believable.