This is fresh air, I'm Terry Gross.

When you think of the acting technique known as the method,

you may think of raging bull on how Robert De Niro gained 60 pounds

to play boxer Jake Lamata in his retirement.

You may think of actors who stay in character,

even while they're not performing.

Or as my guest Isaac Butler puts it,

we tend to think of the method as some goofy,

hocus-pocus that actors, particularly the more self-important ones,

get up to in order to do their job.

Or as someone he met once put it,

it's remembering the most traumatic thing that ever happened to you

in order to make yourself cry.

But the method is much, much more Butler says.

In his new book The Method,

how the 20th century learned to act.

He describes the history of the method

from the series of techniques created in the early 1900s

by the Russian director Constantine Stanislavsky,

through the American adaptation created by the group Theater

and the actor studio and the actors who brought those techniques

to their work on stage and screen.

...