Documentary film-maker Sophie Fiennes returns with another palate-cleansingly meditative, unhurried and intelligent movie about artistic process; in this case, the process of acting – or to be more specific, rehearsing and workshopping ideas. Actors are shown developing approaches to Macbeth under the cool eye of Cheek by Jowl director Declan Donnellan.

This is the part of “acting” that the movie observes in detail; it doesn’t cover the other business of auditions, table reads, tech runs, dress runs and performing night after night. With its clear, daylit approach, it is comparable to Fiennes’s 2010 study of German artist Anselm Kiefer, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow – but is very unlike Fiennes’s atypically hyperactive and flashier films about the movies, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema and The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, whose style is more driven by their unruly presenter, Slavoj Žižek.

Donnellan and his mostly silent co-director Nick Ormerod are shown guiding exploratory rehearsal sessions for which they are using the derelict space of Twyford Abbey – whose crumbling interiors may suggest Inverness Castle – with some occasional actor-games outside in the grounds. Eight actors are in the group: Grace Andrews, Amber James, Sophie Khan Levy and Hannah Young are at different times Lady Macbeth, and David Burnett, Orlando James, Jonathan Livingstone and Ekow Quartey are variously Macbeth. The scenes that they work through are from the earlier stages just before Duncan’s murder, and from much later, covering soliloquies including “Is this a dagger?”, “Unsex me here” and “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”.

Donnellan will sometimes offer larger statements on the nature of the text, and the futility of trying to nail down a single meaning or perhaps any meaning (“it’s not code for something else”); he is interesting on the stigma of over-acting, pointing out the apparently histrionic reactions of onlookers during 9/11, gasping and pointing (“Who directed that?”). The speeches are dissected with great subtlety, with no great crises or debates. (We don’t get, for example, the traditional dispute about how to say: “We fail? But screw your courage to the sticking place and we’ll not fail.”) There is something very refreshing about the calm, collaborative creativity being presented here.