LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: WORKING WITH ACTORS
Directing is such a multi-faceted job, you’re required to be knowledgeable about cameras, art direction, wardrobe, screenwriting, editing and composition and above all else you need to understand how to work with actors. I watched a good number of the ‘Story Beyond the Still’ films and a great many of them suffered from truly abysmal acting which really reduces the credibility of the work. Often this happens in conjunction with awful screenwriting, but you have to accept that just shooting something on a 5D with L lenses ain’t going to make it good unless you learn a bit about the craft of acting.
I firmly believe that you have to devote as much time to crafting performances as you do into crafting your shotlist
Acting is a strange and slippery creature and it’s often very hard to pin down. You can set up a shot, change the angle, change the lens, change the lighting, and see all those changes unfold in front of you. Finessing performances and communicating what you want changed to your actors can sometimes feel like you’re chasing shadows because those subtle nuances of expression and emotion are completely out of your hands. It’s very easy to be heavy-handed with actors, reading their lines for them, telling to do ‘more’ or ‘less’, but it’s also easy to be too laissez-faire, focusing your time on the lighting, the shot, the movement. My own feeling is that you need to develop a system with your actors that makes their performances more concrete, more malleable, less caged in their heads, and more out in the open so you can see it and adjust it the way you see fit. That requires a huge amount of trust between the actor and the director: for the actor in allowing their soul to be peeled open, analysed and taken apart; for the director in allowing the actor to interpret your instructions in their own way, not just taking a line reading from you. For me, the only way to bring performances out of the shadows and make them as clear to the eye as the set design and the wardrobe is to talk about them extensively with your actors. Don’t just let your actors dive in unguided into their performances. You need to give them somewhere to start from. There are so many ways of interpreting lines that it can drive you mad trying to work out which way to go unless you place strict boundaries on the work. I’m still feeling my way into this but I firmly believe that you have to devote as much time to crafting performances as you do into crafting your shotlist.
I’m very comfortable with the camera department, the electrical department, hair, makeup, and post production departments but with actors I’m still working up to that level of comfort
I always start by asking my actors whose scene it is, what the turning point is, and what their characters want. This is a great way to start a dialogue about what’s there and it forces them to squirm a little bit sometimes. No bad thing. As a director you must persuade everyone who works on the project that you know every detail of the script inside and out and that you understand it better than anyone else, even the writer. That inspires trust. Once you’ve started this dialogue with your actors, you quickly begin to sense how the scene should be shaped. The turning point is always the most important part of course and you should look to build to that point and feel very acutely when the moment has come. I talk about this being a dialogue and it really should be. It can be pretty overwhelming being a director sometimes, feeling as if you have to have the answer to every single question, but you really can’t so don’t try. I’m very comfortable with the camera department, the electrical department, hair, makeup, and post production departments but with actors I’m still working up to that level of comfort. I’m constantly talking to my DOP about shot choices, similarly with my art director, bouncing ideas off them to try and reach a consensus about what to do. Ultimately it’s your decision but you’re always talking. I’m starting to do the same with my actors now and finding that I’m able to arrive at much better performances much faster.
I hate castings. I always end up making at least one duff decision and I hate it
So how do you know when the performance is good? I’ve been privileged to be on set with some very very very good actors over the last few years and there always seems to be this moment when the cameras roll where you feel an incredible energy coming from them. You notice the crew becoming much more still and you start to lose yourself in the shot and in the take. It’s very hard to describe but you really know when you see it. Your job as a director is to try and take your actors to that place for at least one take in every setup, for every scene in the script. Not easy. Of course, not all actors have that capacity and the ones who do are highly sought after, for good reason. Casting therefore becomes incredibly important. I make casting decisions based on one criterion, and one only: can they act? What someone looks like ought to be less important than whether they can draw a viewer in. Frank Langella looks nothing like Richard Nixon, but not for one second do you ever think that he is anything other than the disgraced president in Frost/Nixon. That’s astonishing.
Try and run your castings so that you give actors a chance to try the role in a number of different ways. You’re looking for someone who will work well for the part, but you should always be looking for someone whose performance you can shape together into what you’re really after. I hate castings. I always end up making at least one duff decision and I hate it. There’s never really enough time to get your actors up to speed, and you end up having to explain the same role and the same lines a hundred times over. Oh yes, always make sure you know what actors look like on camera. Always. You’d be surprised how people can appear on camera sometimes and just how strong they actually are in those tiny, brilliant moments that only the camera can capture. I’ve often thought someone was a bit weak only to discover that their performances were so beautifully rendered for a camera that I instantly cast them. It’s a bitch this job, but you have to accept that you’re always going to make some mistakes and just try and get as much experience as you can.
