That's the kind of escalation of stakes and obstacles you need to keep your audience transported into the action of the film. The first time director is advised to make certain that the script of his breakthrough film embodies an equally dramatic escalation. If it does not, he must go to work with the writer to make sure that it does. If the writer will not, or cannot, assist him, he should do the rewrite himself. Otherwise, all of his subsequent labors as a director are for naught. If the script does not pass this acid test, the film made from the script will never hold the audience as it could or should.
Again, these standards are met by great films of all genres, not just films that deal in overt forms of suspense. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, Romeo and Juliet enjoy the love and support of their separate, powerful families. All that's at stake is their intense, adolescent infatuation. By the end of the second act, they have sacrificed the love of their families, they are alone in the world, and their lives are on the line for their love. In the beginning of Breathless, the film that launched Jean-Luc Godard's career, all that the hero, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, has to lose is his tenuous and light-heated attachment to a pretty American tourist, played by Jean Seberg. By the end of the second act, his infatuation has grown into love and he ends up sacrificing his life in the pursuit of that love. If you were to chart on a graph the escalation of stakes and obstacles in each Frank Capra film, from It Happened One Night through It's a Wonderful Life, they would all follow an almost identical, ever mounting, hyperbolic curve. The same could be said of every hit children's' film, from The Wizard of Oz through Finding Nemo. The examples are endless. The simple fact remains: A director cannot make a commercially successful movie in which the stakes and obstacles do not continually increase. The first time director must do everything in his power to make sure that the script of his breakthrough movie comes up to this standard.
Attaining Perfection in Casting
You have got to come close to perfection in casting if you are going to make a great film. How do you achieve perfection? Never settle. You must keep on casting with the same single-minded maniacal determination with which Captain Ahab sought Moby Dick, right up until you kill the casting director or the casting director kills you. Whether you are doing it yourself, or you have a top-tier casting director aided by a battalion of associates, assistants, and secretaries, you have to keep working the phones and keep the door open until the actor who is perfect for the part walks in. You may never find the perfect actor. But if you adopt this attitude, if you remain convinced that as good as the best choice you have already discovered may be, you can always do better, you will be rewarded.
Adopting such an uncompromising attitude is difficult. You are certain to take a lot of flack for being unreasonable and impossible. Obviously, if by holding to such astronomical standards you start to seriously jeopardize your relationship with your producer or the money people, then you are going to have to back down. But only back down far enough or long enough to re-ingratiate yourself with the key players. If they have a clue about filmmaking, they will be on your side all the way. Before they come down on you for holding the casting director to an impossibly high standard, they should be ready to fire the casting director or to let the casting director quit. They should understand that all you are trying to do is everything in your power to enable them to achieve their own ends.
The guiding principle of being tireless and uncompromising in casting is valid in all films, from the most humble student productions to the most exalted, mega-budget studio films. How much money you can pay your actors determines what pond you can fish in, but no matter the pond, you still must cast your net again and again, as widely as possible, in order to land the biggest fish. In the case of Back to the Future, Zemeckis made the mistake of casting Eric Stoltz because the studio insisted that he meet a certain deadline for the start of production. They made him pack up his net and go home before he was ready. Sure, they had met their deadline for the start of principal photography, but they had not found one of the essential components for their film: the perfect Marty McFly. The studio would have saved a lot of money if they had not rushed Zemeckis into production.
I have seen this same scenario repeated hundreds of times while I have overseen the production of student films as a professor. Most of my student directors must go into hock just to scrape together the cash to pay for film, processing, and telecine. Paid actors are beyond their grasp. So they are fishing in a different, but not necessarily smaller, pond than Zemeckis or Spielberg. In almost any American city there are thousands of amateur thespians who will work for nothing more than a copy of the finished product with which to build their portfolios. No matter the situation, from out of those thousands, you can find the handful you need to make up your perfect cast, provided that you throw your net wide enough and often enough.
I tell my student directors to tape their casting auditions and, when they are done casting, to make me a tape of their picks. Then, no matter what, I tell them they can do better. Those that have the determination and the vision to do as I advise are always rewarded. They look longer and harder, and they always find a better cast. The longer they look, the harder they look, the better the cast gets. The very best films are always those that, besides having a great script, go through a long, exhaustive casting process.
As a first time director casting his breakthrough film, you are going to be casting in a more exalted pond than the pond of my student directors, and a less sacred pond than the one in which Zemeckis was casting for Back to the Future. Which pond that is will be determined by your casting budget. But the key to success in all ponds is the same: You must never compromise. The laws of statistics dictate that the more people you read for a part, the more likely you are to cast an actor who will win an Oscar for his performance. Hopefully your producer has the good sense to see the logic in that maxim. If he doesn't, you've got bigger problems than casting.
How Do You Define Perfection? Casting Your Leads
It is not easy to define perfection. But I think it would be unconscionable for me to tell you to find it without giving you some idea of how to identify it. There are as many different kinds of perfection as there are roles. For the sake of simplification, I advise homing in on two qualities that an actor can exhibit: like- ability and richness. Generally speaking, your protagonist and leading roles are likeable in the extreme and not so rich, whereas your supporting parts are very rich, but frequently not so thoroughly likeable. The reason is obvious. The more likeable the protagonist, the more completely and intensely the audience will be able to identify with him. The more intensely the audience identifies with the main character, the more fully they can enter the action of the film (provided that the script is also great).
So what exactly is likeability? How do you identify it? The easiest way to clarify this complex question is to simply look at our greatest actors in some of their greatest roles. Likeability is what makes the audience identify with and care about Dustin Hoffman as Enrico “Ratso” Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, even though Ratso is angry, ugly, filthy, ignorant, and manipulative. Likeability is what makes the audience identify with and care about Robert DeNiro as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, even though LaMotta borders on paranoid schizophrenia. Likeability is what makes Marlon Brando lovable, heroic, and so beneficent as to be almost godlike as Don Corleone in The Godfather, even though Don Corleone is the kind of guy who, if you cross him, is going