Homework… Do It
If you’re getting serious about casting someone, you want to do homework on who they are. You can say to yourself, “Oh yes, I know Brad Pitt’s work.” Do you? Go back, look again. Pay attention to how he does things. Where are his mannerisms, his strong points, his weak points? You need that information fresh in your mind. This is where the internet is such a blessing. If you don’t know his work beforehand, you can find his films so easily. You owe it to yourself to learn all you can about what he likes and doesn’t like. Call directors he has worked with in the past and get their take on the actor. Every director will return the call and share what they know. It’s not only professional courtesy; they may need to call you one day.
Donald Petrie: Jack Lemmon kind of encompasses a role all around. Walter Matthau finds something he can glean that is the character. One of the reasons I managed to work so well with Walter is the first day we met, he said, “I don’t know if I can do this. First, this is called Grumpy Old Men. I’m not old. See this hair? There’s not a gray one in it.” He was arguing that he wasn’t old enough to play this role. I said to him, and again, I’d done my homework, so I said, “But Walter, you did so brilliantly in Koch.” Jack Lemmon had directed him in Koch, where he played an old man. “Yeah, I just don’t have a way to kind of glom onto this character. I don’t know it yet. I’ve got this doctor that works for me, and he talks like he’s got cotton in his mouth all the time.” I said, “Oh, that sounds great.” Then I knew I had him. Sure enough, if you listen to “Crazy drivers!” he sounds like he’s got something in his mouth. He chose that thing to kind of build his character around.
They’re On Board
After you, the producer, the studio, the network — and God — have discussed, argued, fought… and gone with the one God wanted in the first place, call the actor on the telephone. Don’t text, tweet, email, Facebook, or smoke signal: Call the actor. They all have phones. Call them up and welcome them to the film. Tell them how delighted you are to get to work with them. Even if you are not delighted, still tell them you are delighted. On a cynical but very realistic level, if you are going to have to work with them, you are going to have to make the best of it. That won’t happen if they think you didn’t want them in the first place. Now get their thoughts on how they see the character and how they like to work.
Jodie Foster: I love it when directors come to me before the first few days of shooting and say, “What do you like and what don’t you like?” “Tell me how I should approach you and how I shouldn’t. What happens in this circumstance? Do you like doing a lot of takes? Do you like to be first? Do you like to be second?” “Is it okay if there are lots of people surrounding you? Do you like a lot of notes?” All those questions are completely fair to the professional actor. You just set up the scenes accordingly.
When you’ve got your actor on the phone, that’s the time to ask if they have any questions or concerns about their part, wardrobe, or dialogue. You don’t want to put them on the spot or embarrass them in any way, you just want to get them thinking. If you didn’t get to meet them in person, you are putting a voice to your name. It’s a critical first step in bonding with the actor, who wants to know that you are looking out for them and will take care of them to get their best work. They’ll come to work feeling someone is there for them.
Allan Arkush: That whole sense of protecting the actor just really makes them be so much better. They end up trusting you so much that they feel they can’t make a mistake, and that if they do make a mistake, you’ve got their back. Obviously, with series regulars, that’s a lot.
This is the easiest phone call you will ever make, and it will only take a few minutes. Of course, the best is meeting in person over a meal, but I’ve made calls from tops of mountains, from the van during tech scouts, or at 3 a.m. to talk to Bryan Brown in Australia. Anywhere. Just get it done; you’ll be glad you did.
Elia Kazan: As a director, I do one good thing right at the outset. Before I start with anybody in any important role, I talk to them for a long time. The conversations have to do with their lives, and before you know it, they’re telling you all about their wives, their mothers, their children, their infidelities, and anything else they feel guilty about…. They’re dying to tell you they tried to kill their brother once. They’re eager to tell you their problems with their father…. I veil it. I make it sound like chatter. An actor will tell you anything in five minutes, if you listen…. By the time you start with an actor, you know everything about him, where to go, what to reach for, what to summon up, what associations to make for him. You have to find a riverbed, a channel in their lives that is like the central channel in the part…. You’re edging toward the part so that the part becomes them.5
If you’ve not been fortunate enough to have had extended rehearsals before shooting — and frankly, very few directors are so fortunate these days — you will have to do it on the day of shooting. Rehearsal is viewed by bean-counting production executives as either some arty perversion designed to cost them money or an opportunity for the actor to undermine the script. The truth is quite the opposite: Rehearsal saves them money because most of the script problems, actor questions, and staging concerns get explored, even in brief periods of rehearsal. Sidney Lumet proved this film after film, year after year. He would consistently shoot his films in four to five weeks when every other director was taking ten weeks for the same kind of film. In rehearsal, a thirty-minute discussion is no big deal. A thirty-minute discussion on the set on a tight shooting schedule is a disaster. And when is the shooting schedule not tight? James Cameron, after two thousand days of shooting on Titanic and Avatar, still says he needed more time. If there’s a protracted disagreement about a scene, not only is shooting time lost, but the tension of the situation causes tempers to flair. Producers get frantic — angry, even; directors smell hot cigar breath on their necks, and actors wonder, “What’s the big deal? I just asked a question.”
There is an art to proper rehearsal. Take a look at Judith Weston’s excellent book Directing Actors, which has a terrific section on rehearsal. As Jessica Lange said in her Academy Award acceptance speech for Blue Sky, “I want to thank our director Tony Richardson for giving us permission to play in rehearsal.” Or Harvey Keitel: “When I met Scorsese, the work between us was never ‘you walk over here and then turn around.’ It was about finding what we were searching for in my own being.” These are not the kinds of things you hear from actors when they get jammed through the process.
On the Day
So you’ve not had the benefit of rehearsal beyond what you might have gotten done in the auditions and callbacks, beyond what you worked out with the actor over dinner. You’re now standing on the set promptly at call time, 7:30 a.m.
That’s your first mistake.
You will be seized by the AD (assistant director) and frog-marched to the DP (director of photography), who wants to know about the first shot. You don’t know, do you? Because you haven’t rehearsed with the actors. Then the prop man comes over to ask if you want a ballpoint pen or a lead pencil in the scene, and the line producer comes up with a heart-stopper: They’ve lost the next location.
When