Working With Actors: What Every Film Director Needs to Know
Download MP3I've watched short films in the Oscar Screening Room where the cinematography was beautiful, where the production design was amazing, where the story structure was impeccable, and yet the film didn't make the shortlist. Why? Because the performances weren't there. Equally, I've watched films with with average cinematography and mediocre production design and brilliant performances that those films were electrifying. So what is the lesson of this is that actors aren't just part of your story.
Bob Degus:They are your story, and that's what we're gonna be exploring in this episode. After forty years in Hollywood and watching more than 3,000 short films as an Oscar voter, I know what separates a good short film from one that wins awards. My name is Bob Degus. This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast, where we'll help you create award winning short films. Episode six, Working with Actors, What Every Short Film Director Needs to Know.
Bob Degus:So in the last episode, episode five, we established that story is the nonnegotiable foundation of every short film. And today, we're gonna build on that because the essence of what makes a great story has to live in the bodies, in the faces, in the voices of real human beings who are inhabiting your characters. And so in this podcast, we're going to look at the bridge between the story that you write and the story that the audience experiences, and that bridge happens through the actors. So the question is, how do you help your actors get and deliver their best performances? And even more fundamentally, how do you know how to pick what actors are right for your film?
Bob Degus:So what makes acting in short films different than acting in feature films? There's some really fundamental differences from the perspective of being a director on either one of them. Both short film acting and directing actors in short films have some really specific demands that are very different than on features. One of the big things is that you don't have time to find the performances on set. And if you think of a feature film, many times directors are working with those actors for fifty, sixty, seventy days of working and refining and finding the performance, and maybe you go back and reshoot something that you did at the beginning because the performance of the actor has evolved over the course of shooting the movie that renders that earlier performance not usable or you might wanna redo it.
Bob Degus:But on a short film, very likely, especially if it's a short film where you're don't have a lot of money. When you don't have a lot of money, that means you don't have a lot of shooting days. And so you're gonna be working with these actors in a very condensed, tight period of time. And what that means is that very often the performance that the actor gives you in that scene on the day is the performance that's going to be in your film. You're not going to have space to go back and reshoot it or modify it or find the performance and explore it.
Bob Degus:It's just a much more condensed production period very often on short films. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that short film acting is really closer to the bone. And so what do I mean by that? In a feature film, if there's a day that the actor's a little bit off and you shoot that scene, very likely the scene before it, the actor was great, and the scene after actor was great, and so this little dip where the acting performance wasn't as strong or your directing of the acting performance wasn't as strong, you can survive that because you have all this momentum that's been carrying you forward and there's a little dip in the performance on this one scene, but then the next scene is really strong.
Bob Degus:And so you can massage that and make it work. Very, very, very often, the first few days of shooting on a feature film is not the strongest material because the director is finding their feet, even an experienced director, they're finding their feet with this crew and this group of actors during the first couple days of shooting. And then by week two, the company's found its stride and is doing, really good work. And so when you're scheduling a movie, often you want to put the least important scenes in the movie in the first week so that if it's a little rough, it's okay. But in a short film, don't have that luxury.
Bob Degus:You're shooting day one, maybe you have a two day shoot, maybe you have a three day shoot, so there's no slow period of finding these performances. Boom, you're just in it. And so the actors and you as the director and you, your whole crew, needs to be able to be really focused in delivering what the story is asking of the actors right away, right out of the gate at the beginning. You know, the audience bonds quicker with actors in short films. Again, because if you think of a feature film, there's this slow introduction where you kinda see the world of the characters and you meet, you know, the town that they live in and you meet their friends and you you're in your mind watching a feature film, and check this out the next time you do, you're being presented with all of the different elements that are going to be explored over the course of the two hours with these characters.
Bob Degus:In a short film, you don't have that. You immediately boom. And if you think of, stutter that we looked at in the last episode of this podcast, right away, you're identifying with this guy Greenwood, and you're on his journey trying to see what happens. So that the fact that audiences bond with characters more immediately in short films is really, means that, again, the first ninety seconds of a film where you're meeting your main character is incredibly important and so how do you shape a great performance with an actor? How do you help an actor deliver that performance and how do you as a director come prepared on a short film to make that happen?
Bob Degus:So what is the director's job working with the actors? Now that topic could be an entire podcast on its own. It's such a vast subject. Have been hundreds of books written about it, and I think it's really important for you to understand that one of the things I've observed not in the Oscar Screening Room, but on sets working with many many many directors is that a good number of directors are terrified of actors and they're terrified of actors because actors are very dynamic and fluid and have all sorts of interesting perspectives on things. Whereas the camera, which many directors are very, very fluent in, well, a 50 millimeter lens put on this camera is always gonna do what a 50 millimeter lens does.
Bob Degus:And so directors have a lot of skill in camera and in the technical things of filmmaking, but when it comes to the dynamics of working with actors, many actors or many directors are really terrified of their actors. And that's because they haven't taken the time to understand how to communicate with actors and they haven't taken the time to, really be open to the exploration that actors need to bring to create their best performance. So let's talk about what it is that when you're directing actors, things you don't want to be doing. Some of these are comical, but it's worth bringing up just for you to think about. So you're not telling an actor how to deliver a line.
Bob Degus:Right? You're not demonstrating the performance that you want them to give by showing them how to do it. Right? You're not micromanaging every physical choice, every emotional beat, and you're not expecting the actor to simply execute what's on the page. Now I want to contrast that a little bit with when you're working in commercials and you want the actor to pick up the product on a certain line and hold it a certain way.
Bob Degus:That's a very different thing, acting in commercials. But acting in film, you want to be as the director creating the conditions where a great performance can happen. That's your most important job. I like to think about directing and also producing, but especially directing. You're the host of a party that you're throwing and you're inviting guests, your actors and your crew, to come to your party.
Bob Degus:That's a very different responsibility and a different way of approaching thinking about acting than you're the director and you're demanding this performance out of an actor. So really you want to create the space which a great performance can happen in. Secondly, understanding what each actor needs. This is emotionally, practically, physically, personally to help them understand the truth, the inner truth that is in that character. Now, what I found when I was directing, I was really good.
Bob Degus:I did all this planning and I laid everything out. Knew these beats for this character, these beats for that character, these other beats for another character. What I found on set is that none of that mattered. The preparation was, of course, necessary, but I had to throw it all out because each actor needed a different thing for me as a director. And really great directors are able to sense this actor needs me to be this way, this other actor needs me to be that way, this other actor needs me to be a different way, to adapt almost like a chameleon into how you're relating to each of your actors and giving them the specific things that they need to make a great performance.
Bob Degus:And you see it's different than forcing the actor to adapt to you as the director. You're setting up the situation where your actor will be able to succeed and deliver a really great and extraordinarily wonderful role. Now your job as a director also is to communicate the why of every scene, not the how, but the why. And that's a different those are two different things. So the why gives meaning in what the scene is about versus how to do it, where to stand, how to move, but but why is a key thing.
Bob Degus:And then you allow the actor to figure out the how. Maybe I'll start standing over here, maybe I'll walk over to the sofa and sit down. Those things come out of what feels right to the actor and that's a really credible thing. Now, it's really really important for you to build trust with your actors and not violate it. I don't think this is something that can be taught either you're somebody who's gonna be trustworthy or you're not and one of the things you have to understand as a director is that acting is extremely vulnerable because great acting exposes someone's soul.
Bob Degus:And so you want to be as a director creating a space where the actor feels safe to do that I worked with a director one time and a very nice man and we're two or three days into shooting this film and one of the actors screws up their lines. And the director made a huge big deal about it and he was saying, okay, the award for the first line screwed up on the movie goes to this particular actor. Now the director was trying to be kind and trying to be make a joke that it was okay that the line screwed up, but what he did was he embarrassed this actor and I watched all the other actors on set shut down and feel like, okay. This is a set where we're gonna be made fun of. And then what happened is the actors delivered less risky performances, which meant that the great performance that you were looking for in the movie never happened because the actors became self conscious because of a an innocent but huge mistake that the director made.
Bob Degus:So you really want to be building a relationship of trust with your actors where you have respect for them and they trust that you are going to be holding this space for them because if you think about the difference between theater acting and film acting, in theater acting, the actors have the audience to get feedback from how they're doing in their performance and they can then calibrate their performance to each audience that evening. Whereas in cinema, there is no audience, and the actors are relying on you as the director to be a reflection of their performance. And if they can't trust you, then they can't trust the reflection of that performance. Now the last thing about this is that you want to also know when to push an actor and when to step back. And that's something that really comes you'll have an instinct for it, but it's also something that comes with just working with actors and being on a set and being able to listen to your inner voice and feel the set and know when you want to push an actor and have them do another take or add to what they did in the last performance or when you just want to let it let it be.
Bob Degus:And that's again, it's an instinct that you have to develop as a director. I contrast that to what I said at the start of the segment, which is with the camera, well you don't have to do that with a 50 millimeter lens. 50 millimeter lens is always going to create this type of composition. That's where working with actors is much more dynamic and much more intuitive, and that's what's exciting about it. So when working with actors, what is the most important decision that a director can make?
Bob Degus:And the answer to that is casting. I feel that a director really only has one decision to make on a movie or one completely free decision to make on a movie, and that's who to cast in the roles. And then everything else comes from that single decision. If you I understood this by imagining a movie where you had a character that's played by John Wayne and you had the same character played by Jimmy Stewart, and you can imagine that that would deliver two completely different performances of that role. That's such an obscure way to think about it now.
Bob Degus:I wanna explain it by thinking about Timothy Chalamet versus, say, Dwayne Johnson and how those two actors in the same role would create two different versions of the movie. And so your job as a director is to really find and put the best, most correct person in your movie. Because think about this. Let's say you have a vision for your movie, and the ideal actor would be someone like Timothee Chalamet. But you have a direct connection to Dwayne Johnson and you get introduced to him, you share the script with him, and he loves your project and he wants to get involved in it.
Bob Degus:And so you cast him because he's this big actor that you have a a connection to. And then you spend your entire time shooting trying to get him to deliver the type of performance that Timothy Chalamet might deliver. And you're gonna just be fighting your casting choice the whole time. So the biggest thing for a director is to pick the right actor for the role and then to get a 100% behind that actor and help that actor deliver the best version of the character that that actor can deliver. And I think that's a real key and important thing for you to be thinking about about how critical your casting choice is.
Bob Degus:The right actor makes your job possible. The wrong actor makes it completely impossible. And I've been in screening movies where you just wonder why did they cast that person in the role, and it's they're wrong for the performance. And it just I guess, like, what is it, nails on a chalkboard, it it it makes you cringe because it's not in flow. And I've equally seen movies with very unknown actors that are perfectly cast for the characters they're playing, and it's like this beautiful piece of music.
Bob Degus:So that's a real key critical thing. So what do you want to be looking for when you are casting your actors and thinking about? Number one, you want emotional availability. Can this actor access genuine feelings within themselves quickly and without a lengthy pre you know, preparation. There are some actors, and I'll use Daniel Day Lewis because he's the most famous at this.
Bob Degus:He needs a year of preparation, you know, and then he becomes literally the character, And you don't actors who work with him will say, oh, I never met Daniel Day Lewis. I met the character because he stays in character, and he uses method acting, and it's extremely effective for him. Well, if you're doing a short film where you have three or four days, he would be probably a very bad choice for your movie because you wouldn't have the time to support his creative journey, which is a year of prep where he goes and he he lives as that character before coming on set. So you want an actor that has emotional availability and can access those genuine feelings quickly because you're you're on a short film most likely shooting in a very compressed period of time. Specificity.
Bob Degus:Can the actor bring something particular and irreplaceable to the role that no other actor can? If you remember, I've said a number of times so far on this podcast that you should be directing movies that only you can direct. You wanna find the actor that is the only actor that can perform this role, and that's a key thing, and specificity will will help you with that. Presence. Does the actor can they hold the frame?
Bob Degus:Do you wanna watch them? Right? Because there's a difference between seeing an actor in person and seeing them on film. So that's a key difference. Are they going to be interesting to watch on film?
Bob Degus:And that's something you have to evaluate. Intelligence. Does the actor understand the story? That's a critical thing. Do they understand the character at the level the film demands?
Bob Degus:So those are going to be different requirements. If you're doing a comedy, well, that's a different set of requirements. You're going to want an actor who has comedic timing and and that you feel is funny versus a drama, but you want an actor that has the artistic intelligence to understand what it is that the character needs and then be able to bring that to the film. And it needs to be somebody that you feel you can have almost an immediate trusting relationship with. And so, again, that's an instinct thing.
Bob Degus:But but as you're looking at actors and meeting them, you want to feel this is somebody I can talk to, this is somebody I can have a dialogue with. And so, again, casting, let's say, you're doing your film. It's a smaller budget film, and you have access to a really big actor. That might be a great casting choice if they're right for the role, or it might be even if they're right for the role, if you meet them and go, can't work with this person, nothing wrong with them, but you guys just don't have a chemistry, then the better thing is perhaps not to cast them because you're going to feel the relationship between the director and the actors in the film. So that's this idea of casting for connections or convenience.
Bob Degus:Maybe you have a group of friends who are actors but they're not quite right, but they're your friends so you're going to put them in your film, or like I said in the example where you have a connection to some very famous actor but you didn't like them in the meeting, those are going to give you less strong performances than when you really have a real connection with the actor. Some of the best shorts that I have seen in thirty years of looking at short films in the Oscars were actors that I didn't know or that were unknown to me in in but just were so perfectly cast for the role in that film and they brought so much texture and vividness to their performances that the story came alive. And so it's a really key thing for you as you're thinking about, your actors and keeping in mind that a brilliant performance by an unknown actor will always outweigh a good performance by a famous actor. So let's take a moment to talk about the rehearsal process on films because it's something that I've seen, especially with short film directors, that it's an aspect of filmmaking that they get wrong.
Bob Degus:It's important for you to think about it through this lens. Lens. If you're working in theater, the rehearsal process is key and you spend weeks and months rehearsing a play. The reason for that is because in theater there's no editing. The editing happens during the rehearsal process.
Bob Degus:There's no post production editing in theater, so it has to happen during the rehearsal process. Now in film there's a giant step called editing where you're editing what you shot on set and shaping the film during post production. But that doesn't mean that you don't need a rehearsal process, especially when you're early in your career and especially on a short film where you have a very tight short shooting schedule. And the reason for that is is that the rehearsal process is where you can explore and make discoveries. Now you don't need a lengthy theater rehearsing process, but you need kind of a compromise between no rehearsing process and a very long one.
Bob Degus:Now there are some very famous actors Joaquin Phoenix comes to mind who is legendary. He will not rehearse and his reason for not rehearsing is because he feels that if he discovers something in the rehearsal process and the cameras didn't capture it, that he's gonna have to mimic it later and it's not gonna be authentic. And there's some validity to that, especially if you look at his performances. But working with an actor like that who won't rehearse, that's fine if you have the budget to support effectively rehearsing on set, on the day, on camera, and filming all of your rehearsals. I suspect that as a filmmaker who's starting out and working in short films, you don't have that luxury.
Bob Degus:So you wanna make sure the actors you're casting are going to be open to rehearsals. Obviously, it's a budget issue because if you're paying your actors, you're gonna have to pay them to show up for rehearsals. But it's a really important step because it gives you first another day or two where you could build trust between you and your actors, which is so critical for a director actor relationship. It allows you to explore the character together without having a crew of 50 people watching you do that. So you're in a much more private, smaller setting, and you can find the back story, the inner life.
Bob Degus:You can find, you know, specific details even if they're not gonna show up in the film that make the character come alive. So that's a really key thing that you're doing in the rehearsing process. You know, you're discovering the things that the actor brings to the role that you didn't even think about and that then cause you to think about other things. And, yes, that will also happen on set, but by doing it in the container of a rehearsal, are able to explore those things and have the time to think about them from the rehearsal to when you get on set that how you might improve upon them or add color to them or texture or something like that. You also in the rehearsal can identify moments in the script that aren't yet working as well as they should.
Bob Degus:And so if you are working a scene and you find maybe these lines are a little bit harder to say or maybe this this scene, why is this scene in this movie, it gives you the opportunity to make adjustments prior to shooting, after which it's going to be much harder for you to make changes than if you can make them beforehand. And then it's also giving your actor the space to be able to fail safely. They can try crazy things because it's just a couple people in a room and, well, maybe that didn't work. Okay. So let's try something else, or, wow, that's a cool, cool way to go.
Bob Degus:So it gives you that ability to for the actor to be able to fail safely so that on set they're going to trust you more because you've earned a place of security with them. There's something called a table read that's incredibly important to do. This is when you assemble all of your actors and you assemble the key filmmaking team, so that would be like the director, the assistant director, your cinematographer, your editor, producers, and you read through the whole script from beginning to end. It's not a performance. You know, your actors aren't aren't going at a 100% performance, but they're reading the script so that you as the director for the first time can actually hear the script embodied by humans.
Bob Degus:I know there's AI programs that that where you can assign characters to them, and that's an interesting step to do. Certainly, it gives you perspective as a director to hear the stories spoken by spoken out loud, but it's a different thing than having the actors that you cast all together in a room likely meeting for the first time, reading through the script, and the team that's making it present to experience that reading. So that's a real critical step that you need to do and it's usually done a few days before shooting so that you have time to experience it and then time to take those changes and make any adjustments that you want to make. Now it's really critical that you don't change the script a day or two before a scene is going to happen because the actors are preparing their lines and if you deliver them a new script the night before it's going to make them very insecure and the focus on set the next day is going to be about getting the lines correct instead of all the rich performance things that you could normally be exploring. I worked on a this was a feature, and for a variety of reasons because of the studio, because of the actors involved, because of the writers involved, because of the directors the director involved, there were so many script revisions, major script revisions, and the actors at some point just shut down because because they couldn't they couldn't keep up and they couldn't do their work.
Bob Degus:Clint Eastwood, who's legendary for making movies, doesn't change the script once he starts shooting. So your job, and what I would encourage you as a director or director working with writers, is to get your script polished before you get to the stage of doing the table read. It doesn't mean you can't make minor adjustments to it, but you you really want to set up a situation where you're not changing your script dramatically a few days before shooting because, like I said, that will make your actors, insecure. And I think one of the most important things in thinking about working with actors is that you're not telling them how to feel. You're giving actors the circumstances that evoke that feeling.
Bob Degus:And this is, you know, some okay you're sad in this scene doesn't doesn't help. But saying your character just found out this morning that your mother is dying. Well, now that's something that's an actable piece of direction or, you know, let's play this scene as if you are just livid with your husband. That's another thing that's that's that's very vivid as a piece of direction, but giving direction that is result oriented The actor, and you can watch this, has to then translate it into something, a physical piece of action, they're called actors because they're doing actions, that they can act. And so the closer you can get to giving direction that is in its pure form, the less translation the actor is going to have to do and the better and more effective their performance will be.
Bob Degus:So I think one of the most important things that a director has to do on set is protect the actors and protect the space that the actors are in. That is why the director is the only person to speak with the actors about their performance. The other crew members don't talk to the actors about their performance because the actors would get confused. So the there's a very sacred relationship between a director and an actor, and you want to really intentionally create a safe space for your actors to create the performance for your film in. And I worked on I'll just tell this story, and I can't tell you the director, and I cannot tell you the film.
Bob Degus:But I worked with a director who was paid millions of dollars to direct a movie, very successful director who directed a number of films, and he would the first AD would say, okay, roll cameras, roll, you know, roll sound, roll cameras, action. And then the director would scream out, give me something good. And then sometimes he might say, good, give me something great this time. And it was very jarring for the actors, and a number of them were upset and talked with me about this. And I I asked the director, and he said, oh, I had I read in a book that actors really wanna please the director, and so I'm just giving them permission to do that.
Bob Degus:But what he really was again doing was shutting down the space because contrasting that with Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood doesn't scream action. He doesn't doesn't it's not like go. He will roll camera, roll sound, section in the other order, roll sound, roll camera, and then he will just say, whenever you're ready, quietly, which if you just feel the difference between action and whenever you're ready, that creates two different places for your actors to act from. One of the things that I think is really important keep in mind to is that the first take is really a sacred take. Very often, it is the best performance that the actor will give.
Bob Degus:Not all actors. Some actors need to warm up, and maybe the eighth take is their best. And that's something you're gonna have to figure out as a director where is my actor best in take one, or are they best in take six? And you might want to arrange your shooting style to accommodate the actor's needs. But on a short film where you only have two or three days of shooting, you aren't going to maybe have the opportunity to discover that.
Bob Degus:Because if if an actor is good on take one and then they start to go downhill, you want to maybe shoot their close-up really early on in the setup. If they're good on take eight or nine, then you wanna be shooting them second, so that you shoot the other actor first. This actor's warming up. And when they're just about to be the best, then you turn the camera around and shoot them. On a feature film, directors are always figuring out when when is the actor gonna be in a position to give their best performance.
Bob Degus:But very often, the first take is something that's very sacred and raw and truthful. It's so much so I keep referencing Clint Eastwood in this podcast, but it's an interesting thing. He rarely shoots more than one take because he feels that's it. That's you got it. And so that's really something to think about because, again, on a tight schedule, you may only be able to do one or two or maybe three takes and you have to move on because you don't have more time.
Bob Degus:Think about when you're communicating with your directors, and this is this is really a critical thing. So you've you've just done the scene, and now you've said cut. The first thing you need to do as a director is go speak with your actors. Don't talk to the cinematographer. Don't talk to anyone else.
Bob Degus:Go up and give your explanation of how you feel the performance went and then give the adjustments for the next performance. What I've seen happen so many times, especially working with students is they'll talk to the cinematographer. They'll talk to the gaffer. They'll talk to the craft service person. I'm kidding about that, But they'll talk to everybody else but the actors because they're afraid to go up to speak with the actors.
Bob Degus:And I think it's really important that you talk to the actors first, not through a megaphone, but get up out of your chair and go speak with them about about the performance. And when you're giving adjustments, they're not corrections. You're not saying, don't do this. Do this. You're you're giving them new information.
Bob Degus:So you might say something like, What if in this moment she actually finds him funny rather than threatening? So it's a what if. What if we do it again and this time what if this character Because this the idea of what if brings a playful energy to it, and it also opens up possibility for other things rather than a scolding. Don't do that. Or, well, you did it wrong, so this time let me tell you how to do it differently.
Bob Degus:You are adding to what the actor has done to improve it. You are taking what they've done and adding the next element. Don't make it so complicated where you where you string on five or six things that you'll just watch the actor's eyes glaze over, but where you're giving one concise thing that helps the actor do a different take in their performance. One of the things I learned really early on working with a a very successful director was if you think about this idea that there's one right way to do the scene, that's an incorrect assumption. There is a range of ways that the actor could deliver a scene, and there's a range of emotions that are all equally valid that could happen in a scene.
Bob Degus:And this director in particular really liked getting different colors of a performance so that in postproduction and editing, you could choose this performance, over a more intense performance, or you could choose a faster performance maybe over a more measured one. And so he tried to get a range of colors of performance that he could use in the editing room versus trying to seek out that one exact right correct performance. So that's something to think about as you are working with your actors. What is your goal, and how can you help them deliver the best performance on film that you can then use in post production when you're editing and assembling your movie? You know, was thinking about all of the performances that I've seen as an Oscar voter looking at short films.
Bob Degus:And if I wanted to boil down the essence to three things that really are memorable to me or things that I remember about extraordinarily great performances. I would say number one is this idea that the actor's performance disappears into the character. In other words, it's not an actor performing a scene. It's not an actor who's indicating these things. It's where the actor becomes the character, and they are that character, and I'm not even thinking that I'm watching a performance.
Bob Degus:It's just that they are that character. You can call it truth or presence or any number of things, but it's just a raw, real, truthful performance. That's I think the single most important thing that I can think of, and that's often where casting a very famous actor may work against you because, oh, now I'm watching Tom Hanks, and it's a different different mindset that than I'm just watching the character in the film so that the performance is truthful and that it feels in your heart that it's real. Secondly, stillness. I find that some of the most interesting performances from actors are when they're listening.
Bob Degus:And in a later episode, we'll talk about editing. But but if you think about a traditional cut cut editing pattern where you're this actor's talking, so the camera's on them. Now this actor's talking and the camera's on them, and it's you kinda go back and forth like this. But what's really interesting to me is when the actor is listening to what the other character is saying. And that stillness that happens is where you can see if there are great actors, where you can see them thinking about what's being said in the scene and how they as that character understand it.
Bob Degus:And that's a really interesting sort of way to think about stillness and think about how you want to put your scene together and what your actors are doing because very often directors will just focus on the line readings instead of the listening, which is really where some of the most powerful acting happens. If you look at all these short films I'm going to be sharing with you, you're going to see this repeated again and again in the editing of these great short films. They spend a lot of time in stillness with the actors listening and thinking. And then the third thing is really performances that surprise you. And this, I think, is hard to quantify, you you yourself as a cinema viewer know where actors do really interesting, extraordinary things that delight you and captivate you and keep you watching the movie.
Bob Degus:And that's something that the actor is going to hopefully bring in the auditions, and you're going to give them the space on your set to explore that so that then you have this gold that they've created that then you can pick and choose the best moments of in post production when you're editing your film together, but allowing space for those performance surprises or accidents or cinema gold to happen on your set so that you have them to use when you're editing your film. You know, most actors are really extraordinarily gifted people, and they bring a powerful way for us to understand our own humanity. And I think they really deserve to be cherished and respected. And I remember I was working producing the movie Pleasantville with Steven Soderbergh and John Kilik and Gary Ross and. Early on in the shooting we we knew we were making a good movie.
Bob Degus:I starred Toby Maguire and Reese Witherspoon and Jeff Daniels and Bill Macy. There are a lot of extraordinary actors in this movie, but we had been shooting a couple weeks and then Joan Allen shows up and she plays the mother in the film. And on her first day of shooting, she delivered a performance that was so extraordinary that she elevated the entire movie, and the movie became significantly better because of her performance. I remember being on set and it was clear to the whole crew that suddenly we were making an extraordinary movie because of Joan Allen. And what she did is she inspired all of the other actors to also up their performances and the the level of their work.
Bob Degus:And that's to me where I understood really how incredibly important actors are and holding the space for them to do something extraordinary because then they're going to inspire everyone else from the cinematographer to the editor to the producers to up their game and up their energy that they're bringing to the project. So they're very actors are very special people, and, I think it's a privilege that directors get to work with them. I worked with Brad Pitt very early in his career. I produced an Oscar nominated short that he was in, and I learned on that film the importance of the relationship between the director and the star of the movie, but maybe that's a story for another podcast. So I just think that as directors and as filmmakers, the more you can educate yourself about actors, the more successful you're going to be in making your film.
Bob Degus:So what does this mean for your film right now? Well, that depends what part of the process you're in. Right? So if you haven't cast yet, really spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about and writing down character descriptions that go beyond physical attributes because really anyone could play the character. If you're fixated on a specific hair color or a specific body type, you're limiting yourself to the available actors.
Bob Degus:Now if if it's truly required for the character, that's a different thing, but most of the time any number of of those physical attributes are just kind of arbitrary. And the the less restrictive you are the more choice of great actors you're going to have so spend a lot of time character descriptions and writing about what these characters feel what they want, what they're afraid of, what do they wanna hide, even if it's not necessarily scenes that are in your script or film, but that their backstory or things that have happened in the character's past that will help you understand who your characters are. You know, before production, make sure you make sure that you schedule rehearsals with your actors where you're very focused on getting to know them and building a trusting relationship with them and exploring things that they want to explore and you want to explore and figure out a working relationship that you can bring onto your set with them and help them be able to deliver their best performances. When you're directing with your actors on set, try to deliver direction in a way that the actor can understand and can work with it.
Bob Degus:And so you're you're not giving result oriented direction. Where It's you're telling them what to do, but you're giving them a want. In this scene, this character, she needs him to forgive her. That's a much cleaner way to give a piece of direction. And I wanna just take a moment and share this book here with you.
Bob Degus:It's called directing actors. It's by Judith Weston if you only read one single book on filmmaking in your entire life, it should be directing actors by Judith Weston. It's an extraordinarily good book for helping every director, however experienced or inexperienced you are, understand how to communicate with actors. It was written. She was, working as a casting director and a casting director's assistant, and she just was horrified at how horrible film directors were at being able to communicate with actors.
Bob Degus:They could communicate with the camera, with the crew, but with actors, they were terrible, and she felt a real need to write a book to help directors have a language and a way to communicate with actors. And it's an extraordinary in-depth easy to read easy to take in book that will exponentially help you working with your actors on your set. That's on set. Then if you've shot your film and you're looking at your finished film, you really want to be, as you're watching it, truthful with yourself and making sure that there's truth in your actors' performances. Not looking at the lighting, not looking at the shot composition, not looking at the costumes, but is there truth in what's being said?
Bob Degus:And you can do this by listening. And almost you could close your eyes and you can listen to the words as they're being spoken in your film and do they ring true to you? And if the answer is no, they don't, then maybe find another alternate take where there's more truth in what's being spoken in the performance. And you also can use this technique on set where you're listening to what the actors are saying because the voice is much more revealing of whether something's being said truthfully or whether it's a little more fake. This is the episode really very overview episode about working with actors and how they can really elevate your film and make it exponentially better.
Bob Degus:I hope this has been helpful. Thank you. One more thing. If today's episode sparked something for you, head over to hollywoodfilmcoach.substack.com for the companion piece. It's original writing that goes deeper into the most important idea from today's episode and includes links to every film we've talked about so you can watch them yourself and form your own conclusions.
Bob Degus:The gap between a good short film and a great one that wins awards is smaller than you think. I'm Bob Degus. This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, follow us, and check out the next episode. Join me for episode seven, the short film that launched Brad Pitt and what it teaches us.
