This content is locked. Please login or become a member.
Acting, like almost every other collaboration, requires reacting to the other person, to the collaborator’s intention and performing in conjunction with it. You learn very quickly in acting class that you have to react to that person’s performance, not the imagined performance that you were hoping they would give because it makes your part that much funnier or dramatic.
Don’t micromanage
The movie I just finished directing that I’m currently editing, the two leading characters are played by me and the wonderful actor Kieran Culkin, who’s on “Succession” and is an absolute genius performer in ways that I don’t even know audiences are fully aware of, because I got to see him improvise in these incredibly complicated character moments. And yet it was very often not the thing that I had written and not the thing that I had expected to perform against because I had written the script. It’s based on something that I know quite well and I’m also the other actor in the scene with him and I’m also the director. So theoretically I should have all the authority in the world to tell him exactly how I want it to be performed and also act alongside him to motivate him in the way that I want it to be performed.
And I discovered, I think on the second day that that was not going to be effective. You really should not try to engineer the other person’s work. You should help them achieve the thing that they do best. When I try to micromanage his wonderful, lived in, loose performance to the part that I had imagined, it was not helping him. He was fantastic when I let him go. He didn’t want to stand on marks, which is when you know you’re acting in a scene, you’re supposed to stand on like a little mark so that it makes, you know, the lighting look good on your face and it makes the camera framing for all the other actors appropriate so you can see everybody. When I asked him to stand on a mark, the few times that we did, it would stifle him. He would work so much better when it was loose and when he was loose, he was so brilliant. We all realized the movie is going to thrive when this leading actor can do kind of anything he wants, when he can walk anywhere he wants, when he could say to any of the characters the thing he wants and we follow him as filmmakers, and the movie was better for it and the cinematographer just ended up loving it.
Change course as needed
The decision to change course after the first day of shooting, to say our style of shooting has to be altered a little bit because this performer excels in this other way was made with complete openness and directness. Cinematographer comes from Polish film school. He’s one of the most brilliant cinematographers in the world. Every frame he makes is a painting. I had a meeting with a cinematographer at the end of the first day and I said, “The work you did today was absolutely amazing. I noticed that Kieran really thrives when he can be a little bit looser. Let’s think about how we can move forward by not worrying too much about marks. I think it would benefit the movie in an amazing way, and I’m sorry if that kind of rankles you a little bit, maybe tomorrow, but I think by day three I think we’ll have this down.”
And our brilliant Polish cinematographer went on day one from feeling very frustrated that the actor’s not standing on the mark to day two, realizing that I have an amazing opportunity here to kind of work with this very unusual loose actor. And how can I be the best cinematographer to this performer? A way to kind of get people comfortable with possibly changing their intended course in a given project is to kind of shed myself of an ego, shed myself of having needs that should be paramount, focusing on what the project needs. I was constantly referencing, what does the movie want this scene to be? Not, what do I want this scene to be? Talking about the greater goal being the motivating factor. When I make it not about me, other people, I think also feel comfortable making it not about them. And if you’re not open-minded to that, if you’re so rigid, if you are what we call in our industry, an auteur, but somebody with complete blinders up, I just think it’s unsustainable and not very helpful.