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Try to understand their behavior
What I focused mostly on in my writing career is having tough characters who are a little difficult with their interactions in the world, characters who can be caustic, some characters who can be flippant or rude, and kind of trying to understand why that person behaves that way. My second to last play, I played a character that was so grossly noxious and offensive and horrible, but what my goal was, was to try to understand who this person was. For me, the most interesting thing is to understand the most difficult people. To understand the person in the world that no one likes, a person that you know, thinks rationally and has a worldview, but that just for whatever reason, turns everybody off. And how can an audience understand that character when every other character in the play has dismissed them?
And that is my favorite thing in the world and that’s partly because I’m really interested and attracted to people who are a bit on the outside or troubled. And that’s partly ’cause I feel that way personally in my own life, that I can’t get along in certain social situations. And I also think it’s the most interesting kind of drama, how we can empathize with a person who seems unempathizable.
So it’s taught me a lot about interactions in the real world too. Being in a position of leadership now as a director has allowed me to really try to understand a person who is seemingly so antagonistic on set, well, what is driving this person? How can we understand why they’re yelling at us and why they’re crying by themselves in the bathroom? And once you can kind of get through like the anger that you might have for this person who is a pariah on an otherwise nice set, it helps fix it.
Mediate conflict
I worked with a filmmaker once who was very talented, but really kind of hurting the crew like almost physically by making the crew do things that were quite dangerous and working hours that were not safe. And the producer who was a wonderful, wonderful person was away shooting something else. They were producing a few things simultaneously. And I called the producer and I begged them, please, please come back and please sit this director down and tell them that what they’re doing is not sustainable and not helpful and dangerous and somebody’s going to get hurt. And the producer said, I really can’t come in today, but okay, let me try to call him. And the producer never did call him, and I felt so much like I wish I was in a position of leadership there where it would’ve been appropriate for me to be the one to have that conversation. I ended up, in fact, kind of just yelling at the director in front of everybody, screaming that he’s going to hurt this cameraman, which he was going to hurt. And the cameraman was so sweet and too shy to say, my back is going to break if I do this shot one more time.
And so when I have been now in that position of leadership and seeing similar things, seeing, you know, people who are not getting along well, you know, people who are kind of asking too much of the crew for their own, you know, their own ego, their own feeling of deservedness or whatever. Which you see, you know, all the time. Somebody’s outsized ego in a place where it’s just not needed or acceptable. I really do like being in the position of being able to kind of mediate these, you know, obstacles. A lot of times what I notice is that somebody who is kind of, let’s say a little difficult, so to speak, in a group, is just feeling nervous and insecure. And so what I’ve discovered is yelling at a person who is, you know, panicked about a line or a costume or a light is not helpful. That person probably is already experiencing a severe amount of anxiety, which is why it’s manifesting in this awful way.
And so what I have found to be successful is to basically give the same speech to the person who is lovely and very anxious, go up to this person who is causing a problem on a set and saying, “I understand you must be feeling a little bit of anxiety. I could understand why I would too if I was in your position. I understand that you were only given three hours today to set up this very complicated shot and that you needed four. I’m really sorry that didn’t happen. We’re all a little kind of frustrated now and I hope you just kind of feel that we’re all feeling this, we’re all struggling together. And thank you so much for the work you’ve put in so far.”
This usually puts out the fire, because usually that’s kind of what the person wanted to hear and that’s why they were upset. And a lot of times bad behavior comes from just wanting to be seen and heard. I mean, I have a 6-year-old child. My child will often scream. Not because they have an important point to make, but because we haven’t been listening to the relatively unimportant point that they wanted to make. The same applies to being in a group. I’ve taken real pleasure in being the person who could handle this in a way that I wish somebody else would handle in situations that haven’t been as functional.