Directing the actor - w9

Running through the rehearsal of ‘Sneaker Spastic’, things as what went wrong, well and what needed improvement got clear. However, as a director I could not work well with one of the actors and I could not figure out why. I left it there and stepped out of the director-actor relationship until after the shooting so I could flick through Mackendrick’s article and find out what was not going so well. The thoughts on the working relationship between the director and his most important collaborator: the actor, together with Paul’s statement on how to work with the actors, taught me that I as a director sometimes have to put actors in place. For me, this required an awful amount of thinking of how to communicate ‘ that performance just sucked, you seriously have to do this or that’. I gave it a shot where I took the script away from the actors and told them ‘do this while saying that to me’ and it went from acting to doing, as if the scene was happening in the reality. At one point a question which should not be asked from an actor came up and it really pissed me off but I decided to continue staying professional and cool, and I surprised myself by talking back to the actor in a persuasive way for the purpose of a) don’t ask questions just act, and b) gain respect when I say or want ‘do this’ and ‘give me that’.

“When I get my master shot via your best performance, that’s when we finish”. I don’t like to get angry and I don’t like fighting but this worked and lesser questions came up and I got more confident as a director. What we in the group have discussed upon how much work the actors needed, the outcome of the shoot prove the opposite and we could not believe how wrong we were in the casting compared to this point of the ‘Sneaker Spastic’ production. We had thought that the protagonist needed most work but in the end it turned out that the antagonist was the one that really needed specific guidelines. Lesson learned.