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H O W N O T T O M A KE A SH O RT FI LM
DIRECTING ACTORS
Now, there are walls, literally, walls of books on how to direct actors in every major bookstore. I wouldn’t dream of trying to condense an entire library of information into a paragraph, but there are some tricks to the trade. Adrienne gives us one: “The most important shift to make when preparing to direct your actors is to move from an intellectual or ‘literary’ understanding of what your characters are going through towards direction that is going to activate your actors into actually having that experience in front of the camera. In other words, you want to move away from result-oriented direction (‘More happy! More sad!’) and instead start thinking about what the facts are in your character’s life that are MAKING them angry, or MAKING them sad. Here’s an example: Let’s say your character hates their job because of an abusive boss, and your story is about how, after taking that abuse for a long time, your character finally rebels. You’re getting ready to shoot the big scene where your character tells the boss off, but you feel your actor is not sufficiently angry. The temptation is to say, ‘No. You’re really pissed off here. REALLY pissed off!’ or something along those lines. The result of this will either be a) that your actor stares at you blankly, beginning to get pissed off at you for giving them result direction, or b) (most likely), that they will dutifully follow your direction and what you will get on screen will be a very generic performance of ‘pissed off-ness’ instead of an actual character in an actual situation. Alternatively, it would be a lot more effective to sidle up to your actor and say quietly: ‘You know what I overheard him (the boss) say last night? He laughed and said that you were a wimp who would never stand up for himself. He said he’d known rabbits that had shown more spunk! And now he’s