Casting

- There's a saying that goes something like 90% of the success of a film is casting. Now, maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it is true that casting is a huge part of the process of making your short or your web series. So let's talk about the casting process a little bit. We're going to first look at it from the point of view as a director, so as a director, what are you looking for when you go into the casting process? Well, the sort of crazy thing about this is that especially if you've written your script, but even if someone else wrote it, and you've just spent time preparing it, often these characters, you can see them in your mind's eye. You know exactly what they look like. You can kind of hear their voice in your head, and now you need to find sort of a real world version of that. And sometimes that's really easy, and sometimes it sort of seems like just no one kind of is what you envisioned. And what I've found over the years is that part of that has to do with forgetting about what you think you need, and actually looking for what you really do, and what I mean by that is basically letting go of sort of preconceived notions that you may have about how a character looks or sounds. Now obviously in certain cases, the physical attributes of a character are very important. Say if you're doing a movie about a giant Asian superhero, you're probably going to be looking primarily at Asian men or women who are in really good shape and super heroic, so that's pretty specific. But a lot of other times, you know, the script may say tall blond guy and there is a less tall guy with brown hair who is better for the role. So how do you separate what you think you want and what you see in your mind's eye with what really is the heart of the character? Well, one of the ways you can do that is by thinking about the real core attributes that make the character, that make up the character. If you wrote your script and you were working on those four core elements of character that we had talked about, need, POV, attitude, and change, now would be a really good time to think about, in particular, the POV and the attitude elements. Try and write a one or two line description of the character that includes sort of the heart of them as you see it, but doesn't include any physical description. When you start looking at things that way, you start to really identify what it is that is going to make someone the right performer to embody that. So that's the first thing is separating out sort of what you'd always envisioned with what is really going to be the best performer for the role. Now when it comes to the audition itself, there's different ways that you can do auditions. The most common two are to ask an actor to read a scene that you've given them to prepare, or to improv a scene, and generally which you choose is mostly going to depend on what type of project you're doing. If you're doing a comedy where improv is going to be a big part of it, then you're probably going to want to ask them to do some improv, 'cause you're going to want to make sure that they can. On the other hand, if you're doing a sort of straight ahead narrative, where the words on the page are what is important, then it wouldn't necessarily help you to see what an actor's improv skills are. You need to know that they can take written material and embody it, so the way you approach your audition is going to be dependent on the type of project that you're casting. Regardless of which approach you take, when you watch actors audition for you, there's two things that you're looking for. Now obviously their performance is one. You want to see if you think that they are good, objectively, and then if they are good in the role, but you also want to see how they take direction. And that's because even if they knock it out of the park on the first try in an audition, even if they're the type of actors who will continuously knock it out of the park on the first take, inevitably there is always going to be room for adjustment here or there, and you need to know that this is someone who can hear the direction you're given, take it, and that you can actually see a change in the performance as a result, so you're always going to want to give at least one note just to see how they handle that. Now the important thing here is to keep the notes simple. Don't go crazy. It should be something simple and specific like just to speed up or slow down the tempo, or it could be a simple sort of shift in the angle that they're coming at a scene from. Say the scene is an argument with a boyfriend. You might want to say okay, this time rather than being really angry, maybe it's more just that the whole situation makes you sad, sort of a simple note that's fairly direct, just to see how they take the direction and how much a simple note will-- How much they can take a simple note and really give you something different from it. You're going to see a bunch of actors for all the different roles, and hopefully a lot of them are going to be great and you'll narrow it down to a short list, and at that point, when it comes time to actually make your final decisions, this is when you're going to start to think about things like callbacks. Callbacks are basically when you just call back some of the actors that you've auditioned, and you're generally doing it for a couple of reasons. One is that there may have been time between when you saw them the first time. You remember that you really liked them, but you don't remember if you liked them more or less than another guy that you really liked, so that's part of it is just refreshing your memory. But even more so than that, you're looking for things like chemistry with another actor. You know, if you've already cast your lead and this is going to be the person opposite of them, it's really important to see how they play off of each other. Are they believable as friends, as lovers, you know? Whatever the situation may be. So the general rules still apply with the callbacks. You're generally probably going to again, either do a written scene or an improv, depending on the type of project. You'll probably have them reading with one of the people that they would be opposite a lot in the project, and again, you're looking for how the performance reads and can they take direction in this context just as well? Remember, you're not looking for perfection. You're going to get to perfection through the process of rehearsing and actually shooting it. What you're looking for is do they embody those key elements that you identified? Do you feel like you can communicate direction to them and they can take it? And do you feel like, in your gut, these are the right people for these roles? So your to-do list for this section is to go ahead and write your casting breakdown. It doesn't have to be too crazy detailed. It's generally just going to be a couple of sentences. Make sure to include those key attributes that really define the heart of the character, and as far as the physical stuff goes, just the generalities, gender, age range, and of course, you know, if ethnicity or race is very important to that character, then obviously you'll note that too. So go ahead and write your character breakdown.