From the course: Working with Actors & Non-Actors in Video Production

Inviting questions and opinion

- Building that ideal, collaborative space comes also from inviting questions and opinions from your talent as you go through the rehearsal and performance process. As part of building that collaborative space, you want to spend more time asking questions, especially during your rehearsals, than actually giving orders to your actors on set. Be a therapist for them. You want to encourage them to talk about their characters and about their scenes by asking them probing questions about their inner lives as those characters. Like I said before, having an open mind towards your actor's opinions and ideas just might make things better and take things in a direction you never thought of before that works well. Having that flexibility gives your actors more freedom to full invest themselves in their characters. It allows an actor to own their choices. Their performances can only be better if they're involved in making choices about their characters. Now if you disagree with one of those choices, don't say so directly. Ask them leading questions. Why do you feel this way about your character? What makes you say that about your character? And if you can't ultimately agree on something, allow the actor to try it their way. Then have them do it yours. It's all part of keeping that collaboration alive. The goal of having a successful production has to include striving for a good talent/director relationship. Always work to maintain a collaboration-based set and fully engage your talent in the process from beginning to end.

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