One of the great joys of directing a film is to work with actors, and when you make an ensemble film, you get to work with a lot of actors! But working with any big group of people — especially actors! — can come with a host of unique challenges. So, whether you’re making a blockbuster like the Russo Brother’s recent uber-ensemble Avengers: Infinity Wars or you’re making a web series in your back yard with all your high school drama class friends, many of the lessons are the same. My current film, Bernard and Huey may sound like a […]

At the moment, Harry Lennix is perhaps best known for his portrayal of FBI agent Harold Cooper on NBC’s The Blacklist. The breadth and depth of his work on the stage and screen go well beyond that hit show, however, with film roles spanning from Robert Townsend’s The Five Heartbeats and Julie Taymor’s Titus, to General Swanwick in both Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman, and on Broadway in August Wilson’s final play Radio Golf, and Cymbeline at The Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2014 Lennix created Exponent Media Group and began producing his own content, such as H4, a […]

Emily Mortimer is perhaps best known for her role as MacKenzie McHale in Aaron Sorkin’s beloved HBO series The Newsroom. Some of her other memorable performances are in Woody Allen’s Match Point, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island and Hugo and, as Phoebe, Jack Donaghy’s love interest, on the NBC series 30 Rock. In this hour she talks extensively about one particular, powerful scene in her breakout film, Nicole Holofcener’s Lovely & Amazing (which earned her an Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress), and about what it was like to play a character named “Emily Mortimer” in her HBO series Doll […]

Welcome to the debut episode of Filmmaker‘s new podcast about acting, Back To One. In each episode, host Peter Rinaldi invites one working actor to do a deep dive into their unique process, psychology, and approach to the craft. No small talk, no celebrity stories, no inane banter — just the work. Episode One: Kevin Corrigan We could not have a more perfect guest for the first episode of a podcast about “the work” of acting if we had somehow constructed one. The TV guest star extraordinaire, the go-to indie comedy player of our time, the actor’s actor, Kevin Corrigan […]

For many directors, the thought of “directing actors” can instill panic. Directors who were once cinematographers, say, or who have worked on film sets, might be at ease working with crews or blocking shots but will freeze up when challenged to give notes to actors. Such performance anxiety is not surprising. Unlike the crew, with whom directors have the whole shoot to develop working relationships, many actors are only on set for a few days. So it’s understandable that directors may worry about “getting it right” when it comes to guiding them in their performance. But the thing is: there […]

The director Ruben Östlund shoots wide in 4K, composing the individual shots for films like Force Majeure by, in post-production, pushing in and moving from side to side. Now, Disney Research has developed a new tool, Face Director, that offers directors even greater possibilities; it crosses the final frontier in post-production manipulation: actors’ performances. Whereas, previously, directors would shape a performance by using multiple takes or, in post, skillful editing and music, with Face Director directors can alter performance by modulating them between two extremes. From Disney’s page: We present a method to continuously blend between multiple facial performances of […]

In a free-flowing interview with June Stein in the Spring, 2008 issue of BOMB Magazine, Philip Seymour Hoffman discusses the insights into acting he gleaned from his experience as a director. Early on there is the following remarkable exchange, in which Hoffman says that acting is not about embracing one’s first instincts: PS: … Actors’ first instinct is to make themselves feel comfortable, to do things to make themselves feel like they’re in it, they’re truthful; I’m moving over here and that feels right, blah, blah, blah…. That’s what I do; so when I see another actor doing that, I […]

In Robert Bly’s examination of Jung’s concept of the shadow, Bly talks a lot about this thing called “the bag.” The bag is where, for the first 20 years of our lives, we hide the stuff we’re ashamed of. Or have been made to be ashamed of. Then we spend the rest of our lives trying to get those things out of the bag. Things like our emotions, our anger, our creativity, our vulnerability, our troublemaker, our defiance, our gut instinct, our spontaneous wildness. They’re in the bag a lot of the time. So, boys learn how to put their […]

Usually the term “a cast of hundreds” isn’t applied to a film with just two characters. But that’s exactly how to describe Matt Herron’s new feature Audition, an innovative film in which 100 actors — 50 men, 50 women — portray one couple over the course of a torrid romance. The concept is for this narrative story to be told through the documentary process of different actors interpreting the fictional roles (or, conversely, it could be seen as a documentary about acting that conveys a narrative storyline): the original 100 actors are winnowed down as the film progresses until the […]

As Toronto Film Festival head Cameron Bailey said by way of introducing a conversation with directors David Cronenberg and Brandon Cronenberg here at the Cannes Film Festival, 2012 is the first time the event has ever featured father and son filmmakers in the official selection. Pere Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis is a hotly anticipated title in the Official Competition. (Perhaps “ruefully anticipated” is a more accurate description; the film plays Saturday; many journalists, myself included, will be back home; and there have been no advance press screenings.) Antiviral, son Cronenberg’s foray into body horror and celebrity culture, is in Un Certain Regard. […]