Learning to Shut Up:  A verbose director prepares to work with child actors

A post by Kaz Phillips Safer

So, I would say that my biggest flaw as a director, the thing that I’m constantly working on, is that I tend to over-explain things to actors.  I’m a pretty cerebral, nay, nerdy person.  And I love ideas and I love words, and these things all come in super handy when I’m writing a script, especially since I tend to traffic in concepts and source material that are fairly esoteric and intellectual.  So being able to pull something out of the abstract and put it in literary form is a useful tool.  But when I get on set, I am always tempted to present the motivation or context of a scene to my actor in the form of a sort of diatribe.  A long-winded, highly convoluted thesis as to why they’re going to have this reaction and not that reaction to whatever’s going on. Not good.  I know this. I know I need to work on it.

A great piece of advice I once got from a very wise woman was, if you have fifteen notes, give two and the other thirteen will fall into place.  Her point being, drowning someone in “fixes” is not going to transform their performance into the nuanced, subtle, compelling nexus you were dreaming of, but just make them over think it, try to do too much, second guess what were probably good instincts in the first place, and feel overwhelmed and tighten up.  I completely get this intellectually, but have always found it hard to put into practice.

So, I have to think there was something fighting it out in my subconscious when I wrote a script in which one of the two main characters is a six-year-old girl. Didn’t occur to me until after I’d found out that I got the Reach Film Fellowship and started really gunning into the pre-production process that not only did I have no experience working with kids, but that I’d better get over my over-talky syndrome FAST because there is no better way to get a kid to clam up than to yammer at them about stuff they don’t understand. I mean, this has a negative effect on grown up actors who are used to dealing with crazy neurotic directors!

So suddenly I find myself in this self-imposed learn-to-shut-up boot camp.  How to proceed?

Going into this project, I knew what I was looking for in my young female lead. There is very little dialogue in my film (aside from a few brief lines at the very end). There is also some choreography, when my characters break into a simple, synchronized dance. So I wanted the girl I cast to be able to “play” and be un-self-conscious in front of the camera.  I didn’t want a peachy keen toothpaste commercial kid, but she did need to be kind of magnetic, not cute, but like you couldn’t take your eyes off her. I need the audience to fall in love with her and be rooting for her. And honestly, I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, in terms of what I was looking for in an audition, I just kind of knew I’d know it when I saw it.

The audition process was going to be critical, but how to draw out these girls’ potential without suffocating their every impulse with over-explaining?  I decided to take some cues from a source that was more dance-based than dialogue-based.  It made sense for what I needed to see, and was also going to be a good exercise in keeping my direction lean and simple.

I’m the resident video designer for an experimental dance theater company.  I create and implement the multi-media elements of their performances—projections, live feed video, etc. In the process of working with them I have observed a thing or two about non-conventional forms of directing, and getting performances out of people. The artistic director of the company has a pretty remarkable ability, which I admire on a daily basis, to keep his direction founded in lean, task-based, uncomplicated instructions.  No lengthy contemplations on motive or emotional landscape (*sigh*) just clean, simple, cut to the bone type stuff.  Rather than getting bogged down in motivations or more method acting type approaches, he physicalizes everything and the performances are simpler, the performers can get there via more direct routes rather than having to think their way to a pre-determined emotional conclusion. Love it.  Working on it.

I realized, my audition needed to be very task based. So in addition to the more traditional “read these sides with the friend I have wrangled into donating their time for three hours” audition element, we also did a more unconventional exercise.  Basically, I asked the girls to come in to the audition prepared to tell me a story—could be true or made up, happy or sad, etc.  I would have them tell me the story.  Then, I would have them tell it to me again, but this time I gave them a bag full of toys and asked them to act out the stories using the toys, like puppets.

This was a very interesting and fun exercise.  There’s something quite delightful about presenting six year olds with a bag of toys and telling them to dig in. Their little faces kind of light up.  And for the most part, it worked.  Girls that had been a bit nervous or rigid when they walked in suddenly opened up like little flowers, doing voices, asking if they can use the toy bag as a character too, etc. Other girls had more difficulty with it.

It was the girls who “didn’t get it” that posed the biggest challenge for me, because suddenly I found myself in the position of having to “explain.”  I had boiled it down to what I thought was a pretty simple, basic explanation but when they’re still staring at you blankly, you have to improvise and that’s where I started getting nervous, because, sure, this was just the audition.  And if some little miss is having such a hard time understanding that I just want her to play, she’s probably not right for the role anyway.  But what about on set?  Losing light?  Flirting with over time?  What about when this little face is looking up at me not understanding why I need another take of her running to the bench and I’m struggling with the words rattling in my own head saying, she’s sort of in love with him, but in this platonic way, and even though she wants the whole cookie for herself, she sees that he’s hungry and wants to share it with him, but… have you read any Cormac McCarthy? Disaster.  Panic.  How am I going to get the finely shaded and layered performance if my actor if I can’t explain what I want from them???

And that’s when I remembered a great story, maybe apocryphal, though I like to think not, about the making of Casablanca.  And there’s some shot where Bogart’s standing at the window, and like, the Nazis have arrived, and he turns, brow furrowed and surveys the dark city and it just encapsulates the tone and tension and tragedy of the entire film.  And apparently someone asked Michael Curtiz later what he had said to Bogart to prepare him for this moment, to capture so perfectly that moment in time, what motivation or explanation he had given that resulted in such a charged, poignant performance.  And Curtiz apparently said, “I told him to stand there, count to ten, then turn his head to the left.”

The girl I ended up casting, Arden Truax, is a non-actor, though her mom is an acting teacher who works with my husband.  She’s this amazing elfin creature who went about her audition and callback very seriously.  At first I wasn’t sure, because I wanted the Penny character to transmit a sense of joy.  But then I realized it was just like the Casablanca situation.  It’s not her job to make the joy, it’s her job to walk to the bench, sit down, take the cookie out of her bag and hand it to the guy.  I just have to construct the world around her so that the end result is incandescent.  All she needs to give me is a big eyed freckle nosed canvas to paint on.  And that, I can do without saying a word.

Kaz Phillips Safer is a 2011 Reach Film Fellow. HIn her film RFF supported film,  Jolly Friends Forever More, the boundary between imagination and hallucination are tested when a homeless man is befriended by a mysterious little girl that seems able to appear and disappear at will. Kaz’s previous film Megafauna was directed and developed at AFI’s Directing Workshop for Women. It won AFI’s 2010 Jean Picker Firstenberg Award for Excellence and is distributed by IndiePix. Kaz’s RFF mentor, Karin Chien, has produced seven feature-length films, including The Exploding Girl (2009), The Motel (2005) and Robot Stories (2002), which have won over 75 festival awards, premiered at Sundance and Berlin, and have been distributed internationally.