A post by Gabriel Long

At the start of the Reach Film Fellowship, there were two important aspects of my film, Brothers, I was hoping to get help with. First, I didn’t feel confident about how I would handle casting and directing young actors (my two main characters are children). I know that getting a natural performance from a child, one that doesn’t feel self-conscious, is going to be key to my film. Second, I felt that my script could be improved, but couldn’t decide what to change.

Casting and Directing Child Actors
During our recent advising workshop with Writer/Director Tze Chun (Children of Invention), there were some very useful takeaways related to casting and working with children.

More from his workshop will be posted on this blog soon, I think, but one piece of advice he gave was particularly useful to me. Tze said that when casting a role, it’s critical to keep in mind the specific demands of the part. A very natural young actor who doesn’t have a great deal of acting ability can work well for a role that doesn’t contain many highly emotional scenes. If the character needs to display a great deal of strong emotion, however, more acting ability is necessary even if this means sacrificing naturalness to some degree.

Directing Child Actors Workshop with Tze Chun

When I entered the casting process and had to begin making decisions, I took Tze’s advice and looked for the right balance of acting ability versus naturalness.  We auditioned 20 actors for the two open roles and had four, two actors per character, come in for callbacks.

At callbacks, I was careful to go over the most emotionally subtle parts of the script several times to see what each actor could bring to the moments. In this script there are no highly emotional scenes that call for crying, or throwing a tantrum, so I decided I could err on the side of naturalness over acting experience, while making sure that the actors were skilled enough to understated and convey the emotions of the scenes.

Also critical to me, was looking at the chemistry between each pair of actors. My two actors will be playing brothers and the story hinges on the subtle interactions that make up their relationship.

Now that my film is cast, I am looking ahead at how I will work with my actors in rehearsal and on set. In my discussions with my mentor, Laurie Collyer (Sherrybaby), Laurie has really emphasized using improvisation as a lead-in to scripted scenes in order to get a more natural performance from child actors. Tze also advised that I give my young actors a set of actions to execute whenever possible, rather than a single action, in order to keep them from over-emphasizing each one. I’ll definitely be employing these tactics.

Refining My Script
There were a lot of things I liked about my script going into this process, but in some ways I felt like I wanted to make it better. The story didn’t feel as compelling or engaging as I wanted it to. It was tight, but a bit predictable.

In terms of re-writing, however, I felt I was at a bit of a dead end. I felt that every element of my script was so connected to the whole piece that unless I overhauled it, it would be difficult to improve.

During my second meeting with Laurie, we analyzed my script in depth. Based on her advice, I did a complete re-write of the script, viewing it as an exercise rather than an attempt to come up with a different story. She thought it might free me up to continue improving on what I had.

The idea of writing an “exercise” script was very freeing and allowed me to get past my attachment to the interconnectedness of the previous draft. The resulting draft wound up involving the same location, characters, and subject matter, but was very different and significantly better. I allowed myself to completely re-imagine scenes with the knowledge that if they didn’t work I didn’t need to use them in the final version.

Rather than taking the best elements of the exercise script and melding them into the older draft, I did the reverse. I ended up taking the moments in the older draft that I thought held the essence of the story and constructed a new narrative around them. The end result was a more natural and compelling story.

RFF 2010 Fellow Gabriel Long (mentored by Laurie Collyer) has done extensive work in both narrative and documentary film. Two of his documentary projects were nationally broadcast by Current TV. Swimming New York City documents a swimming race around Governor’s Island, and The Art of Sticks offers a portrait of outdoor sculptor Patrick Doherty. He has also completed seven narrative short films, most recently Adán, which follows a schoolteacher as he travels from his home in Ecuador to New York City, trying to find a friend in the wake of a school shooting. Long recently moved to New York City where he works as an assistant director, editor, and writer. Gabriel’s RFF Film, Brothers, is about two young boys living in the shadow of a hot-tempered father. As the younger brother grapples with his sexual identity and the other becomes his unlikely protector.