ICYMI – I’m preparing to shoot a short film in April and I asked my friends on Instagram if they had any questions about Director Prep. I’m answering some of the questions in detail here on my blog page. Today’s question is about preparing to work with actors (as opposed to the on-set work), and while the writer had a few specific questions in trying to answer them I found myself just going through most of my process… so the question I’m answering today it: How do you prepare to work with actors.
In the past year I’ve explained my process to actors a few times and several actors have told me, ‘that’s exactly what I do when preparing my character’. So I would say a lot of the prep work I do overlaps with the prep work that the actors do and then there are a few specific things that I need to be thinking about as a director that is rooted in character but will affect how I shoot and edit the film.
One example of this, and a way that I like to ease myself into the character work, is figuring out whose point of view each scene is told from. Then I just make a note of that beside each scene “POV: Character A”.
The next steps are things that an actor might do for their character – everyone has a different process. But they will help you give direction to the actors.
Another thing I do for every scene is I answer a set of “Big Picture Questions” for every character in that scene. They are:
- What are the facts of the scene? Write what actually happens, not the emotional beats of the scenes or what it means.
- What happened immediately before this scene? Maybe one character just arrived home from a stressful day at work. Maybe the other character just hurried their secret lover out the back door. Sometimes the script will answer this question for you if scenes are continuous, but a lot of the time you’ll be making something up.
- What is each character’s expectation of what is going to happen in this scene? Maybe one character thinks they’re finally going to be able to sit down and read the book they’ve been trying to get to all weekend. Maybe the other character thinks that person will listen to their latest boyfriend problem after they show up unannounced.
- What do they want and why do they want it? I learned to format this as a WANTS/SO THAT statement. Character A WANTS Character B to seduce the SO THAT Character A knows they’re still attractive.
- What is the obstacle? Or what is stopping each character from getting what they want in this scene?
After all of this I like to get into notes on the dialogue. The two things I work with are Verbs, and Subtext.
Subtext: Every line should have subtext. The line is what the actor says, the subtext is what the character means. It doesn’t have to be overly complicated or subversive. ‘Hi’ can mean ‘I’m so glad you’re here’ or it can mean ‘I really don’t want to be interrupted right now’ or it can mean ‘why are you talking to me?’ The possibilities are nearly endless.
If you feel confused about a line or can’t figure out the subtext a call to the writer is in order. Try to collect all ‘problem lines’ so you can have a fulsome conversation with the writer. If you can’t contact the writer, there are a lot of good strategies for working with ‘problem lines’ in Judith Weston’s books and in John Badham on Directing. I recommend giving those books a thorough read either way. If you’re the writer – and I say this as someone who has written my own scripts – and you can’t figure out the subtext… it might be a bad line. Come up with an alternative line that has the current line as a subtext and see how that works.
Verbs: What you’re looking for is a playable action for each line of dialogue. What do I mean by ‘playable’ it means you’re giving the actor something to do. You can ‘punish’ another person with your line, you can ‘seduce’ the other character, you can ‘apologize’, you can ‘belittle’ someone. Again, Judith Weston is the GOAT and if you want to really understand how to use verbs get yourself a copy of Directing Actors.
I’m going to stop here because this post has gotten pretty long. Let me know here or over on Instagram if you have more specific questions and maybe I can get into that in another post or on a live Q&A.