Directing Actors Advice from Jeremiah Daws
Posted by Emmet Gibney on July 1st, 2008This post was contributed by Jeremiah Daws, co-director of “Dangerous Calling” alongside his brother Josh Daws. Visit their website Adventures in Filmmaking to follow along in their journey to super stardom. This is the first in a two part series talking about directing actors and eventually reviewing “Directing Actors” by Judith Weston.
I’ve been involved in filmmaking since I was 8 years old. My first experience was playing “Marty McFly” in re-creation of Back to the Future. My older brother was the director/camera operator. His directing style consisted of telling me and the other actors what to say and yelling at us if we got it wrong or misunderstood his “eloquent” direction. But he was only 11 and he was a first-born and an older brother. It’s their job to yell at us younger brothers.
Flash forward 20 years and now we direct together. We just finished our first feature film, Dangerous Calling. Over the years I’ve directed dozens of short films (both with Josh and without him.) I got a B.A. in film (by going to three different film schools).
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever gotten was from Sterling Van Wagganen, co-creator of the Sundance Film Festival. (He isn’t affiliated anymore and that’s probably why it’s not “Independent” anymore. But I could be wrong.) I’ll call him Sterling because I don’t want to type his last name again.
Sterling told my brother and me that if we want to be directors, get out there and direct. A lot. And he said it would eventually click. So we went out and directed. A lot! We made about 8 short films over the period of a year and many little video projects. Each film and project, we’d focus on one aspect of filmmaking - the shots, the sound, the screenplay. After that year was over, we started focusing on doing all those things well in one film. And after 3 or 4 really good (and longer) short films, we made the leap to our feature.
But the one thing that has taken the longest time to “click” is working with actors. We worked with our first “professional” actors while I was in my last year of film school. Up till this point, it had been friends, relatives, and ourselves playing the roles in our films. And let me tell you, hiring professional actors is the best thing you could do. If you are a filmmaker that is still using your friends after several years and you can’t understand why your movies don’t get any better - news flash. Your friends SUCK at acting. You SUCK at acting. Sorry. But you do.
So we used real actors for several projects. After the first few, we stopped getting excited when they showed up and knew their lines (something our friends NEVER did) and we started to notice that some actors are better than others. And I think we developed an intuition about actors. This probably has to do with what Sterling said about it all clicking.
Now, let me go back and lay down my experience with acting. I took one acting class in college. A woman who had done some impressive movies in the 80s taught it. You’d probably recognize her face but not be able to name her movies. Also, you might recognize her body from some of the magazines she appeared in after her movie career died. (Though I never saw them. She was my teacher and a sweet lady who probably regrets it.)
I really enjoyed the class more as insight into what actors do. I never had an interest in becoming an actor myself. I acted in several short films directed by my fellow students. They liked using me, probably because I could memorize the lines and I fit the roles that most student films are about - the nerdy, skinny, college student. I also did a monologue from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which I think was pretty good. (My acting teacher said I have Jimmy Stewart qualities. Cool. He’s my favorite actor!)
All this being said, my experience with “real” acting wasn’t much. Having done a feature and several short films and video projects, I think we’ve gotten pretty good at feeling our way through directing actors. But after being in certain situations while directing our feature where I felt I was unable to help our actors get to where they needed to get, I wanted to look into getting better at working with actors. (Let me just say, the actors in our film did an amazing job and got to where they needed to but in some scenes, they did it without our help.)
I also took a couple of directing classes in college. These were EXTREMELY helpful in working out blocking - which includes working with actors. On this end of things, we do really well in talking to actors. We work together with the actors while rehearsing a scene to figure out the best blocking. And I’ve been really pleased with how our films are blocked and the flow of the actors through the sets.
During these classes, my professor gave her take on directing actors. She said that each beat of the scene should have a new Objective and Emotion. So for years, I’d go through the script and write out the Objective and Emotion for each new beat in the scene. Basically every couple of lines. And that is to be done for each character. As you can imagine, that makes the script very cluttered.
As you can also imagine, using this as a directing technique for actors isn’t very useful. We tried talking to our actors for our film Reading Time in terms of these objectives and emotions and they didn’t respond well. It felt like I was micromanaging their performance. And essentially that’s what I was doing.
Once we found that didn’t work, we took a more relaxed approach, still figuring out what the character’s objective and emotion were but just keeping that in the background. And it has worked for the most part.
So that’s where I was going into Dangerous Calling.
Stay tuned for the second part of this post coming up in a few days!!
