Jesseca Kusher

I chose one of my actors for my senior film thesis because I reveled in the challenge of directing him. Perhaps this was an act of hubris but this is all meant to be a learning experience, so fight me. As I am quickly discovering, there are many challenges to working with a stage actor in film.

I am very proud of the performance I have helped Henry to feel. As a director it was difficult to avoid making him feel even more insecure about his acting style. I tried very hard to articulate that he was using a “singsongy” voice and was over-expressing with his eyebrows without making him close off to more direction. I found it was helpful to focus in on the emotion behind the scene rather than the scene itself.

The first of which is how you can’t hide anything from the camera. Every little eyebrow twitch, every voice infection, every sideways glance that reads as skepticism when it should feel like grief or discovery. In the case of stage actors who are used to getting away with the portrayal of caricature (large movements, large facial expressions) it is a nightmare to try to get them to tone it down. Beyond that, however, I have chosen an actor whose inner acting insecurities lie so deeply that he cannot be his true self on camera. The camera, of course, can see through his lie, and so shots end (and generally just exist) with me literally pulling my hair out.

I am learning the importance of helping an actor feel the given circumstances beyond describing what action I would like to see from them in a given frame. The best performances cannot be coached, but I would argue they can certainly be felt. My conversations with my actors regarding the emotional weight a given scene holds for me enables me to be vulnerable with them and hopefully coax their own vulnerability onto the screen.

I have so much faith in my actors. I have to, I must. They, however, are having to learn how to find faith in me and my team in order to let them be their own vulnerable selves.

Ultimately, screw type-casting — but how do you really get a “true” performance out of a student actor who has only ever been trained on the stage? Stay tuned as I learn how to regret my own casting decisions or else make some sort of powerful breakthrough as a director.