It’s the director who calls the shots on set, right? Sure, but Hollywood’s biggest actors know their onions – and have some notes for directors on how they like to be steered in order to give their best performance.
“What’s never helpful is when a director overexplains a note. I think they need to keep it really concise and they need to be really clear,” Ronan said on Backstage’s In the Envelope: The Actor’s Podcast. “I think that making a comment on a take is not the same as directing someone. I think you need to know when to give an actor the space to explore it themself and when you need to very clearly guide them. I think you need to guide them in a way that’s not manipulative or controlling, or especially with actors who are more experienced…when a director kind of tells you what you need to give your best performance. I don’t think that’s the way to get the best out of any actor. I think it’s as important for a director to read the actor as it is for the actor to understand their character.”
Gladstone, who worked with Martin Scorsese on Killers of the Flower Moon, praised the director for his “actionable” notes: “An actionable note that [Scorsese] would give is, ‘Lily, can you look like you like him a little bit more?,’ and what’s nice about that is, ‘OK, that’s an action, and it allows the space for me to articulate what that would look like as [my character] Molly’…it also clued me in to how it was coming across on film…. It was not trying to get into my head, not trying to dictate my psyche to me…a very quick way to annoy me as an actor is a director trying to tell me what my character is thinking.”
Oscar nominee Wright, who delivered a leading turn as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison in Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, believes the best directors share “an expansive imagination and a comprehensive vision of what we are here to do, combined with clarity, capacity, and clear, generous communication. And then, the quality of leadership.”
“Don’t get paranoid or feel you’re losing control because an actor wants to try something different,” Mortensen said to Backstage. “A good idea can come from anyone at any time: your cast, a crew member. The best thing a director can do for an actor is create an atmosphere that’s relaxed and conducive to good work. It’s not just telling them what to do and where to stand, and being annoyed because they didn’t give you the emotional moment you hoped for. Maybe they’re giving you something different that’s just as good.”
“The biggest gift you can get from a director is to lose any sense of wondering what you look like when you do things because you have such trust in them,” Mulligan told Backstage. “It just gives you freedom to experience stuff as opposed to thinking, I need to telegraph this particular emotion or this particular feeling.”
Recalling his time working with director Francis Ford Coppola on Megalopolis, Driver told Backstage: “The first day of shooting, one of [Coppola’s] directions to everybody in the room was, ‘We’re not being brave enough,’ which I think was the best piece of direction that I’ve ever been given. He wasn’t interested in making something that people had seen before. He wanted to try to push the medium and make it cinematic and entertaining and about big ideas, but also push performances toward not being so literal, because he has faith that an audience can handle ambiguity.”
Though it’s the director’s job to bring a creative vision to the project, acting also involves creativity and imagination. The best directors will steer the ship, but trust their actors to formulate and deliver their characters.