How to Match Different Types of Actors Together in an Ensemble
From the HD Pro Guide Magazine archive: this article first appeared in HD Pro Guide Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 4 (2014). By Charles Haine.
by Charles Haine one of the things that I noticed often in my years as a cinematographer that I took with me when moving over to directing was how difficult it is to work with a mis-matched ensemble of performers. While a truly versatile actor should be able to work with anybody, the realities of production (where you live with a constant time crunch) meant that actors with very different working methods, rhythms, or personalities could end up being a tremendous problem on set. On one picture I shot, the three leads were a mix of an indie film actor with a method background, a stage actress doing her first ever film work and man who had just come off two years on a sitcom. The way they used space, the way they used their voices, the way they worked were all completely at odds with each other, and the production slowed down to a crawl as we tried to find the right way to bring them together. The key is that they all wanted to work together: they had great attitudes, liked the project, and there wasn’t any drama. But we would rehearse a scene and the sound guy would come to the director and say “look, even their volume is wildly different, he’s all over the map, she’s selling it to the cheap seats, and Mr. sitcom is right there in the middle, oddly consistent in his level.” On a higher budget production you might have the luxury of the time this will cost you, but on most independent films you simply do not. Acting involves a lot of losing self-consciousness: you train your body and your voice to be a tool under your subconscious control, and you want to lose yourself in the moment. If you exercise too much conscious control of the instrument, you end up coming off sort of wooden, and losing your spontaneity and aliveness. We would often have great rehearsals with everybody “matching” each others’ energies. Then we would start doing takes, they would get “in the moment,” and their training would take over, sending their energies wildly divergent directions. As a human being, we can’t help but fall into ruts: if you’ve spent a decade on stage, you habituate yourself to the demands of working in front of a crowd in a thousand small ways you might not even be aware of. And it’s hard to shake. This isn’t generally a problem with older actors who have had varied careers and have had to learn how to bend their energy, but many indie and student films center around the lives and problems of young people, teens and 20-somethings, where you’ll run into this problem a lot with actors who tend to have had one type of experience. The best way to catch this, of course, is group reading during auditioning. Get people together, face to face, and read the scene’s enough times that you get a sense for what their natural rhythm is before you commit to hire. Unfortunately, on a lot of indie films this just isn’t possible. Stars, generally, don’t audition. You’ve seen their work, the thinking goes, you should be able to cast from that. If they’ve come on your project as co-producer, you might be able to get them to read with the performers you’re auditioning for supporting roles, but even that is rare. More common is “star-meter casting.” For better or worse, distributors often look to an actor’s star rating when evaluating their prospects for distribution. Thus, many indie films cast by using the star meter, saying, “alright, we need someone above 5,000 for this part, above 10,000 for this part,” in order to build a package that might be attractive to a distributor. So you send out offers to agents without ever having read the performer for the specific part, or against the other actors. This, combined with how seldom stars are willing to audition, often leaves you with a cast that has never read together before you get them together on set.
If you end up in that situation, your best bet is a careful reading of the cast IMDB pages (have they spent the last 20 years on a soap opera? or are they always bouncing around from genre to genre?) and if possible reaching out to other directors and crews who have worked with them to see what the experience was like. This isn’t gossiping: you’re about to rest the fate of your movie on these performers, you want to research them as much as you possibly can, and an audition is often just not part of it. A smaller and more easily fixed way that actors might not match each other is if they are “warm up” actors versus “cool down” actors. Some actors seem to be about as good as they are going to get on take 1: after that, they are just trying to recreate take 1, and they gradually lose whatever spark or instinct made them interesting. Other actors “warm up” to the scene, exploring until they find it, often taking 10-20 takes to get where they want to go. A mismatch here isn’t actually the worst thing in the world, but it’s good to pay attention to since you can find yourself taking advantage of it when necessary. I shot a project where the two leads were a “warm up” and a “cool down,” and after the first days production was over, we never had to talk about whose close-up was first. Without a pause, after we had a buy on the master, we would move into the “cool down” actor’s close up, to get the performance while it was still fresh, and the warm up actor who used those takes to keep exploring to find the scene, so that by the time we flipped around on him, he was generally all warmed up and ready to kill it. We even started lighting the master so we could move into the cool down actor’s close-up as quickly as possible, to capture the magic while it was fresh.
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