A Quote by Ben Affleck
When you hire great actors, you're lucky, so you just try to create an atmosphere where they can succeed and relax and take risks. You're happy that you get to watch them at the monitor and that your name is on the director's chair.
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I like to create an atmosphere where actors feel safe enough to take risks.
Your job, as an actor, is never to just do what you're told. That's boring, and life is too short. It's your job to bring something, and it will either be to other people's taste or your own taste, and you have to try things out. Actors say, "Well, as long as the director's happy," but I don't believe that and I don't agree with that. I want the director to be happy, but if I'm not happy, I won't sleep at night.
I want to get out of the way of the actors. I want to get out of their eye lines. I want to them to stop thinking they're making a movie. I want them to just go and live. It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life, and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.
I think it's important to create an atmosphere where actors feel like they can try things out. It doesn't mean that I'll take every suggestion, but I want there to be some room for actors to grow.
As a director, I also get to sit and watch actors and learn from them in a way that I don't get to do when I'm just acting.
It's like you take these great actors and put them in an aquarium of life and just watch them swim. That's what makes editing tough because you get all these beautiful, unplanned moments.
Actors, I think, are all the same. Both Korean actors and American actors are all very sensitive people, and they are all curious to know what the director thinks of them and how they are evaluated, and they try to satisfy the director. And they like it if you listen carefully to their opinions and accept them.
A car to pick me up every day, a chair with my name on it, everybody being very polite... what can you do except sit back and watch it all, try to take it all in?
The thing I preach constantly is do your research; build your knowledge base. Don't just go into business on a whim or a prayer - and don't think 'I'm an entrepreneur so I have to take risks'. Entrepreneurs don't take risks. They take calculated risks; only the good ones.
I've always been lucky in casting. The trick in casting is to hire great people, and let them do what they do, don't interfere with them too much. And then when they're great, take credit for it in the end.
Take risks and you'll get the payoffs. Learn from your mistakes until you succeed.
Tell me who you want to see on the Left, and I'll hire them. If you give me a big name that's out there, that's floating around and wants work, I'd be happy to hire them.
We know, in history, people are unable to put different elements together and create gold, yet it's what you're asking actors to do every day. You're asking them to relax enough with the confines and restrictions of the lights and the cameras, and you gotta hit this mark, to relax enough to create what seems wonderful and beautiful.
Your actors need to trust you as a director, but normally, I think you just need to have an open communication between the actors and the director. I think the director needs to really paint his or her vision to the cast and let them know the kind of mood that he or she is making. I think that's very important.
It's true that I don't think I'd be a good director. If I were a director, I'd try to hire the best people I could and then leave them alone. I don't know much about cameras or lighting, so I'd make sure that I had a really good cameraman who understood lenses and lighting, and I say to him, "This is the scene we have to shoot and this is what I think it should be, you go do it." Same with actors. But really, very good directors who know everything do basically the same thing. They hire you and then they leave you alone.
I never go to the monitor. I just look at the camera monitor and my favorite part of all of the directing, except for the writing and editing of it, is right when we're rolling and they do lines and I'll say "Try this, try this, try this."
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