A Quote by Catherine McCormack
Actors are accustomed to doing exactly what the director or writer requests us to do, and rarely get involved in that part of the process.
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I get involved with projects based on three parameters - the script, the actors involved and the director.
I love actors. Part of that is my theater background and being a writer who cares about performance. Actors have usually chosen their profession because they have a dream of doing it and they want to express something about the world. That's the same thing that I have with writing. Most of the good actors get into it for those reason, rather than for reasons of fame or fortune, or anything like that, and that's where I'm coming from, as a storyteller.
I get to be in a room with other actors, but I never, or very rarely, get the chance to be in a room with another director.
I miss that process of getting the script and reading it and working on it. Every actor has their own way of memorizing their lines, and the whole process of starting to work with the other actors and the director, and doing rehearsals, and going to the location, and going through wardrobe.
As a director, you want to be really connected to every part of your set, from your actors all the way to your camera operators. Everybody is a part of the creative process, and if they feel like they're part of a team versus just being a tool, they're going to give you something special.
The dream, I think, with any project is it starts with an idea, and then somebody writes it, and the writer hopes that a director comes on and makes this piece of material visual, and both the director and writer hope that they can have actors come in and bring something to it that neither one of them expected, elevating it along the way.
Writing is a black-box proposition. You see actors; you can see what they're doing. You can watch the director on set doing his work. But when a studio says to a writer, 'Give us some pages,' he just goes off and comes back. It's just pages, and suddenly, there's some writing on them.
When I'm in the studio, I write the music, I play the different instruments, I produce it, I arrange it, and it's a self-indulgent exercise. It's the way I make my music. And when I'm acting, I get to leave myself behind, which is a relief. I get to collaborate with a director; I respect the director's medium and all the actors and actresses. So at the end of the day, it's about a character and it's about a director's vision. It's a really good balance for being so intense and alone in my personal process of making music.
You can't create chemistry. In fact, the chemistry between two actors is for people to see, sense, and judge. The only thing we can do as actors is to come on board individually because we feel the same kind of passion for a script and for a director to cast us because he feels that, as actors, we'll do justice to that part.
As roles go, very rarely do you get a role written for you or a director who wants you and only you for the part.
As a director, you have to know what actors are doing. You're the one telling them what to do. The actors' job is to come prepared to the set, but sometimes, if they're beginning actors or people who are non-actors, you have to teach them how to act.
As an actor, it's always important to understand what the director is after. That, to me, is my job. When I'm acting, I like to ask a lot of questions and understand exactly why the director is doing what they're doing, so that I can provide him or her with the ingredients that they need to get the scene that they want. It's not to challenge them, in any way. It's just so that I can do my job best.
As an author, it's a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It's tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.
Sometimes as actors and artists, we don't really get to be an effective and integral part of the promotional process, other than doing interviews. With Twitter and Facebook now, and all of this stuff, it really allows us to play and have fun, vis-à-vis the pictures that I send out on Twitter every day, or little videos, or whatever it is.
Coming off 'Sopranos' and 'Mad Men,' I was starting to feel like I was being spoiled creatively. I wanted to move forward as a director in TV and get more involved in the process. After having those two great experiences, doing regular episodic TV wouldn't be quite the thrill.
It's notoriously difficult to get actors to go on record speaking about other actors. Such requests are usually met with terse replies from publicists explaining that their clients are on set and too busy to reply.
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