A Quote by Steven Soderbergh

My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen. So you're constantly calibrating to play to their strengths. And the key is to never ask them to do things that are beyond their abilities or are really far away from who they are at their core.
My experience over the years with working with people who are not actors or not trained actors is that you have to get to know them well enough to see what they have that's translatable onto the screen.
In this type of cinema, whether working with actors or non-actors, as much as you do direct them, if you allow yourself to be directed by them, then the end result will be much more pleasing. The real and individual strengths of the actors is allowed to be expressed and is something that does affect the audience very deeply.
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.
I'm the well-trained fruit tree. Full of well-trained feelings and abilities and all of them grafted onto me
Comedians work great as actors because they're good under pressure. With a lot of actors, you have to make them feel like everything's going really well to get a good performance out of them. But, if you have a comedian on the set, you can tell them, 'Hey, you really are screwing this up,' and then they just get better.
Unfortunately, when you're working in film, it's this huge machine, and you've got to get everyone right there, so you get kind of locked into things. I'm not sure where the artistry in film making is. It's usually that moment when you're on set and you're working with the actors. That's the time to play around, the moment of theater. And then you can shape things. But a lot of it is just managing stuff. It's upsetting because you get away from the core.
Actors are professionals who deal with people's emotions and their thoughts. So, working with this very intelligent, smart cast meant that sometimes I would only have to start speaking a word and these wonderful actors would immediately catch onto what I wanted them to portray, and how I wanted them to act.
While you can be trained and groomed to be a better actor, seasoning happens only to TV actors. TV actors shoot every day, and that makes a difference to the project. They are hard-working, but that's not taking anything away from the film actors.
There are so many brilliant, trained actors of color in America. If you just think about it, every year in the spring Julliard and NYU and Yale and hundreds of schools across the country graduate classes of trained actors, and in those classes are actors of color. So to say that there aren't enough actors of color is factually inaccurate.
When I got into the movie business, working with actors was the one thing I was really weak at. I didn't know what to say to actors. They scared me and intimidated me. The actors that I've worked with who have had a lot of experience, or who I've even grown up watching as a kid, were really scary. I was like, "What am I going to say to this person?" But, I've matured. It's fun. I understand what actors do now.
In my films, I like to use the same actors again and again, so I know them really well and can bring their unique personalities into the process. However, as a director, I have strict control over the way they express their personalities. I don't want them to go beyond what I need from them, but I also don't want them to underplay. So I modulate their performances very closely, within a certain range of expression.
When actors get a bad name for diva behavior - I've never seen it. Because my experience with people who are really famous actors is that they work really hard.
I can't wait to do a fully improvised script again, to find people who are really comfortable and into it. It's about the capabilities of the people you're working with, what are their strengths and weaknesses. Some of the most brilliant actors need the spine of the text to work off of, and there's no shame in that; they're actors, not writers.
I started out as a writer and a director. I started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors. When people ask me what I do, I don't really say that I'm an actor, because actors often wait for someone to give them roles.
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.
Well, acting is cheap; I knew all these actors who weren't in the Screen Actors Guild yet, and it happened that they were all just about thirty years old.
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