If you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money. But if you hire people who believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood, sweat, and tears.
The most exciting thing I've seen is directors not only being open to actors coming in the room with different abilities but actively looking at ways that the story can be enlarged with disabled actors.
The great thing about David Poile and Nashville is they believe in the people that they hire and they stick with the people that they hire.
I believe that happiness consists in having a destiny in keeping with our abilities. Our desires are things of the moment, often harmful even to ourselves; but our abilities are permanent, and their demands never cease.
I think that I've learned to relax, and trust in and hire very talented people, and trust in their abilities a little more.
A lot of people don't want to hire disabled actors. They think you're going to take twice as long over a shot, or they don't want have to put up a ramp for disabled access. They think, 'Why would I do that when I can just hire an able-bodied actor to play the disabled character?'
It's illegal to hire or fire anybody because of their race, appearance, or sexual orientation, but in Hollywood, ironically, it's the reason people will hire or not hire you.
I've given the idea a lot of thought and I believe it is a sound, logical course of action to hire a woman. The woman I hire won't be on the field blowing a whistle. She'll be in charge of academic counseling for the players and will do some recruiting.
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.
Later, you should learn to hire fast and scale up the company, but in the early days the goal should be not to hire. Not to hire.
It's really important for actors to feel that they're more than something for hire.
Good people hire people better than themselves. So A players hire A+ players. But others hire below their skills to make themselves look good. So B players hire C players. C players hire D players, etc.
In a collaborative environment directors hire actors because they want their input, not just their bodies.
Why hire these geniuses if they're forced to stick with the script? You want to empower your actors as collaborators.
I am sympathetic to the general form of Aristotle's view: the exercise of complex and more inclusive abilities is not anything in itself that is or necessarily should be valued over simple and less inclusive abilities. Rather, value depends on what the abilities are and the ends to which they are put.
I don't have any money to hire actors. I just need to get people who are going to do a good job being themselves.