Friday Night at the Movies with Adam Kiss
Marc Arginteanu
Neurosurgeon... Best Selling Nonfiction Author... Award Winning Fiction Author
ADAM: Hello this is Adam Kiss and as you all know by now Marc and I share a love of movies. And today instead of talking about movies as a finished product I wanted to take a minute to talk a little about making movies—a little glimpse into the behind the scenes world. And the subject I wanted to talk about is casting in movies—in particular the question of whether casting is 90% of directing. As a film director myself who just completed a feature film I definitely can speak from experience on the subject!
So I wanted to start with an anecdote that Michael Caine once told. This was after he had filmed The Man Who Would Be King starring himself and Sean Connery and it was directed by John Huston the great film director who directed The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon and so many other great films. Michael Caine mentioned that most directors he worked with gave him a lot of direction and a lot of specific notes and that he noticed while making this film with John Huston he wasn’t getting many. So he was almost a little uncomfortable and wanted to get more feedback from the director. He kind of went up to John Huston and asked if he was doing ok and John Huston replied something like “You're doing fine, 90% of directing is casting.”
MARC: That’s quite an interesting perspective. Do you buy into it?
ADAM: This is something that I've heard from many famous directors who have said something similar over the years, but I find it to be very true! At least as a director it makes your life much easier to choose someone who is right for the particular role. You can and should “direct” people to do things the way you want them done, but you are probably not going to make the scene or performance more than 10% better even if you spend hours and hours on it!?
MARC: Well, that still leaves (at the very least) 10% room for the director. That being said, who are your favorite directors? And what lessons did you learn from them?
ADAM: David Lean, who was a meticulous director. He is probably my favorite and definitely didn’t leave the actors much room in their performances and controlled every aspect of the production and the performances. He believed in making the actors conform to his specific vision no matter what. And then Alfred Hitchcok, who was meticulous about the production as a whole and production design, storyboards, and specific shots he wanted. But he sort of let the actors control their own acting (for the most part). He only stepped in when there was a problem and something he didn’t agree with in a performance. I think I fall somewhere in the middle of those two extremes.
I’m a very hands-on director so I'm not the kind of director who puts my hands up and just lets everything be. I have my specific vision that I'm going after, and my goal is to realize that specific vision. In my last feature film “My Last Words” I was the casting director as well as the director so it goes without saying that I was totally involved in the casting process and I really don't understand how some directors can't be even more hands-on in the casting process because it's really so important. As a director you have to have your vision going into the movie and then it's about finding the people to fit that specific vision. I’m open minded to changing things all the time and adapting but you also need to have a very strong feeling for what the movie should be and what the character should be like otherwise you are totally lost. The point is—either way you look at it, casting is one of the most important aspects of directing! Once you have cast a movie, a lot of the work is done! If you cast it correctly things will go smoothly and you still have to direct the actors to get exactly what you want as a director, but if you cast it poorly then nothing you can do can save it and no amount of direction can save the movie.?
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