I just want to control your mind…

Wow…I have been delinquent in my blogging. I think it is because I have been so busy casting the feature film “Vinyl” and concentrating on getting the actors we want into the film. It is like a huge juggling feat to try to get the actors you want, meet with the actors the agents want the director to meet with and still manage everyone’s expectations. Being a casting director is sometimes like being thrown into the middle of a giant shit-storm and having to sort through a ton of crap in order to finally get to the finished product. Hopefully on the way you haven’t burned any bridges or forgotten to email or call back too many people, or forgotten to pay the office rent and phones! With “Vinyl,” we are shooting in Canada and the U.S and many of the actors we are looking at are not only based in L.A but also the U.K and Australia. Casting is now truly a global profession. I have to be aware of actors coming out of other countries before they are getting into bigger studio films. It’s a cool way to be ahead of the curve in finding talent and it can be helpful at the end of the day when the producer needs to find a distributor, which can be a year or three years after filming ends. For example, when Sam Worthington (“Avatar”) was in L.A several years ago and meeting with casting directors, I was telling my producers on films I was working on, that he was defiantly going to be something. You could tell when he was in his first film, BOOTMEN, in 2000, that as the supporting role to Adam Garcia (who?), that Sam had something special. In the meeting with me, he was quiet and reserved but he had an intensity to him that kept me focused on him, which is a good sign of someone with the quality of becoming a future star. It would have been very smart to find him a cool indie to cast him in a year or two before he got “Avatar.” So that is what I am doing on “Vinyl” (hopefully), really trying to pinpoint who is being overlooked by Studios, who is capable of giving a great performance and seeing if they fit into one of the characters. It can be a very frustrating process. An actor I cast in a production before “Vinyl” was perfect for one of the roles in “Vinyl” and I got her a straight offer. The film I cast her in she was making scale and with “Vinyl” it would have been decent money, plus a little more high profile of a gig and a really cool character to play. But she didn’t respond to the script or want to meet with the director! How crazy is that? If you are an actor and you are given an opportunity to meet with a director, why not see what the gig is all about before passing on the job? Especially when the offer is coming from a casting director who already loves your work and wants to keep casting you. I was kind of upset about the whole thing, for like 5 seconds, and then had to move on; I will always be baffled by her choice not to meet with the director. But this business is about people not numbers and if you could control people, well, that would be awesome!