Searching for Talent

Casting, casting, casting.  Pretty much all I’m doing this week.

My producers and I finally settled on a casting director for the short we’re doing and I absolutely love her. We started working together early this week. At the same time I’ve had to deliver some preliminary casting ideas for my producer for the feature. So this week has been nothing but actors. Actors headshots, reels, interviews, websites and imdb pages. But my favorite new casting tool is Youtube.

Because here’s the unfortunate truth, if you work in this industry you do not have the time to sit around watching shows all day - so knowing every actor you should is just impossible. Which is one of the reasons you work with a casting director. But when my casting director says, “Jen have you seen so & so on such & such? She’s amazing! You’ll love her.” I want to be able to look her up immediately so we can continue brainstorming. I don’t want to wait for someone to messenger a reel or to get her latest film on Netflix. And most importantly, on Youtube I can look up actor’s interviews.

Once you get to a certain level of actors you know that they can hit their marks, memorize lines and deliver some sort of interesting performance. Well, basically, this is true. What I don’t know is what they’re like as people and, at the early stages of casting, that is far more important to me than anything else. As we progress I will certainly want to see tape and meet them in person, but for now I mostly want to know if the person we’re considering has any essence of the character already within them.

I know this is hard for new actors to hear, but here’s the thing, I don’t want to see actors acting in my films. I want to see my characters. And the best way to ensure that, aside from hiring the few true chameleons on this planet like Cate Blanchett and Daniel Day-Lewis, is to find the character in the actor. Casting is like a grand treasure hunt!

So back to Youtube. Jimmy Kimmel does me a massive favor by having all these up and coming actors on his show. I search for actor plus Jimmy Kimmel and viola! I instantly get some glimpse in to the actor’s energy. Are they calm, chaotic, funny, needy, smart, quick on their feet or dim? Of course this doesn’t tell me about the quality of their acting, but it does help me to widdle down a preliminary list from a larger list of talented actors. I can tell pretty much instantly if the actor I’m looking at on Youtube bears any resemblance to the character I’m trying to cast.

Now obviously this is not the only tool I’ll use to cast – that would be insane – but in terms of helping me come up with my preliminary list I’m finding Youtube incredibly helpful. And if it means I see fewer of the wrong people from the start it’s helpful for actors too!