Casting

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Casting

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casting director.
Assemble a Team. Contrary to popular wisdom, you don’t need an A-list casting director. What you need is someone who can sound like a credible casting director on the phone.

Having a distribution deal in place before you approach name talent will dramatically improve your chances of booking them. I

The script matters above all else.

Direct As Much As Possible

Pair Actors Together

Callbacks Are Key

Be Bi-Coastally Curious. From New York, come back to L.A.. This confuses the agencies, in a good way. If they think you’re bi-coastal, they will take you more seriously (Scott Rudin has offices in L.A. and N.Y., why shouldn’t you?). If you live in L.A., get a 917 number. If you live in N.Y., get a 323. Leave messages at 6:00 AM in L.A. or 9:00 PM in N.Y. Then play them off against each other: “Oh yes, that sitcom actor’s good, but your N.Y. colleague has this other Broadway actor that seems more… how do I put this? Substantial. Do you have any feature actors who are better?”

Develop Relationships with Agents Yourself. No matter how good or powerful your casting director is, you as the filmmaker need to develop and cultivate relationships with talent agents and managers yourself:

Play the Agency Game. As friendly as you get with one agent, make sure you’re also friends with another. Typically you get three bites at the apple with an agency: If three actors pass on the same script, they will stop returning your calls. And if all your actors do come from the same agent, then the power shifts, and you’re beholden to that agent

Set a Start Date. This is a lesson I learned from Robert Altman: Set a start date, and they will come. For most actors — particularly those who’ve been on TV series, or big-budget movies — they don’t need the money. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s $65,000 or $100 a day. They’re doing it for the roles. The key thing is the start date. If they’re available, they will want to work. Actors abhor a vacuum in their schedules.

Make it Real. As soon as you start asking questions like “does your client have any peanut allergies we should be aware of?” (since all you can afford to feed them is PB&J) or “what is your client’s hat size?” (to give the impression that you’ve already hired a wardrobe department), the agents will believe that you really are making the movie.

You need some serious cojones to pull all this off properly. It helps to know that you have backup actors in a pinch. For literally years, I had been meeting actors for coffee (it’s axiomatic that actors don’t eat, so you can take them to reasonably nice places and not go broke). So I knew we could always make the film with talented actors if we wanted. Remember, as you cast, most of these so-called attachments will fall through. The micro-budget indie will always get trumped by the Spielberg film or pilot shoot for Scandal. But as long as they don’t all fall through the same day, you’re fine.

Take Advantage of Others’ Misfortune. As you get closer to that start date, your ability to cast closer to the A-list actually increases. In our case, the best example was Julia Stiles. She’d always been floating around our lists (I lied; of course we had lists), but I knew she was booked for six months in a Neil LaBute play on Broadway. But her agent called me in a panic: Despite rehearsing for a month, that play’s financing had fallen through two hours before, and they needed to fill Julia’s schedule. Was I interested? Yes, make the offer! (I knew her manager was already a fan of the script, having taken him to breakfast in Venice some three years before). Within 24 hours, Julia called me and said she was in. Two weeks later, she was in my kitchen rehearsing the movie.