What Direction Really Means

Note: There are situations where an actor just sucks, but your sign that's what's happening is when you have to do 47 takes. Then there are cases where a Director is just an asshole. Again, that's usually obvious. The scope of this post doesn't encompass either of these situations.

Over the weekend I had three different conversations with different actors about getting direction. They went like this:

1) After an actress kept saying "I'm sorry" every time I gave Direction, I threatened to fine her $1 every time those words came out of her mouth from that point forward.

2) An actress asked me for feedback, anything I could tell her about anything she does. I told her that the only thing I could think of is she always seems irritated when I give her Direction. This led to a long conversation about how she always feels like crap when getting Direction.

3) An actress' mother wrote me yesterday expressing appreciation for the opportunity (always a good idea for the actor, manager, or mother to do after a first gig) and mentioned some Direction I'd had to to give the actress about picking up her energy level for the next take.

All three of these conversations implied one thing: If somebody has to give you Direction, YOU SUCK. That is NOT what Direction means in 95% of the cases. Direction is either offering the editor choices or it's fine tuning a performance.

Choices
You can deliver a perfect performance in a take but we still want to offer the editor choices because maybe a different choice will end up fitting the overall feel or theme of the project. For instance, maybe in 4 other scenes we have people getting irritated with Rob. So you just gave us the perfect irritated take, but when we get into the editing room we discover that EVERYBODY's irritated with Rob in EVERY scene. That's boring and repetitive. If Director was a moron and didn't ask every actor for other choices, we'd be stuck with that and the project would suck. That's why we need other choices.

Think about it like this. Let's say you're going to a party and you know everybody's going to be wearing a tie, so you put on a red tie, but you stick a blue tie in your pocket just in case. You get to the party and most other people are wearing a red tie, so you look stupid being another red tie. So you take it off and put on the blue one. An actor apologizing when you give Direction is like that red tie being all like "I'm sorry I'm red instead of blue!" Dude, you were the perfect red tie, you just didn't fit the situation so we went a different way. That's all.

Veteran actors will automatically give the Director different choices with each take because they understand this, but some Directors don't want that so if you wait for them to ask for different choices that's fine. Just understand what that means, which is NOT "you suck."

Fine Tuning
Sometimes you're almost there, we just need to fine tune your performance to get the rest of the way there. You're not a mind reader, and also sometimes we need to experience the performance once or twice to even realize exactly what we want, then we fine tune from there. But we'd never get there if you sucked. You were good, we just needed that before we could fine tune it to what specifically we need. Again, this has nothing to do with a bad take and is nothing to be ashamed of.

This would be like turning on a radio and it'd drifted to 92.7 instead of the actual channel 92.3, and when you tune it back to where it should be, the radio is all like "OMG! I wasn't where I was supposed to be!" and throws itself off a ledge. That's as silly as stressing over a simple fine tuning Direction. Like the actress above going home and mentioning to her mother that I had to tell her to pick up her energy level. That's not a noteworthy event. I needed to hear her do it once before knowing what energy level was needed. It would be like going home and telling people your boss needed you to move your car a spot over so the sunlight didn't reflect off the windshield into the office windows, creating a painful glare. There was no way for you know that would happen until you parked there, and it's not very noteworthy.

Stress
Acting is an extremely stressful occupation. And in a lot of ways there's no way around that. But one thing you should NEVER stress about is taking Direction. And yet its extremely common for actors to obsess over every Direction they get, take it personally, and take it in a negative way. But its a silly worry because that's almost never why you're getting Direction.

So chill, yo. It's all good.