Dear Director

Dear Director

Thanks for your message. I understand your frustration, the actors you work with won’t do precisely as you ask, and I appreciate that you wish that in acting school, actors would learn to produce the results that you require, but I’m afraid you’re labouring under a misapprehension.

Actors are not robots, automatons or puppets, they do not exist to merely produce the results that you desire/require. The beauty of working with real, living human beings is there capacity for infinite difference.

I know that you are angry that I suggested that you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s just that having a ‘vision’ and understanding the script are two different things. If the film is a synthesis between the script the writer wrote for you and your own vision of the script, then why not add the actor’s uniqueness into the mix?

If you merely want meat puppets, why not just use CGI instead? Direction isn’t dictatorial, it’s suggestive, it’s nurturing, sometimes it being the sergeant major, some times the best friend, sometimes the teacher, sometimes the bully, but always you should be working to make the most of those talents that actors actually have, rather than insisting they simply become tools for your grander design.

Please learn to understand how to speak ‘actor’ before you demand that they turn your ideas into action, because each time you request a ‘result’, be ‘ANGRIER’, you insult the intelligence of actors, who know that playing the result is always the most superficial performance.

Perhaps you could also think of acting as a subtle thing, tiny brushstrokes, rather than a paint roller, the audience don’t need telling how to feel or what to think, they’re actually much smarter than you think, they’ll work it out for themselves.

How about you learn to trust the actors that you’ve cast, and instead of a philosophy that places you at the centre of the film making universe, you place the script there instead, you chose to make it, so why not respect it. It’s just a suggestion, but the writer may have been actually good at what they do.

Directing actors has to be so much more than having a personal vision and just shoe-horning actors into that vision, I don’t care what the rest of the industry is doing, the rest of the industry has made a mistake, the actors are your greatest resource, you should learn to work with them and not the other way around.

Don’t be angry with me for suggesting that actors be autonomous of you and be equal to you, we’re all adults.

Best Wishes

Mark Westbrook

Acting Coach Scotland