Part of casting is hearing the lines you wrote spoken out loud by professional actors. Yeah it's neat and all, but I've gone over that aspect a lot. The thing that really struck me about hearing my words spoken by an actor was how different the written word is from the spoken word.
The cool part is when something works. You know when it pops. Coming into auditions, I thought the opening scene to this movie was very good, but I wasn't really sure about it on the page. It's not that I didn't like it, I just wasn't sure how it would read. Last week was the first audition for the key role in that opening, and as the actor read the part, I literally stood up in the middle of it I was so excited. The fucking scene didn't just pop, it exploded. It's going to be so awesome.
But it doesn't always happen that way. When I first started this process, I knew that we would be getting notes from the director and maybe one or two others about the script, but the whole reason I did the movie as an indie was to keep creative control. I didn't think there was any way that other people would, as a general rule, be able to improve on the dialogue as Nils and I had constructed it.
Yet, we aren't even into rehearsals, and I can already see that I was very wrong about this. Until the last day of shooting, a script is a living, breathing thing, changing and adapting to the director, the actors, the locations--everything that shows up on the screen can change the words we wrote on paper. An error is an error, and we have a lot in the script. Very few of them are structural or plot issues--they are more about sentence structure and pacing. People don't talk the way they read and write, and we weren't experienced enough to understand this and account for it in our writing.
For example, there is this one scene that Nils and I spent hours on, painstakingly working out each phrase and the pacing, that just isn't coming off in the room. Every actor stumbles over the same parts, and words that look so beautiful on the page don't work when they come out of the actors mouth. So we sat down and reworked it to make it more suitable to speaking.
Remember how I said that sitting through bad auditions is painful? A big part of the pain is hearing a line that I wrote that doesn't work. Good actors find a way to make even bad lines sound less bad, but even average actors just slaughter every line that isn't perfect. Bad dialogue displays poor acting fast, and we have a few lines in the sides that will be different in the shooting script. Even though it drives me nuts when actors do it, I will slightly ad lib my own lines in these situations, adding in clauses or twisting a turn of phrase to make it sound more fluid. As much as it aggravates me to see the script change like this, it's not only necessary, it will end up making the movie better.
It's like getting a dozen small, prickly lessons in humility every casting session.
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