One of the first things you learn when making a movie is how important the below-the-line people are. The actors and director get all the press, but often the difference between good and great starts with people whose names you never pay attention to in the credits. But not every position is equally important, and the importance can vary widely depending on the genre of movie. For a horror film, the art director is key, because the genre is so dependent on the visuals. For an action movie with lots of CGI, the special effects coordinator is key. And for a comedy, the most important thing is the cast, which means that the casting director is key. [Actually, the script is also key for a comedy, but we have an amazing script, so for us, it's now only cast.]
How do you pick a casting director?
The first thing you usually do with a movie is pick a director. We did that (that post is coming later) and then immediately focused on attaching a casting director. When picking a casting director, there are the obvious things like being able to work with them, and them knowing what the fuck they are doing. But there is an aspect that isn't obvious, but turns out to be crucially important for us:
Reputation.
Why does reputation matter? Remember what I have been saying about how everything in Hollywood revolves around social rank? Frankly put, we needed an A-List person whose name would lend us immediate buzz and let everyone in Hollywood know that this project was legit.
It's funny--coming from outside Hollywood, you would think that the most important thing would be the quality of the script, right? If the material is good, that's all that matters, right? Wrong. In fact, the quality of the script is usually the LAST thing that matters, because no one in Hollywood reads anything, and even those that do usually don't have any idea what is good and what isn't. In Hollywood, I would estimate that 99% of people judge the quality of a project almost exclusively by who is or wants to be attached, or its "buzz." For real. The stories are incredible and unbelievable--an A-List writer will pitch some stupid idea on a napkin to an even stupider exec, who buys it, then convinces a sleazy agent to attach his A-List actor client for some ludicrous sum of money, and then the trades publish a breathless piece about this "hot project" that no one has read but everyone wants to be on, and then it gets made, regardless of how bad it is. How else do you think movies like TOWN AND COUNTRY, PLUTO NASH, and WATERWORLD get made? This idiocy is built into the DNA of Hollywood.
Don't get me wrong, I hate the way the system works, but there are times when you are just better off working within the current confines of the system rather than fighting it, and this is one of those times. The director and TheProducer sent the script out to several A-List casting directors that they have previously worked with. The biggest one we went out to, Joseph Middleton, got back to us in 12 hours. He loved the script and wanted in on the project. This by itself was kinda gratifying to me. Remember what I said above about crappy movies being made because no one reads? Here's the perverse thing about Hollywood: The below-the-line people, the ones who don't make the major creative decisions, actually DO read everything and usually DO have a good sense of what will and won't work. Why is this? Because they are almost all independent contractors and their reputations are made by working on movies that turn out to be good. If they take a bunch of crappy studio clunkers that suck dick at the box office, it can badly hurt their reputation, even if they do their job well. Unlike studio execs, they have to be right.
But even though Joseph wanted on the project, it wasn't as simple as just saying "Welcome aboard!" He is A-List for a reason (just look at his credits), and as a result, he gets to charge an A-List fee. The budget on this movie is only 10 million, which means that we don't have tons of money to throw around, and he was asking almost twice the amount we had budgeted for a casting director. His fee was basically as high as one could ask for a movie with this budget, and on 10 million dollars, a few thousand here and there really make a difference.
Don't get me wrong--I am not saying that he was overestimating his value, or that he was being unreasonable. The guy's casting credits are insane. He has discovered several of the biggest stars in Hollywood and, put together, the movies he cast have grossed well over a BILLION dollars. And in most of these, the cast was a large reason they did so well. If we put him in the project, every agency and management firm and actor in Hollywood will stand up and take notice. When this guy calls you with a script, you put everything else down and read it. His name means that much, and that kind of pull is very very valuable.
So we had to decide--was he worth the money? Well, the fact is, in Hollywood my name doesn't mean jack shit right now. The director we've attached is great, but he made his name doing indies in New York. In LA, he doesn't send the needle moving much. And the two experienced producers I have attached are fantastic at their jobs, but there just aren't many producers whose names alone make people take notice, and they aren't on that level. So even though he was very expensive, because we needed his name on the project, and because cast is SO important on a comedy and since he really is one of the best casting directors in Hollywood...we made the deal and paid the money. You want quality, you have to pay for it.
[If you recall during this post, I bitched about how hard it was to negotiate the deal. I'm not going to talk about the fucking tar baby his deal was. At least not yet. It was my first lesson in Hollywood dealmaking; some things I got right, some I got wrong, but in the end we got where we needed to be. I'll probably write a long post about it later, and really break down the anatomy of making a deal. It's more complex and nuanced than a Shakespearean drama.]
What does a casting director do?
The first thing Joseph did (he started working for us before the deal was even made, which was very cool) was put together a huge binder with all of his casting suggestions for each of the three male leads. We discussed them, went over why some were right and some were wrong, and then gave him more of a background understanding of the characters. In any script, the characters can be interpreted many different ways (think of how different a movie like HEAT would be if Al Pacino played the bad guy and Robert De Niro played the good guy), so we wanted to make sure that the casting director "got" the essence of how we saw these characters. I literally sat there and told him illuminating stories about me and SlingBlade and got into the heads of the characters for him.
From there, Joseph sends out what is called a "breakdown." This is sent out to all the agencies and major management firms and gives a brief coverage of the script, and a breakdown of what each character is like and what is required from an actor to play the role. The agencies then talk about the breakdowns every week in their staff meetings, and decide which actors to suggest/make available to the casting director. And of course, there is an elaborate chemistry at play here--the agencies want to create transactions so they can take their commissions, so they are incentivized to send as many actors out to as many casting calls as possible. But not quite, because they don't want to dilute the buzz of their hot stars (see the Offer Only, Meeting Only, Audition post) by sending them out too much. And they don't want to stick the big actors who can command big money from studios on little indies. That being said, they want to make sure the clients are happy, and as a general rule, actors care first and foremost about the quality of the roles they play, not about how much the role pays. Complicated enough for you?
[As a side note, the order was a bit fucked up for us; Joseph started work before we had the deal finished, so even though we were reading actors for the past three weeks, the breakdown is actually going out Monday. The past three weeks, everyone he brought in were actors he knew very well; the masses start piling in next week. But you get the point.]
Now do you see why having a big casting director on a project like mine helps so much? When someone at the level of Joseph attaches to a movie, especially a smaller indie, it signals something big to agencies and actors, and as a result, they take my project seriously and read my script and send good actors.
Not only does the casting director serve as a liaison between the producers and the agencies/actors, he passes information to both sides about the other. There was one actor I thought would be perfect to play a certain role in the movie; our casting director immediately negged the idea. He knew something about the dude that was not public knowledge but crucial, and saved us from a potential disaster. And it goes both ways--he talks to the agencies and actors, and lets them know what I am like, what the other producers are like, what we are looking for, and what we'll be like to work with. He lowers the cost of information for both parties, which is hugely beneficial to everyone involved. He's almost like an old school yenta-style match maker.
This is all before the casting even begins. Once the actors have started reading the script and agree to audition for a part, the casting director pre-reads most of them. That means they come in and read for him first, and he assesses them to see if they are even close, and if so, gives them notes about their performance to help them improve it and get closer to what we are looking for. Then when he has 5-7 ready for us to see, me, the director, and the producers come in and the actors read for us. The casting director (or his associate) tape every reading so we have something to see later, and then goes over every reading with us after, assessing their performance. We talk about what they did right and what they did wrong, and with each reading, everyone gets a clearer understanding of what we want and the casting director is able to narrow the field more and more and we can focus on the people most right for the roles.
Beyond that, he has an eagle eye for acting, and gives great advice on who is right and wrong and for what reasons. For instance, we had one guy read for Tucker that, in person, was fucking perfect. Had the right attitude, demeanor, swagger, everything. But on camera, he didn't come off in the way that we needed him too. Joseph pointed this out before anyone else. His feel for the actors is very finely tuned, and he knows what they are like, on and off camera, better than anyone.
I think that's it. As if it's not enough.
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