Directing the Performance

I will restrict myself to one question, because it is the question this film lives or dies on: how do you photograph a man the whole world has already memorized, at the age before he was anyone? Anthony Bourdain has been mythologized without pause in the years since his death, and the field of posthumous product is exactly as lurid as you fear. Matt Johnson’s Tony, for A24, written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, answers the question with a scope decision so severe it amounts to a manifesto: one summer, 1975, Provincetown. A nineteen-year-old washes dishes badly, lies about everything, and gets, in the words of Kitchen Confidential that open the film, the good ass-kicking he badly needs. The show, the fame, the voice, none of it appears. The film ends before the man begins. ...

Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered. ...

To capture the unfiltered, destructive reality of New York youth in his 1995 film Kids, photographer-turned-director Larry Clark knew that traditional Hollywood casting would fail. You cannot hire a casting director to find a Juilliard-trained 18-year-old and expect them to convincingly portray the hyper-specific, chaotic reality of a downtown skateboarder. The Participant-Observer Instead, Clark became a participant-observer. He spent three years embedding himself within the downtown NYC skateboarding community, gaining the trust of the teenagers before a camera ever rolled. He learned their language, observed their behavior, and mapped their social dynamics. He approached the narrative film as if it were a strict ethnographic documentary. ...

Traditional film production is an exercise in rigid geography. An actor is told exactly where to stand—their “mark”—so the lighting is perfect and the camera focus is sharp. But hitting a mark destroys spontaneity. To achieve a hyper-realistic, documentary-style intimacy on a tight $700,000 budget, Half Nelson director Ryan Fleck completely rejected the mark. Character-Driven Blocking Instead of forcing actors Ryan Gosling and Shareeka Epps to adapt to the camera, Fleck forced the camera to adapt to them. He utilized a highly mobile, handheld 16mm camera to follow the actors’ natural instincts. The actors were allowed to move organically through the real Brooklyn locations. This character-driven blocking prioritized emotional spontaneity over technical perfection, resulting in performances that feel radically unscripted and alive. ...

When directing actors, the primary goal is usually to elicit natural, emotional, “human” performances. In Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos does the exact opposite. To construct a horrifying portrait of a family living in an isolated, artificially constructed reality, he systematically strips his actors of natural human behavior. The Trance of the Deadpan Lanthimos directs his actors to deliver their dialogue in a notoriously flat, monotone, and deadpan style. The characters do not inflect; they do not emote. This verbal strangeness forces the characters to appear as if they are in a trance, perfectly reflecting their status as infantilized subjects who have been brainwashed by their parents’ authoritarian social experiment. They are repeating words, not feeling them. ...

When a production is starved of money, directors often make the mistake of over-compensating with stylistic gimmicks to make the film look “cinematic.” Destin Daniel Cretton took the opposite approach with Short Term 12. He realized that when you are confined to a single location with a $400,000 budget, your greatest visual effect is human empathy. The Contained Narrative The film is set almost entirely within the pressure-cooker environment of a residential foster-care facility. Cretton did not try to expand the scope to make the film feel bigger. He turned the financial constraint of a 20-day, single-location shoot into a narrative weapon. By trapping the audience in the facility, the film focuses exclusively on character dynamics. The narrative is not driven by external plot mechanics; it is propelled forward entirely by the volatile, unpredictable emotional states of the teenagers and the staff. ...

The camera is a predatory instrument. When you point it at real people suffering real tragedy, the line between documentation and exploitation becomes dangerously thin. In The Rider, Chloé Zhao navigates this ethical minefield not by shooting a straight documentary, but by constructing a highly specific fiction around a devastating reality. Casting the Truth Zhao did not cast actors to play cowboys. She cast Brady Jandreau, a genuine rodeo rider, shortly after he suffered a real, near-fatal head injury that ended his career. She cast his actual father, his actual sister, and his actual best friend, Lane Scott, who was left severely disabled by his own rodeo accident. ...

Actors are liars. They come to set armed with premeditated tears, rehearsed vocal inflections, and a desperate need to show you how much they are feeling. It is the director’s job to strip away this artifice and expose the terrifying truth beneath. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a devastating masterpiece precisely because he refused to let his actors act. Directing the Performance: The Emotionless Read To achieve the profound emotional resonance of the film, Hamaguchi employed an extreme, almost sadistic rehearsal technique. He forced his cast to endure extensive, repetitive table reads of the script—and of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya—completely stripped of emotion. ...

Hollywood is terrified of actual teenagers. For decades, studios have cast perfectly polished twenty-five-year-olds to play high school students. This cowardice results in a sanitized, plastic version of adolescence. In Eighth Grade, Bo Burnham recognized that to capture the terrifying reality of Generation Z anxiety, he could not hire professionals playing dress-up. He had to hire the real thing. Directing the Performance: Actual Children Bref, Burnham insisted on casting actual eighth graders. He discovered lead actress Elsie Fisher on YouTube. She had graduated from the eighth grade a mere week before principal photography began. ...

Too many American filmmakers treat nature as a backdrop. They throw actors into pristine forests with a pristine wardrobe, spray them with a little Evian water to simulate sweat, and call it grit. Debra Granik, thankfully, understands that the wilderness is an adversary, not a prop. To make Leave No Trace, she demanded absolute, exhausting authenticity. Production Mechanics: The Survivalist Boot Camp Bref, Granik refused to rely on the props department to fake survival skills. Before filming began, she forced her lead actors, Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie, into an intensive, multi-day training camp with a military survival expert. ...