Performance

Take one fishing village of no fixed century, a bride who smells of the water, a basketmaker who asks no questions, and a husband built in New Zealand out of cane, and you have, more or less exactly, Wicker. Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s second feature, after the sci-fi comedy Save Yourselves!, premiered at Sundance in January, was picked up there by Black Bear, and reached American screens on October 23 with the sort of buzz Punch Drunk Critics describes well: spoken about steadily but quietly for nine months, until the autumn festivals turned the murmur into noise. I came to it for the same reason the cinematography forums will: a lead character who is a practical build, mostly, from Wētā Workshop, and who has to carry a romantic comedy without, by the nature of his material, being able to move very much. ...

I am going to talk about the hands, and let everything else in Noah Segan’s The Only Living Pickpocket in New York follow from them, because that is how the film itself is built. Harry (John Turturro) lifts a wallet and a gym bag from a young man in the opening stretch using, by IGN’s account, only a penny, and IGN goes on to describe the method the film takes care to show us: wallets snatched as if the thief were invisible, overcoats cut with tactical pockets so that the path from removal to hiding place is the shortest possible. The Substack critic John Doc calls these passages process porn, with approval, and he is right to approve; a film that bothers to show you how a trade is actually done has already made a promise about how seriously it will take everything else. Système D as a way of life, filmed with respect. The question is whether the rest of the picture keeps the promise the hands make. ...

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. ...

Bref, recreating the past is usually an expensive trap. When a director says they want to set their film in the 1970s, the producers immediately start sweating. Period cars, period wardrobe, period licensing—it drains a budget faster than a bad storm. So, how did the Cairnes brothers manage to build a flawless 1977 American late-night television broadcast on a modest $2 million budget? They did what all great independent filmmakers do: they contained the madness. ...

When a production is restricted to a single location, the instinct is to chop the narrative into pieces. You shoot coverage. You break the scene down line by line to protect the actor and give the editor options. In Locke, Steven Knight had a single location: the cabin of a moving BMW X5. He did not chop the narrative into pieces. He forced his actor to endure it in real-time. ...

When actors know what is going to happen in a scene, they stop reacting and start performing. In a thriller, performance is fatal. We can always see the artifice. To execute the mind-bending science fiction film Coherence on a micro-budget of $50,000, director James Ward Byrkit had to eliminate artifice entirely. He did this by enforcing the architecture of ignorance. The Scriptless Experiment Byrkit did not write a screenplay. He wrote a structural master plan outlining the narrative beats, but he refused to give the actors a script. Every day, the cast was handed index cards detailing their individual character motivations. Crucially, they were kept completely blind to the motivations and actions of the rest of the ensemble. ...

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. ...

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. ...

The modern audience expects a star to deliver their brand. They demand the hysteria, the operatic outbursts, the comfortable familiarity of an actor playing themselves. To cast a star is to invite their baggage onto your set. But Michael Sarnoski did not cast Nicolas Cage in Pig to exploit the “Cage Rage.” He cast him to completely destroy it. Directing the Performance: Subverting the Persona The premise of the film—a man hunting down the people who stole his beloved animal—is a deliberate trap. It signals to the audience that they are about to watch a violent revenge thriller. It invites the expectation of bloodshed and operatic madness. ...