Casting trick #6: Think of performance not in terms of right or wrong, but rather in terms of true or false.

My wife has an audition for a Gus Van Sant movie this morning, which is especially neat for me.

For one thing, I love getting a glimpse at how other, more famous, directors work. For another, my wife is amazingly good at breaking down a scene and constructing an entire world from the clues she finds hidden in dialogue or screen direction.

This time, though, I see the scene one way and she sees it another. And the reality is, neither one of us has a clue how Gus sees it. For all we know, we could both be totally off.

How is that relevant? Because your actors can't know what's in your head.

You can tell them. And you should. But even the most detailed explanation will leave them loads of room to interpret. This is a good thing, by the way. It's what actors get paid to do.

What that means for you doing casting, though, is that you need to think of performance not in terms of right and wrong, but rather in terms of true or false.

One of my wife's lines is, "Mind your business." Is she saying it with anger? Sadness? Frustration? Is she lashing out or muttering? Is she even speaking to the other actor or is she saying it to herself?

Who knows? At this point in the process, I'd be surprised if Gus Van Sant even knows.

My wife needs to fill in the blanks the best way she can, and if you ask me, the way to do that is to have a clear picture of her character first.

I like the idea of her character feigning ineptitude in order to avoid having to confront reality, but my wife is leaning more toward her putting on a false front of optimism in the feeble hope that she can control her fate. Whatever she decides will inform the way the line comes out. That, along with the way the line that precedes it is given to her.

If Gus is any good, and I happen to think he's pretty good, he won't care whether she lands squarely in his headspace. If he were me, he'd evaluate the decisions she'd made given the information she was provided and if he respected her reasoning, would then consider how she executed. Did she listen and react? Was she believable? Did she find the emotional beats?

In other words, was her performance true to the character?

Every once in a while you're going to have an actor walk in and nail exactly what you're thinking the first time at bat. When that happens, suppress the urge to high-five yourself. See what else he or she can give you first.

If you get another interpretation that's just as believable, then by all means, head to the nearest bar for a celebratory cocktail. But if you get the same thing again, you need to realize that if you cast this person, you're going to get what they want to give you, not necessarily what you want to get.

You're the director, after all. That means you're supposed to, you know, direct.

Stay out of the middle.

There are two extremes when it comes to producing. At one end, you have the no-budget projects. The ones you do with friends and favors, guerilla-style, not paying location fees or getting permits and just hoping you'll be done before somebody kicks you out.

On the other extreme are the multi-million dollar extravaganzas. On these, everything is done by the book and everybody is on the clock.

At both extremes, life is difficult. On the no-budget end, if you need your actor to wear a blue shirt, you either break out the credit card to buy one or you borrow one from someone who happens to be the right size. On the huge-budget end, you're working with stars earning more than $10 million just to be there. Those stars have people –– people who often have people of their own –– who do nothing but make sure the stars are 'taken care of'. Someone recently told me that on the film 'Falling Down' (a film about a middle class guy having a really bad day) Michael Douglas wore one of eight identical shirts the wardrobe stylist was required to buy, full retail, from Barney's.

You know that Kiswahili saying, "When the elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers?" On a big show, your production is the grass. Your only hope of protecting the grass is to be an elephant yourself, which you're not, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this blog. But even if you were, you'd have to be a pretty huge elephant not to get drawn into stupid fights over who doesn't show up on set until everybody else is there and ready to shoot or what color out-of-season flowers have to be in whose trailer.

But as hard as it is to do no-budget productions –– and as hard as it is to do huge-budget productions –– it's hardest of all to do the middle-budget productions. The ones where you have enough money to rent a stage, but not enough to build a decent set. Where you get the cast you want, but you only have one 14-hour day to shoot three-days' worth of footage. Where everybody gets paid, but not enough to make their rate.

On these jobs, you can't ask for favors. And there isn't any extra money to throw around.

You want my advice? Of course you do. Don't aim for the middle. Make everything you can for nothing until something hits so big that Hollywood comes knocking.

And pay attention. I guarantee you, your first time at bat, Hollywood isn't going to back up the truck and unload stacks of money. So unless you know not only why it takes four gaffers two hours to light a bathroom, but how much those gaffers, the lights, and the bathroom cost, the first time you find yourself on a job with a real budget your ass is going to be, well, grass.

Casting trick #5: Look at one person at a time.

Funny thing about dialogue: you need two people to have one. That means if you're shooting a conversation of any kind, you're going to have to cast more than one person.

This sounds terribly remedial, I know, but it's important.

So let's say you're running a casting session for a scene that requires dialogue and you have two actors come into the room together. They slate –– one at a time, of course –– and then they go through the action.

Which one are you looking at?

See where I'm headed with this?

If one of them sucks and the other one's great, what do you do?

I'll tell you what you do. You go back in time. Before you even begin working with your actors, you take your video camera and point it at one of them –– doesn't matter which. Frame the other person completely out. Then as you're watching the performance, you make notes only about that one. And since you're a conscientious person and don't want to give one of the actors the impression that you're ignoring him, you tell him that once you're done working with the one guy, you're going to concentrate on him.

When you've got the first person's performance to a place you like, tell your first actor to keep things right there and turn the camera on the second actor. Then work with him.

There are a couple of benefits to doing things this way. First, you only have to keep your mind on one performance at a time. More critical, if you're like most directors you don't get the final say on casting. Other people are going to have to discuss your choices, and they can't discuss what they don't see.

Which brings me to a rule I try to apply, not just with casting, but with every aspect of production: Never submit anybody or anything you wouldn't be 100% happy to work with. I guarantee you that if you give somebody a choice, they're going to choose the one you don't like.

Casting trick #4. Look at the resumes.

There's a story kicking around about Steven Spielberg which might be true, but even if it's not, it's pretty informative. The way I heard it, a woman approached him in a restaurant and told him he should audition her kids for his next film. He asked if they'd ever been in movies, and she said no. And he said, "I don't put people in their first movie, but I might put them in their second."

Welcome to Hollywood. You can't get work unless you have experience and you can't get experience unless you get work.

There's so much at stake when it comes to making any kind of production that most people are reluctant to take a chance with an unknown. This is true in every department, but today we're talking about actors.

I guess my standards aren't as high as Mr. Spielberg's because I will actually hire actors for their first job. But only on a couple of conditions. One is that they really do their homework, meaning they need to know how to act. The other is that they don't lie about it.

Which brings me to the point of this blog. Insist on your actors submitting resumes. And read them. Even if your actor doesn't have a ton of experience, a resume can tell you a lot about how to work with him or her.

So how do you read a resume?

First, I give it an overview. Just a glance will tell you not only how experienced your actor is, but what kind of acting he or she tends to do. There's a huge difference between the grammar of the stage and the grammar of a film, and stage actors generally need a little special care to make the adjustment to film. People with improv experience can usually improvise, but those who do it almost exclusively might not be as comfortable following a script verbatim. I don't care –– in fact, I prefer that my actors find the line that makes the most sense to them –– but there are some situations where a script has been through so many revisions, tests, animatics, and levels of approval that you can't change a single syllable.

Then I read. Usually from the bottom up.

The bottom is where actors put special skills. Someone who has a black belt in taekwando is probably pretty dedicated, whereas listing "likes cats" might mean he or she doesn't really commit to much. If I see a special skill that I know something about, it gives me an opportunity feel them out, to see how much their resume might be padded.

Just above special skills, most actors put their training. There are a lot of acting schools, each of which has a slightly different take on both the business and the appropriate approach to acting. I like seeing actors who have attended a variety of schools because it means they're probably looking for what works best for them. Call me a cynic, but I think finding the perfect acting school right off the bat is about as likely has finding true love with your high school sweetheart.

Of course, once an actor has done enough work to fill out a resume, he or she has probably learned the rhythms of an actual set and the shorthand we use to communicate, so that stuff is a little less critical.

Right above training, actors put their experience. They usually break it up into film, television, stage, and commercial, with the more experienced actors (or the ones who want to appear more experienced –– remember what I said about using special skills to see how much they might be padding their resumes?) putting the line "conflicts available upon request," which means, "I've done too many to list here."

It also means, "I'll audition for your Burger King commercial even though I shot a McDonald's commercial last month and if you want me I'm going to hope that nobody notices." This, by the way, is a really bad move.

One of the things I look for in the experience section is anything that might be interesting or relevant. Believe it or not, there are some directors whose work I really admire. If someone's worked for one of them, it means that he or she impressed that director enough to get the job. I give points for that.

I never take off points for working for a director whose work I loathe, by the way. Work is work, and it's certainly not the actor's fault if the director who hires him or her happens to suck.

All this takes me maybe a minute, by the way.

And what if your actor has absolutely no experience and absolutely no training? Well, unless you're dealing with a kid –– and I'm talking a kid under five or six –– that person has been up to something, right? Whatever that something is can tell you a lot about how to work with him or her.

A lawyer can't be a lawyer without learning to think a certain way. Just as a mother can't be a mother without learning how to deal with kids. Those things are relevant because they tell you how to communicate with them. If I find the perfect person for the role, I'm not going to make a silly detail like lack of acting experience keep me from working with them.

Spielberg has every right to hire only people who have worked before. But if we all did that, he would never have been hired for his first job.

The most expensive $29 hat I ever bought and why it was worth it.

I was hired to shoot a job for the the Arizona Department of Tourism, and since Arizona is, as you well know, hot and sunny and since the whole point of shooting a project like that was to show, well, Arizona, I had a pretty good feeling I was going to need a hat.

I'd like to point out that I already had plenty of hats, most of them baseball caps and most of them black, which if you read this blog on April 12th, you understand why.

But this was Arizona Tourism. Jobs like this don't come along all the time, so when they do you need to get a hat worthy of them.

So I went to REI.

I found a hat that I liked. A Tilley Endurables.

The brim was wide, the crown vented. It had absorbent padding where the inside of the hat presses up against your head. But what really sold me on it was the pocket. There's a little pocket up in the crown that even has a fabric patch on it specially designed for you to write your name and phone number on it.

When I saw the price tag, I balked. It seemed like a lot of money.But my wife insisted. It was a good job and it would be better with a good hat, she said.

When we got out to the car, I took out a Sharpie and wrote my name and phone number in it. That way, at least I had a little bit of a chance of recovering the hat if I lost it.

I told her I felt silly spending $29 for a hat, and she got this funny look on her face. "Twenty-nine dollars?" she asked. I thought for sure she'd seen the price tag.

"Uh, yeah. Didn't you realize how expensive it was?" Now I felt really bad. I'd already written in it. There's no way I could return it.

"Yeah, but you didn't," she said.

My turn to get a funny look on my face. I asked her what she meant. She dug the price tag out of the trash bag and showed it to me.

I'd read it upside down. If I felt $29 was extravagant for a hat, imagine how I felt when I realized I'd dropped $65.

For a hat.

Okay, a hat with a pocket which, by the way, is incredibly useful. I stuff currency in mine –– US, Canadian, Mexican, and Turkish, so far. And a Lactaid pill, since I'm lactose intolerant and you never know when you're going to be out shooting in the desert, get separated from your entire crew, and have no choice but to eat ice cream in order to survive.

As for the other features, they do everything they're supposed to. The wide brim keeps the sun off my ears and neck, the vented crown keeps me only moderately sweltering, and the absorbent padding does a really good job of absorbing. I soak it with water and let the evaporation cool me down.

And the hat comes with a lifetime guarantee. If you destroy it or lose it, the Tilley company will replace it.

Of course, they only do that once. But still, that's like getting two hats. For $65. Which works out to $32.50 apiece.

Talk about a bargain.

Casting trick #3. Looks aren't everything. In fact, they're about half.

Unlike the Triumph Spitfire, this trick is actually both powerful and reliable, so pay attention.

The first thing I do when I get a casting log is draw a line from top to bottom, halfway through the area designated for comments.

That's not what makes this trick so powerful (or reliable). The part that makes it powerful (and reliable) is how I label the sections. One side is "Look"; the other side is "Performance". What this does is allow me to evaluate each actor for both how well he or she suits the role superficially and how convincingly he or she plays the part.

Sure, the guy may look like the quintessential matador, but if he's a lousy actor we're better off going with someone who doesn't look quite as convincing, but can actually perform. (I'm amazed that in 16 years of working with casting directors, producers, copywriters, art directors, and creative directors as a director –– plus all those years of working as a copywriter on shoots with other directors –– I never once came across anybody else who broke it down like this.)

I encourage the ad agency people I'm working with to break down their evaluations the same way. This does two things. The first is to keep the conversation focused –– if we don't agree about a particular person, we can more easily figure out why. The second is a bit more subtle, and that's so I can get a clearer picture of how the agency people see their spot. We all have our own pictures of what a shaman looks like, and it's often only when we each respond to the actors who come in that I can see clearly what the art director and copywriter had in mind when they came up with the concept. Which, by the way, are often wildly different from each other.

I'll give you another tip. The evaluations are relative, not absolute. What I mean is that you could go insane trying to find the perfect space hooker when all you need to find is the best space hooker.

There's a neat implication to this that I discovered about ten years ago. I rate each actor on a one to ten basis, with ten being the highest, so the first person –– no matter how good or how bad –– gets a five for both look and performance.

If the next person is better, he or she might get a six. Nobody ever gets a ten because I always want to leave open the possibility that somebody else better might come along. I've passed on people who scored 9.875. And I've cast people who scored a five.

Sometimes, I can't help but give a zero, because I can't imagine how anybody could possibly be worse. Invariably, somebody is, which only goes to show that my system, as good as it sounds in theory, is pretty hard to put into practice.

At the end of the session, I take the top scorers for both looks and performance and figure out which contestant meets both criteria the best. If the ones that look the best aren't the same as the ones that perform the best –– and this is the case a lot –– I make a judgement call.

But then, that's what I get paid for. To make judgement calls. My particular way of evaluating casting is only one way for me to make the best decision.

If it works for you, great. If it doesn't, find another way that does.

Casting trick #1. First impressions count.

Now that I've given an overview of the casting process (http://tinyurl.com/knnno6) and told you how I write a casting breakdown (http://tinyurl.com/ld7dyx), let me give you a trick I use to help make casting go smoother: The first thing I do when I review my submissions is watch each actor slate and jot down my first impression of him or her.

This isn't stuff like "Yuck!" or "Hottie." It's the first thing that comes to mind about the person. On the job I just finished, some of my notes are "Irish cop," "1950s news anchor," and "Al's friend from that New Year's thing."

These aren't judgments. They're impressions. And it doesn't matter if anybody else can make sense of them.

So what's the point?

Most commercials have more than one role and your first submission can be as many as 300 people. So you have to be able to keep them straight, especially when you need to discuss actors with art directors, copywriters, creative directors, and producers. Jotting down a first impression is a way of crystalizing it for me, kind of like a mnemonic device that helps me recall which actor made which impression later.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Brian, how come you do this with the slate and not the head shot?"

Excellent question.

Actors put a lot of effort into head shots, for the simple reason that it's the thing that makes the difference between being called in for an audition or not. That's good, at least in theory. The problem comes when the photograph goes beyond presenting an actor in a favorable light, which a lot of them do.

There's a talent agency in LA that requires its actors to use the same incredible photographer for their head shots. I love getting submissions from them because every single photo is beautiful. But I also hate getting submissions from them because a lot of the actors who come in only bear a passing resemblance to the person in the photo.

Besides, an impression isn’t necessarily based on how someone looks. It could be based on how they move, how they speak, or the way their clothes hang.