One of the director’s great entertainment Duke JohnsonGhost and beautiful new film “The actor“Suitable enough, considering the film’s title, the abundance of fantastic performances. André Holland Anchors the movie as a title character, an actor who struggles to find out who he is and where he belongs after an accident leaves him with memory loss. He is surrounded by a gallery with equally fascinating supporting players – most play several characters, with the actors often unrecognizable under layers of elaborate hair and makeup.
For Johnson, the decision was to create a group of actors who would play different characters all the time both practically and philosophically. “There are the limitations of shooting in Europe and getting your actors,” Johnson told IndieWire about an upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit PodcastNoting that getting a huge role in Budapest for production would have been insurmountably expensive – when he got talented artists like Tracey Ullman and Toby Jones to the site, why not use them as much as possible?
But having every actor to play different people Holland interacts on their journey also served a deeper conceptual purpose and must do with the ideas that Donald Westlake novel raised (“Memory”) that Johnson and co-author Stephen Cooney based his script. “There is the theme to act and how we all play roles in our daily lives,” Johnson said. “It is leaning into the idea of“ What can you really trust? “
The effect on the audience is hypnotic and sometimes disoriented, making the “actor” a deeply subjective viewing experience when we are sucked into the protagonist’s point of view. When actors return in different features, there is a sense of déjà vu that is aggravated by the film’s strategy for production design. Several sets are reused to serve as different places – again an economically sensible decision that also carries deep emotional resonance.
Johnson’s background is in stop-motion animation-he is best known for co-directing “anomalisa” with Charlie Kaufman-and he found that the director of the actors in his first live-action function was far from what he had experienced in his previous work. “In animation you make voting records, and there is much opportunity for actors to contribute, but then you take it and do the film and the performance does not change much after that point,” Johnson said. “To make a live-action movie, it develops daily.”
Johnson also discovered that the time pressure in live measures made his job exponentially more difficult than on a careful project such as “Anomalisa.” “I was like,” I won’t make a new movie stop, “because they are too hard to do,” Johnson said. “And then I made a live-action movie, and they’re so hard! Because you don’t have time. It’s like a ticking clock, and if something goes wrong, it’s really, really challenging. Sometimes things don’t work and you have to stop and figure it out with your collaborators, but sometimes there is just not time to do it. “
The biggest thing that Johnson learned on his first move to Live-Action was to leave some of his assumptions about the film school behind. “I come from a pretentious background where coverage is for losers or not for artists,” he said. “There is a David Fincher quote that there are two ways to shoot a scene, and one of them is wrong. And I would just say, get some fucking coverage. You need it to check stimulation and to have something to cut into the editing room. If you shoot digitally, it is so easy to throw in another camera – even if you know you can get it.
The “actor” opens in theaters on Friday 14 March. To make sure you don’t miss Duke JohnsonUpcoming episodes of Filmmaker Toolkit, Make sure you subscribe to the podcast on AppleThe SpotifyOr your favorite podcast platform.
