The Actor
This chapter is all about the relationship of the director with the actor. Because the actor is the most direct expression of the director’s idea, it is critical that the director understand the actor as well as the critical synergistic relationship of the director and the actor. An analogy that is appropriate here is the therapist–patient relationship. I do not mean this in the sense of a confessional relationship but rather a creative one. When it works, the therapist and the patient together create a pathway to a “new” person who is more actualized and more present in the world. In this sense, a good director and his actor create a pathway (i.e., performance) to a new person—the character in the film. That character will bring alive the narrative and create yet another relationship—with the audience. These creative, compelling relationships are what audiences seek. It is the reason why good actors are so well paid, and it is the reason why directors who do not use actors to their fullest potential are less well paid. I would like to add that actors are the frontline in a production. They take the greatest personal risk, and their courage deserves the audience’s respect and, dare I say it, love. They are an important partner in the creation of a film and in deployment of the director’s idea.
Casting
Many directors believe that “cast right and half of your job as a director is accomplished.” The statement at best is a half-truth. In this era of star-making projects, the politics of finance as often as a director’s vision dictate casting. The rise of powerful agents and casting directors have moved the pendulum in the direction of political rather than creative casting. My comments that follow are only relevant to creative casting (let me just say that directors must continue to fight to maintain their vision of the characters in their films).
Casting is the first expression of the director’s idea before production begins—all the more reason why the director at this pre-production stage must have a clear director’s idea, which, at this stage, is based on an interpretation of the script. The casting process is first and foremost about the look of an actor. Whether or not the actor physically conforms to the director’s vision of the character is less important than a checklist about the qualities, both physical and behavioral, the actor projects. I would suggest that at this first meeting between the director and an actor and the reading that will follow that the director keep a list of criteria by which to assess the actor, such as:
- Professionalism
- Level of tension the actor brings to the situation
- Energy
- Charisma
- Sexuality
Hold onto the notion that the director should apply these same criteria to the actor’s subsequent reading and to the actor’s readings with other actors.
First, we will address the issue of professionalism. By professionalism, I mean showing up on time and responding to the interview in a professional manner. The actor is there to be hired for a role, and the director is there to hire an actor. When the meeting strays in any fashion from achieving these two goals, then the director and the actor are in unprofessional territory.
The second issue is the level of tension the actor brings to the situation. When personality, desire, and opportunity mix, tension should result. How much tension is the actor able to produce? How is the actor managing and expressing that tension? Tension can become energy. As a director, I would be concerned if the actor is not able to produce the necessary tension. I would also be concerned if the actor’s coping strategy exceeded my expectations, given the circumstances (i.e., auditioning). Key here is that tension is expected and can be useful to the actor.
The third issue is energy. Good actors know that no matter the type of film the essential result is energy. Happiness, sadness, anger, wit, and charm are all part of an energy field. Does the actor generate that energy field or do they instead absorb the energy around them? Perhaps the reader is beginning to think that directors must have a psychology degree to cast. It is not necessary, but having a feel for people, understanding them and what makes them tick as human beings, helps.
The fourth issue is charisma, which is a form of energy, but it links to something more specific—belief, intense, aggressively held, and operational belief. It seems as if the actor wants the audience to join in his or her belief. This belief is so strong that it is inspirational, energetic . . . charismatic. Charismatic actors have extraordinary attraction, or pull. Does your actor have it?
Finally, sexuality. Every good actor knows that his or her film performance is on one level a seduction; in order to draw in the audience, the actor has to be seductive. Does this particular actor have that kind of magnetism? Is this actor attracting you, the director?
This checklist allows the director to determine whether a particular actor conforms to the director’s vision of the character. Often actors do not quite look the part but may bring something else to a role.
The second phase of the casting session—the reading by the actor—also should be filtered through the five points discussed above, although the reading itself has additional facets. The “through line” becomes the measure. What interpretation of the character is the actor aiming for? Does the interpretation conform to that of the director, or is it different? How is it different? How has the interpretation been built? Has the actor made a conscious effort to construct the through line? Is there charm? Is there energy? Is there belief? Does the actor want to please or displease? These are all issues that arise during an interpretation. Whether the character is stupid or brilliant, aware or unaware, the director must be able to see how the actor is building the interpretation and evoking feelings for the character such that the director knows that a connection has been made and the performance is developing.
If the interpretation differs from that of the director, then the question becomes one of how interesting the actor’s interpretation is. If it has captured the director’s attention, then there is obviously something there worth pursuing. The actor may be the right age and have the right look but undermine everything in the reading. For the director, the reading essentially reveals whether the actor has an empathy for the character and whether the actor’s interpretation has created something new. Finally, every actor wants a role, so desire and energy are going to be givens in the audition. The director’s job is to decide, using the five criteria, whether or not the actor has been seductive enough in his or her reading and interpretation of the character.
A second-level skill test in the reading is to pose the challenge of giving a different reading. Some directors will suggest an extreme situation—your mother has just died, you have just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer—and ask the actor to read the scene again. The goal here is to test the flexibility of the actor. Can the actor give more than one reading? This exercise gives the director a sense of the actor’s range. Good actors will be able to give a wide range of interpretations—funny, sad, tragic. Such a challenge serves as a warm-up for the role. The actor’s flexibility is reflected in his or her interpretation of the character, which might differ from the director’s interpretation of the character. How interesting is the difference, and how stimulating is the person’s range as an actor?
The third layer of the casting process, which may or may not be a separate session, is to have the actor read the part with another actor, another character. The same five criteria can be used to assess this reading. Is there a chemistry between the characters? If so, what is the nature of that chemistry? Do the actors connect or compete with each other? Competition is not necessarily bad; often it can be quite useful. This reading and subsequent readings with multiple actors can reveal whether or not the actor can sustain a connection with an audience. Does the actor command the audience’s attention? Energy, charisma, and sexuality all work together to keep the audience—and the director—engaged.
The Character Arc
Characters all have particular physical and behavioral qualities. Beyond these qualities, deeper into a character’s psyche, is what can best be described as the character’s core. This core affects the narrative goal through its mix of desires and inhibitions. This “character lava” is what makes the character pulsate with life and above all credibility. It is important for the director and the actor to create a character arc and maintain it throughout the film. A main character must have the capacity to transform and indeed must undergo an actual transformation during the film. (More on this in a moment.) Secondary characters will have significant interactions with the main character that may help or harm the main character. What is critical is that these secondary characters are passionate enough in their goals that they bring about change in the main character. This is their arc in the narrative. Let’s look at this process more specifically.
Let’s start with the capacity to transform. In most films, we are presented with a situation that forces the main character to adapt. When a daughter is kidnapped by Indians in Ron Howard’s “The Missing,” what will the main character, the mother, do? A second example is “Spiderman 2.” Spiderman is so busy keeping the peace that the love of his life leaves him for someone else. What will Spiderman do? The audience must believe that the mother in “The Missing” and Spiderman in “Spiderman 2” are capable of change. Something about each character has to be in sufficient flux that we believe each will act.
The next question is how does a character transform? Or, to put it another way, what propels a character along the character arc? From a narrative point of view, one of two story elements moves the main character to change. The first element is relationships. Think of Juliette Lewis’ character, who was the catalyst for change in Johnny Depp’s character in Lasse Hallström’s “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?” The second element is plot. Plot applies pressure to the goal of the main character. Think of the decision made by Michael (played by Dustin Hoffman) to pretend he is a female actress in Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie.” Michael, a failed actor, becomes an overnight star in a television soap, but as his career soars his impersonation of a woman modifies his male tendencies to lie and manipulate. As he puts it at the end, being a woman was the best part of the person Michael has become.
Main characters are always transformed, and their character arc forms the emotional spine of the film. Secondary characters can also change, but their transformations are in the service of the main character. Think of the confession made by Charlie (Rod Steiger) to his brother in the car ride in Elia Kazan’s “On the Waterfront.” Throughout the narrative, to satisfy his mob boss, Charlie has continually manipulated his brother Terry (Marlon Brando). Now trying to manipulate Terry one last time, Charlie realizes how much he has harmed his brother. He decides against the ultimate intimidation, Terry’s murder, and opts to let his brother live, although it will mean death for Charlie. This sacrifice is Charlie’s transformation, his single act of brotherly love. Because Charlie’s death will prompt Terry to testify against the mob, Charlie’s action (and relationship) has transformed Terry as much as his other significant relationship with Edie (Eva Marie Saint). The character arc of secondary characters has to be in the service of the main character.
Actors have to understand the emotional spine that is the character arc in order to build their performance. Directors need to understand the character arc because for them the character arc is the road map for a performance.
An Aside about Actors as Directors
Understanding the character arc is one of the reasons why actors have made good directors. Although undervalued, there is a tradition of actors becoming directors. The tradition goes all the way back to Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, who in a sense became great directors who were as well known as directors as they were actors. Although Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen are the most obvious directors whose character persona on screen was reflected by their work as directors, many actors have chosen different genres in which to develop their directorial skills. Charles Laughton, for example, chose to direct a nightmarish fable, “The Night of the Hunter.” Marlon Brando chose to direct a Western, “One-Eyed Jacks.” Both films are powerful, evocative experiences.
More often, however, actors tend to work closer to familiar territory. Dick Powell opted for terse thrillers and war films, such as “The Enemy Below.” Lawrence Olivier favored Shakespeare and directed “Henry V” and “Hamlet.” Powell and Olivier proved audacious within their familiar territory. Veering away from familiar territory can result in underappreciation and underfunding. Both Ida Lupino (“The Burglar”) and John Cassavetes (“Shadows”) developed underground reputations as directors, but their projects proved difficult to finance and neither actor could sustain a career as a director.
This situation has changed considerably in the past 25 years. The biggest stars have become important directors. Warren Beatty made “Heaven Can’t Wait” and “Reds.” Robert Redford made “Ordinary People.” Clint Eastwood directed “Unforgiven” and “Mystic River.” Mel Gibson directed “Braveheart” and “The Passion of the Christ.” Actors Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Diane Keaton, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, and Angelica Huston have all directed films, and the trend will only continue to grow. It must not be forgotten that Elia Kazan and Mike Nichols began their careers as performers and both went on to exceptional careers as directors. Understanding that characters change, how they change, and who they become (in essence, the character arc) is an advantage for actors who become directors. The philosophies of acting they use might differ, but the end result is the same—a living, lively, engaging portrayal of a character that grips the audience. We turn now to those philosophies of acting that actors use and directors should understand.
Philosophies of Acting
Philosophies of acting have generally arisen from theater performance rather than film or the media. Ideas about acting revolutionized by a Russian, Konstantin Stanislavsky, have been adapted in, for example, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Before discussing these ideas, however, it must be noted that their underpinnings are the 19th- and 20th-century advances made in our understanding of human behavior, principally cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis, fields that are concerned with the skin and subcutaneous layers of human behavior. These ideas quickly made their way into literature, the visual arts, design, and theater. It is not surprising that the contradictions and conflicts inherent to the outer and inner lives of a character became the focus of first playwrights, then directors and acting coaches. For each, the instrument that illustrated the conflict was the actor. How to bring the actor into a state of immediacy became the focus of ideas about acting for the next hundred years. It remains the focus today.
In order to understand the philosophies of acting that prevail today it is important to go to the source, Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director and theoretician of acting. His work on the interpretation of the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov crystallized his ideas about acting. Today’s ideas about acting differ only in their emphasis. (A good elaboration of these ideas is David Richard Jones’ Great Directors at Work, University of California Press, 1986.) Stanislavsky felt that acting should be directed toward uncovering or revealing certain universals: the human spirit, or nature, and above all truth. Stanislavsky’s examination of acting attempted to methodize the finding of truth. For Stanislavsky, truth was three things (see Great Directors at Work, p. 32):
- Verisimilitude, which corresponds to what is observable in the world (the outer world)
- Coherence, an assessment device that is in essence one’s system of belief (equivalent to a character’s subjectivity, or the inner world)
- The spiritual meaning of life, referring to the notion that spirituality coexists with material values in a dimension where reality and spirituality complement one another
Together, these three dimensions are symbiotic and help the actor create a truthful character on stage. According to Stanislavsky,
“What does it mean to be truthful on stage? Does it mean that you conduct yourself as you do in ordinary life? Not at all. Truthfulness in those terms would be sheer triviality. There is the same difference between artistic and inartistic truth as exists between a painting and a photograph; the latter reproduces everything, the former only what is essential” (K. Stanislavsky, Stanislavsky’s Legacy, edited by E.R. Hapgood, Theater Arts Books, 1968, p. 20).
All of the acting philosophies of the past hundred years have arisen out of these three ideas about acting. Let’s get specific.
Outside In
There is an informal school of acting that coalesces around actors such as Lawrence Olivier. Proponents believe that technique begins with the outside, what Stanislavsky called verisimilitude. If the actor wears the clothes of his character, adopts his manner of walking, and has his hair cut as that character would, then that actor can begin to work with that exterior to become the character. Other British actors such as Michael Caine and Anthony Hopkins have found this approach meaningful.
Here, observation is the key to preparing to develop a character. The approach of acting from the inside out (what Stanislavsky called coherence) has become the modus operandi for most schools of acting. Strategies that connect an actor to his inner life, including possible emotional memories associated with particular experiences, provide the material necessary to understand and develop the character. Improvisation, sense memory, and articulating inner experiences and feelings with physical outward expressiveness are the mechanical means of bringing out the inner “cohesiveness” to create a character.
The American School
The American School of acting arose out of the Group Theater in the 1930s and was very much influenced by Stanislavsky. American School acting teachers created the famous “method” style of acting, but within the school some acting teachers focused on memory— specifically, to readers of this book, the recall of feelings associated with specific events in their lives. These memories were the basis for creating an actor’s character, both behaviorally and physically. As in the work of Stanislavsky, the character should have a goal but it need not be searching for the truth, although authenticity in the creation of the character would be a form of truth.
Stella Adler emphasized imagination. Adler promoted the use of memories, feelings, impulses, and observations to create something else—a character. Improvisation is an important tool for directly accessing unconscious material that can be used to create a character.
Sanford Meisner focused on repetition to create an immediate “in the moment” experience. Putting an emphasis on what is going on here and now and focusing on the people, places, and total environment can help create an immediacy by virtue of the audience’s reaction to the people and places. The surprise this behavior ellicits invites spontaneous reaction. Energy, surprise, and a particular reality are created before our eyes. This acting style is perhaps the most active because it eschews reflection, while the styles of Adler and Lee Strasberg focus on a character who is in relative terms more developmental.
The European school of acting was not really a reaction to the American acting style; rather, it was fueled by a passion for new experiences that are more startling, even shocking. The kind of experimentation associated with Antonin Artaud and Jerzy Grotowski and most powerfully with Peter Brook is most aligned to the third Stanislavsky requisite in performance—the spiritual one. The work is focused on visceral expressions and reactions to the material world (realism). Indeed, directors such as Brook are totally disinterested in realism. Madness, religiosity, uninhibited cruelty, the craving for power, transcendence—all of these states were of great interest to Brook. Here is where an actor’s performance should be pitched. A character’s inner life and the outer world may exist but they are unimportant with regard to creating that character. Greater forces in the world require a style of performance (behavior) that is less individual and more tribal, less psychological and more anthropological. Understanding these larger forces should drive the reading of the play and the performances that articulate that reading. In a sense, the result is a communal, social style of performance as compared to the individualistic, psychological style of performance that has dominated the American theater and film.
In a sense, we can view the Brook style of acting as highly theatrical, searching out the primitive, the historical connections to past generations. This style of performance is best captured by the work of Julie Taymor. In the theater, she is represented by “The Lion King,” and on film she directed “Titus” and “Frida.” Reflected in her work is Taymor’s interest in ancient cultures—their archetypes for the range of human experience, from fertility to healing to celebration to death. For Taymor, life is ritual that connects past and future, and her approach to acting seeks out these same values. Her work connects her to Brook and to Stanislavsky’s third rail to truth, the spiritual. This style of acting is best described as theatrical. Put another way, Taymor’s work can be viewed as antimaterialistic and acting styles that emphasize the physical or outer world can be considered as materialistic or modern. Here the work of playwrights such as Neil LaBute, Craig Lucas, and Patrick Marber focus and their directors and their actors to approach performance from a perspective different from Taymor.
To further clarify this approach to acting, I turn to acting coach Judith Weston (Directing Actors, Michael Wiese Productions, 1999) and director David Mamet (On Directing Film, Penguin, 1992), who have best articulated the “how” of it. Weston has adapted a combination of the Adler and Meisner approaches to acting. Her focus is on the imaginative creation of a character and she has devised a series of suggested strategies to help the actor “be in the moment” and create a living character who can reach out and engage the audience. First, actors need to work with a set of resources of their own. These resources include their memories or personal experiences, their observations of others, their imagination accessed by improvisation, and their immediate experience. Immediate experience and observation refer to the outer world, the world around the actor. The actor’s memories and imagination refer to the actor’s inner life. Critical here is the issue of access. Lee Strasberg developed the strategy of sense memory, complete with exercises to access those memories and the attendant feelings, Stella Adler developed exercises to access imagination, and Sanford Meisner created a repetition exercise to access and elaborate upon immediate experience (and to deliver the actor into the moment). Think of each of these exercises as accessing a well of feeling that the actor can funnel energetically into the creation of a character. Using that energy, the actor creates a character. To develop that character, though, a number of choices must be made. Those choices should be based on a deep understanding of the character and should be directed toward developing a character who is authentic, moving toward a true understanding and articulation of the self in the sense of truth Stanislavsky intended, not just verisimilitude but rather a character who has an inner life, an outer reality, and a spiritual layer.
To move into the mechanics of character creation, the actor needs to determine what the spine of that character will be. In a sense this means coming to an understanding of the subtext of the screen story. When defining the character, it is useful to consider what obstacles the character will face. What is the spine? By spine I mean the underlying goal of the character. Whether the goal is an existential one or Weltanschauung (the reason for being), the actor needs to understand the spine in practical terms. Weston uses the example of Michael in “The Godfather” (see Weston’s Directing Actors, p. 100). She feels (and I agree) that Michael’s underlying goal, beyond being an individual and his own person, is to please his father, Don Corleone. This perception is critical because on a deep level it motivates Michael’s character. The spine can and should underlie the character’s actions in every scene.
Taking this into the social realm, we see Michael’s goal as part of a story subtext in “The Godfather.” Whenever Michael, his father (the Don), and other members of the family are gathered, whether the scene addresses professional or personal issues, the subtext is the same—the threat to the family is ongoing, and everything should be done to preserve the family. The outside world must remain outside, and efforts to preserve the family must be constant. The actor should be aware of this subtext if he is to build his character. The third component underlying performance is the presence of obstacles. The actor must constantly be aware of obstacles. In one scene, the obstacle might be simple and easily overcome, but over a sequence of scenes the obstacles should grow larger and more varied. Obstacles are useful to the actor. They are signposts bringing the spine of the character into sharper relief. Spine, subtext, and obstacles form the general outlines of the character, and specific mechanical devices can aid the actor in the actual moment-tomoment creation of the character.
Objective, intention, image, fact, sense of belief, physical life, specifics, and listening all contribute to the creation of a character. By objective, Weston really means two elements. The first element is a conscious short-term objective in a scene; this can be as simple as walking to a window or pouring a cup of coffee. The second objective is unconscious and emotional. By pouring a cup of coffee for his wife, a character can illustrate how service even in its simplest form can be used to gain the approval of another (in this case, the wife). Such a scene can serve to illustrate that the character has an unconscious objective to seek approval. One can imagine how this objective manifests itself in the workplace, in circumstances where the character himself seeks service. Does this character feel uncomfortable, for example, when others provide service to him? This is how the unconscious objective works and when it is operating it implies a living, thinking, feeling person.
Intention involves the actor’s reaching for an objective and the means required to make the objective more attainable. What would the character do to achieve an objective? Would he verbalize? Would he act? Or would he be more subtle? Intention illustrates the character’s thought process, intelligence, and chosen pathway for achieving his objective.
Image refers to the surround of the character, what the character would notice in the world—the things and the people and how they transport a character to the sensual world of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching. The more specific the images the actor considers, the more complex will be their interactions with the world. Image is not necessarily specific to the script. It can be whatever the actor experiences in order to give his character dimension within the world of the script. Image also tells us something nonverbal about the character and can be used to make the character’s world and the characterization richer in imagination (surprise).
Facts are used to create a reality for a character. The more the actor knows about the character or develops through improvisation, the greater the sense of reality for that character. Facts give a character a past and may imply that the character believes in or is moving toward a future. One element of fact is belief. Belief animates a character’s movement through the story. Belief is a function of the goals, hopes, and needs of a character. In this sense, belief supplies the energy and movement of the character. This energy is critical to the audience. It helps them identify with the character better. When we see a sense of belief in a performance, we are drawn to the character.
Physical life is an important complement to the sense of belief. The actor must physicalize his performance, which requires turning intention into a physical manifestation. It also requires the actor to physicalize his interactions with the setting as well as with other characters. Costumes and makeup, together with posture and carriage, help the actor create the physical parameters of a character. In order to animate the physical and the sense of belief, actors need to find specific gestures and actions that delineate the character. Generality moves us away from the character; specifics move us into the character. An effort to be as specific as possible is critical in the creation of a performance.
Finally, it is critical that a character listen to the other characters. Active listening will convey the impression that the actor is part of the scene, but an actor who is perceived as not listening will disengage the audience. An actor who is obviously listening will appear to be immersed in the action as it unfolds, and the audience will be more likely to be immersed along with the actor.
Objective, intention, image, fact, sense of belief, physical life, specifics, and listening will all mechanically contribute to the actor’s creation of a character. Judith Weston has suggested what the director should understand about the actor from the actor’s point of view. We now turn to David Mamet, who speaks to the issue from the director’s point of view.
A playwright and a man of the theater, Mamet came late to film work. He was the screenwriter for Sidney Lumet’s “The Verdict” and Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables,” both lauded screenplays. Mamet turned to directing with “Things Change” and “Homicide” and has directed a film every two years, with each one becoming increasingly plot oriented, such as “Heist” and “Spartan.”
In a sense Mamet offers a position on directing intentionally opposite that of an acting coach such as Judith Weston. Even an actor’s director such as Elia Kazan overinvests directing in the actor’s performance, according to Mamet (On Directing Film). Mamet takes the position championed by Sergei Eisenstein and V. Pudovkin: Eisenstein’s “method has nothing to do with following the protagonist around but rather is a succession of images juxtaposed so that the contrast between these images moves the story forward in the mind of the audience” (On Directing Film, p. 2). The emphasis then is on shot selection and organization. Mamet equates the conversation with the cinematographer regarding where to place the camera (technical) with the conversation with the actor about what the actor should do (technical). Mamet downplays or outright dismisses conversations about motivation. Mamet elaborates this idea later in his book. Using a Stanislavsky anecdote about navigation on the challenging Volga River, Mamet suggests:
“How is it that given the many, many ways one might direct a movie, one might always be able with economy, and perhaps a certain amount of grace, to tell the story? The answer is: ‘Stick to the channel; it’s marked’ (sailing reference). The channel is the super objective of the hero and the marker buoys are the small objectives of each scene and the smaller objectives of each beat, and the smallest unit of all, which is the shot” (On Directing Film, pp. 103–104).
Above all, Mamet keeps going back to three ideas for the director: There is a super objective that should guide the directing of a performance. The super objective is akin to the spine in Weston’s terminology. Mamet also emphasizes the physicality of the per-formance; actions must be physical as opposed to verbal (Mamet’s ideal for dialogue is a silent scene, an irony for such a fine writer of dialogue). Finally, Mamet emphasizes specific actions within a shot, the more concrete the better. After these guiding principles Mamet is happy to rely on casting and the intelligence and charisma of an actor to flesh out the screen character. For this director, however, less is more.
Having presented the Mamet position, a position that is quite the opposite from the Weston position, I suggest that you, as a director, will have to choose your own approach to acting, one in line with your own experience and character. Directors have ranged from the minimalist (Alfred Hitchcock) to the reverential (Mike Leigh) in their approach to actors and performance. Within that spectrum, directors have adopted particular strategies ranging from the seductive (Elia Kazan) to the sadistic (Otto Preminger). The full spectrum of human behaviors associated with trying to achieve a goal comes into full play with directors, no less than with any other profession. What is not typical, however, when compared to other professional relationships, is that the actor is the most direct expression of the director’s idea; consequently, the director’s relationship with the actor and the approach to character creation are fundamental building blocks in filmmaking. As a result, the director must know how to work with an actor to create the characters that will animate the director’s idea.