Book No. 26 of 2025
No, I haven’t made a career change and gone into film; I saw this book mentioned in a Captain Awkward post and it struck me that a book for directors on how to direct actors for film/TV would be useful for me in an analogous way. I’ve been feeling an increasing interior tension (just saying that makes me sound like an insufferable Artiste) between the part of me that has to do all the project managing/booking/decision-making, and the part of me that has to do all the vulnerable art-making. It occurred to me that thinking of those two parts of myself as the director and actor could be really helpful.
I did find Directing Actors to be helpful in the way I hoped it would be—if nothing else, it affirmed that being any kind of performing artist requires immense vulnerability that has to be protected, and that so much about performance comes down to how the performer mentally frames things—with the side effect of teaching me a lot about the film industry. As someone whose familiarity with acting is all of one semester of a beginning acting class, I know so little about how movies/TV shows get made and what directors actually do, and this book explained a lot! It also made me realize that I really don’t have what it takes to be an actor.
For people who aren’t performing artists, this is also, obliquely, a helpful book on management, particularly managing creative and/or difficult people. I can think of multiple people who could use the lessons in this book, which is a reminder after all that when you strip away the glamour and mystique of film, every movie and show is just a big group project, and to make any project successful, you have to know how to work with people.