The Great Acting Blog: “The Good Director”
The good director understands that his idea of the way a certain moment in a scene should be played, is only one person’s view, and that it may not even be the strongest. He knows instinctively when to back off an actor’s performance. If an actor plays a moment differently to how the director envisaged it, then he will accept it if it is true to the actor, even on those occasions when he feels his way of doing it would be better. The point is, he is accepting the moment as it has been filtered through the actor’s creative individuality.
I remember working on a film when the other actor in the scene had to turn on a tap and stare at the water for a few moments. He did it by turning the tap on and off quickly, creating intermittent spits of water. Later, the director said that he had originally imagined the scene being done with the tap being turned on and left on, so that the actor would be staring at the flowing water, but when the actor did it the way he did, he accepted it because he could see it was a moment organically created by the actor’s attempts to do the action. That’s good directing in my view.
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