Eminent directors talk actors and selfie controversy at Artios Awards: ‘We’re looking at your tapes’

Directors celebrating their own film at the 38th annual Artios Awards on Thursday had a message for actors who worry that making a self-tape means sending your work into the abyss: Do Take the time to watch your audition at home.

Casting Society president Destiny Lilly told Deadline that she acknowledges that some actors likely believe that selfies filmed during the pandemic ended up in a large, unopened stack of Manila folders. And that couldn’t be further from the truth, she said.

“Actors are the lifeblood of what we do. We couldn’t do what we do without actors,” Lilly said ahead of today’s awards ceremony at the Beverly Hilton. “Of course I listen to the actors when they want to say something and of course what they say is right. I miss the connection of being in the room with people. I miss that feeling of being with everyone and having an actor and you’re like, ‘This is the right person!’ During the pandemic this was not possible for us. As we slowly crawl out of this as an industry, we are all rethinking how we approach casting, how to make it safe, how to do it as fairly as possible and how to make sure the actors can do their best.

“We’re looking at your tires,” Lilly continued. “The most important thing to know is that actors solve the casting problems. We are trying to find people. We are looking for you. We go through the tires. One of the things about incoming tapes is that we can see them more than if we only had 10 people in the room. Our goal is to see how we can make this process work for everyone.”

Casting Society board member Steven Tyler O’Connor understands that actors miss auditions in person, but because of the pandemic, no one has the luxury of offices anymore. Most casting directors, like O’Connor, work from home.

“Until we get back and have studios and office space to cast actors, what am I going to do, have actors audition in my backyard?” he said. “We want to go back to the room. i like actors i like to see them in the room. I can’t wait to get back in the room just like her. But we have certain limitations on our side.”

But he also thinks of this creature in the room doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always better for an actor. “I think the idea that being personal is an advantage… I don’t think that’s true. If the role is yours, the role is yours. It will be translated on tape,” O’Connor said.

Casting Society board member Wendy Kurtzman is concerned that the current controversy surrounding self-recording is unnecessarily dividing the community into factions. “It is not constructive if people sit on one side and the other,” she said. “We hang together. You think we are the gatekeepers. Remember that we are accountable to producers and directors. We have a chain of command.”

“The most important thing for me is rest [the situation]Kurtzman said. “Actors get frustrated, they want to be seen. And besides, we want to see them. We love being in the room with them. We all need to sit down and hear what frustrates actors and see what a cast can do to reduce it. But remember we are in the middle of the swing You have the actors on one side and the producers, broadcasters and studios on the other, we are in the middle, we are trying to guide people to get them hired. We want them, we need them, we love them. We are all in this together. I don’t know how it suddenly became us versus them.