Envelope Directors Roundtable: Ben Affleck on being an actor-director

It's no surprise that as a director, veteran actor Ben Affleck has some ideas about how to get a good performance from his cast; he's been in enough movies to see how other directors do it.

But how much freedom should you give actors and how do you earn their trust?

There are no easy answers, according to the panelists at the  Envelope Directors Roundtable, which included Affleck ("The Town"), David Fincher ("The Social Network"), Lisa Cholodenko ("The Kids Are All Right"), Ethan Coen ("True Grit"), Darren Aronofsky ("Black Swan") and Tom Hooper ("The King's Speech").

— John Horn

Recent and related:

Envelope Directors Roundtable: Shaping the story

Envelope Directors Roundtable: The managed compromise

 

Comments

[elena howe]

The Envelope Directors Roundtable clips are all gathered on The Envelope homepage. Go to http://theenvelope.latimes.com/

[Kelly]

These are really good but the website is really hard to follow. The links to these clips are all over the place and you have to search the internet in google to come back to this site to find the rest of the series. This makes no sense. Why not simply have one page with the series of clips in order? Thanks for putting these up but why go through the effort if they are almost impossible for the viewer to track?

[Rich]

Can you please just put the whole Round-table discussion online already! Watching it in pieces like this is frustrating...especially when, in this one for instance, Affleck references something Fincher said...BUT WE HAVEN'T SEEN IT!

Take a page out of the Hollywood Reporter's book: put the whole thing online...but also post segments for those who do not wish to sit through the entire discussion.

Thank you!