The Relationship Between the Director and the Actor(s)

I'd like to adress this subject matter purely on the terms of how it sounds, how I find the relationship between the director and the actor to be key factor in the success of a film.

I'll be mainly assessing this with my current film project in mind, "The Unreliable Narrator". Before starting any part of my film i needed to choose a set of actors, the film I wanted create was going to be about isolation and hallucination. The main films I drew inspiration from were Stalker and Eraserhead.

Looking at these films and their directors made me think about what led them to pick certain actors for such roles.


For example, when Andrei Tarkovsky was shooting Stalker (wiki) many of the actors were poisoned from the surrounding area in which a lot of the film was captured. An amazing recollection of the events during the filming can be found here: link
A quote from that article:
"Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larissa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris..."
It fascinates me that Tarkovsky and his cast would put their lives at such blatant danger for a film.

David Lynch (IMDb) (wiki) - I have always admired Lynch's choice of actors, especially for Eraserhead, which was one of the main influences for my film. As Lynch became more recognized for his work he was able to take on more well known actors, I appreciate this because avant-garde directors usually tend to stick with unrecognized actors. In a way I perceive this as more of an exploitation of the audience's familiarity with the actor, where Lynch puts their situation in unusual circumstances, for example, Naomi Watts's role as one of the rabbits (from the series of episodes Rabbits (wiki)), where her face is not seen through the entire feature.

I wanted to add a particular student-life comedy element to my film, but I wanted to keep it to a style of my own, near the end of my film there is a scene based almost exactly on on a scene from Eraserhead, except set in student halls. The replication of the scene is more of a playful parody, Luckily my friend Leigh had shot a scene with me which suited the situation very well.