ACTORS CAN BE NEEDY, fragile creatures they crave the spotlight, but often it just amplifies their insecurities, like a magnifying glass burning ants. When Judith Weston began working with directors, she was startled to discover how many were scared of their stars.
"Directors come to me and say, 'How do I keep control?"" says Weston, sitting in the idyllic back garden of her home near Venice Beach in LA. "If I tell them they don't have to have control, it's a relief to them." Weston has been coaching directors for close to 35 years, instructing them, among other things, in the care and feeding of the actorly temperament.
"I find it almost like seeing a directors' therapist," says Lucy Tcherniak, a director on the streaming series Station Eleven and forthcoming Apple TV+ series Sunny. "You're surrounded by people, but directing can be a really lonely job." Many devotees discovered Weston through her book Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television, updated last year for its 25th anniversary. Over the years, she has amassed a long list of clients, including Taika Waititi, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ava DuVernay, Boots Riley, and Alma Har'el. Waititi says he considers Weston a creative, maternal figure in his life: "She's basically Yoda, except she's not small and she's not green." When he was making Thor: Ragnarok, he asked her what she thought of the screenwriters' script, and she blurted, "Well, it reads like it was written by a sevenyear-old boy." Even this, he told Weston, inspired him: He could definitely get excited about directing a movie that a kid wrote.
Weston is usually gentler. She greets me in a bright turquoise tunic, talking quietly and radiating empathy.
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