The Cast Call

The beauty of having a small crew is that you’re nimble and can fit in tight spaces or, as we’d find out, be less conspicuous in the big outdoors… more on that subject later.

Here we were April 2007 with the goal to shoot a feature film ‘deconstructive’ style… a series of shorts, +/-10, that we’d submit to film festivals, YouTube, and everywhere else appropriate, along the way.  Even in hindsight, I think this is a darn good idea, and I have a story about a serial killer in San Francisco that’s perfect for this approach, it's Seven meets Sliding Doors… but I digress.

Confident of our plan, 7-minute script in hand, we set about the task of casting and quickly realized that we needed to find all our principal cast, even for the short, i.e. Anjelica, Mitch and Toni.  Since we were operating with zero budget, there was no discussion about hiring a Casting Agent, so it was up to us and resources on the Internet.

While Craig's List is always an option, as well as other indie filmmaker groups, my tool of choice was SF Casting.  I can’t speak highly enough of their service – a great resource for finding talented actors; even better for indie filmmakers, it’s free.  No sooner had we posted our profile and call for our cast and we were inundated with applicants. 

This is one of the most fun aspects of filmmaking… to actualize your vision of a character and see it embodied in a walking, talking human being.  I’ll confess, it’s a bit of a meat market… kind of like online dating, at least to start, as you flip through pages and pages of headshots.  Nope, too pretty… nope, too skinny… nope, too young… nope, no film experience… nope, nope, nope!  Until you get to the maybe, maybe, maybe and hopefully, yes, yes, yes!

We whittled the list down to our top three for each role and thus began the parade – through my living room – of actors hoping to bring their interpretation of our characters to life.