🍕🎥 Pizza Film School S2 recap: 4 tips from Emerald Fennell for actors who want to direct their first film 

When the urge to direct films calls, how do actors make the leap? In a recent episode of Pizza Film School, AGBO’s Anthony and Joe Russo asked that very question when they sat down with multi-hyphenate filmmaker and actor Emerald Fennell. During the chat, the brothers dove into Fennell’s career trajectory as an actor who starred in TV hits like Call the Midwife and Victoria, before making her directorial debut with the Oscar-nominated Promising Young Woman. You can also spot Fennell in one of this year’s biggest films, Barbie, in which she plays the doll’s pregnant friend, Midge.

Fennell’s endless reservoir of ideas and vivid imagination were key in making the transition to the director’s chair. “When I look back at my life, I think I had two lives. One is in the real world, and one is in the imaginary world,” explains Fennel, whose next film Saltburn is being released later this year. “So much of my time is spent in a sort of fugue state, living other lives or thinking of stories.” 

This foundation of ideas served her well when she went on to write and direct Promising Young Woman, and brought her story to life from behind the camera, instead of from in front of it. Here are 4 tips from Fennell for first-time directors. 

Catch up on all the episodes of Pizza Film School Season 2 here. 

Before you start writing, try to fully imagine your characters and their lives.

[Inhabiting characters] is totally immersive [for me]. I’ll listen to music: I’ll have a playlist that I’ll just play over and over and over again for years and years — so it’s almost background. And each song usually will trigger a different moment. It’s [a bit] like a VR experience…I will [imagine that I’m going into [a character’s] apartment, so I'll be in [a character’s] apartment and you know, over the course of months, years, when I revisit it, there’ll be more detail. So there’ll be stuff on the floor, half-eaten snacks everywhere, plaid shirts on the floor, [etc.]. So bit by bit, moment by moment, the world gets built and then the conversation changes. A script will be the last thing that I do. For me, by the time it’s on paper, it’s already kind of fossilized – it’s already happened. So I try to keep it inside my head for as long as I can. With Promising Young Woman, I spent years writing it in my head.

Make a detailed, highly specific mood board for your collaborators

The mood board that I made for my new movie [Saltburn] is like a hundred pages. Everything is oppressively detailed. [To make it], I’ll just pull stuff and put it onto a folder on my computer over the course of a long time. I’ll just collect hundreds and hundreds of images, of anything. They’re often paintings that they can be movie stills, photos I’ve taken of stuff, any kind of image really. I do it in PowerPoint, and then I’ll save it as a PDF. I’ll probably ask someone in the production to make it a bit nicer, but I’m still sending out the same shitty PDFs to people. It does the trick, and I like doing it on my own — it's therapeutic and it organizes your mind quite easily. I was lucky that everyone who worked on it understood that it was sort of a pathological thing for me. And so they let me be over-invested in every single thing. I think that when you’re working with brilliant people, you can let go because they come to you with stuff that’s different from what you imagined. 

When casting actors, chemistry is everything. 

For Promising Young Woman, in terms of the casting, we did meetings — we didn’t do any auditions at all. At the end, we did a chemistry read with Carey Mulligan and Bo Burnham. Both of them are geniuses in very, very different ways. It was fascinating because when Bo came in to read with Carey, neither of them knew what the other one was doing. What you really want from a chemistry read is not this immediate intimacy, but something more interesting: This is a new thing, you’re a new person. Then, watching and playing those scenes together. It’s about casting the person that you would conceivably fall in love with. And Bo is not only beloved as a genius, but he’s an object of enormous lust and love in the world. And it would be somebody that we would all really believe is good. 

Actors really do make the best directors 

I’ve been very lucky working as an actor, where I’ve seen what doesn't work. And I think the worst thing is somebody who has a very specific idea in their head, but cannot communicate it. Whether it’s with the performance, or with the look, or the movie. [Directors] who just get unbelievably frustrated because they can’t communicate [their vision]. And you're like, ‘Well that’s no good.’ …. For actors, I feel like the main job of a director is to create an atmosphere where they feel completely safe, if they fuck up their line or whatever. There’s always another take, there’s always time to play around. There are so many sets that run on adrenaline and terror. The  idea of scaring people, the idea of grinding them down to get something that you think is going to be better, I don’t think it’s true. 

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