Hoping to bring a brighter spotlight to their profession are the team behind documentary Casting By, which screens on Sunday evening with Shooting Stars in Berlin. The film tells the story of the creation of the casting profession, with a particular focus on one of its most illustrious practitioners: Marion Dougherty. Explains one of the film's producers Joanna Colbert, who is herself a Hollywood casting director and formerly ran the casting department for Universal Pictures, "I thought this story had to be told: how Marion discovered De Niro, Pacino, Gene Hackman, Bette Midler, Redford. She gave all of these people their first job, and she was invisible. She was changing film history and changing Hollywood, and nobody knew her name." Colbert, whose casting discoveries include a ten-year-old Kirsten Dunst for Interview With The Vampire and Channing Tatum for Step Up, has a personal connection to the films' subject in that she herself was mentored by casting director Juliet Taylor, who was previously mentored by Dougherty. Explains Colbert, "It¹s such an important part of casting today. There's no school for casting, so it has to be a mentorship. I learned from the best. I had the opportunity to meet Marion on a Warner Bros flight, going across the country to cast Interview With The Vampire. She and I spoke on the flight. I could just tell she was a force, a force to be reckoned with. I was so thrilled. It was like meeting the greatest celebrity, for me, to meet Marion."
Like ICDN chairman Debbie McWilliams (see separate story, below), Colbert agrees that casting is becoming more and more international and that's especially encouraging to hear coming from a casting director working exclusively on US productions. Says Colbert, "I think absolutely yes. One of the reasons is just a general evolution that's going on in the world of openness. People really looking at the way people live, and who they marry and who they adopt and what their kids look like. They are not just in a box any more. And then with the introduction of the internet, it opens us up even more to being able to do an audition anywhere in the world as quickly as we could do it with our neighbour. And I think it's exciting. Network television is the real litmus test for this quote unquote openness. Networks are casting with more diversity and more internationally, and I think that's
the sign that the world¹s eyes are finally open."
While studios and international sales agents are still guided by lists of actors they perceive to be bankable talent, says Colbert, "Thankfully we are evolving in this regard. The lists are now filled with names at the top that might otherwise be at the bottom. For example, Chiwetel Ejiofor, I used to have to beg for somebody to pay attention to that name and now he¹s an Oscar nominee and will be at the top of every list. And I love it. It's an unpronounceable name to some Americans, it's a name that used to scare executives and that will now be embraced, and I think it¹s thrilling."
In decades past, it was common for foreign-born actors to change their names to make them easier to pronounce for American film fans Greta Gustafsson became Garbo, for example. In fairness, actors changing names to something more memorably iconic was more the practice of the time, regardless of ancestry. Still, it's heartening for our Shooting Stars past and present to consider that no name, however foreign-sounding to Anglophone ears, is now viewed as any impediment to a successful international career.
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