It’s always fascinating to me how others get work in this industry. We know the drill for actors: Submit headshot and resume, hopefully get called in for an audition, hopefully be the right fit, hopefully do well, hopefully get called back, hopefully book the gig. I also love knowing how other industry professionals do their work. So, when I spoke with Vera Miller of Elite Casting, I asked her to take me through the process of working as a casting director in Montréal, start to finish.
Getting Started
This is typically what happens when we get a new project. We get called by a producer (more than likely somebody that already knows us, mostly for projects that shoot here–but we do work all across Canada). A producer will call and say, “Look I’ve got this project. It’s a television film for such a network and we’d like you to do the casting.” That’s the first step. That’s how it begins.
Then before we start anything, we ask them for the script. We are three partners here. There’s Rosina Bucci, Nadia Rona, and me. So we get the script, we read it, they may say somebody’s already attached to it, maybe not, and we’ll see how many we have to cast. Then there is another discussion: When do we start? Then we have to make the deal for our casting services. We [casting directors] don’t have agents here, so we have to do it ourselves. Usually it works that they want a package deal or we tell them it’s so much for the casting services, so much for the video facilities. Once we have the deal in place, then the next thing is to go over everything in the director’s vision: What does the director want? How does he see each character? We go over that. They tell us exactly what it is they want, what the age is, what the look is (really American films or American television films, they want really good-looking people), we are told exactly.
Then the next thing after that is for the breakdown. We have Casting Workbook, which is not the same as yours, but it’s the Canadian one. It’s fantastic. We say everything like you do on your American Breakdown Services — who it is, what it is, describe every character, so on, just like you do — it just looks a little different. We put out the breakdown, we tell them when we’re going to do the auditions, and then the suggestions come in. This takes awhile. We need at least a week to prepare to do the actual auditions.
Hard Copy vs. Electronic Submissions
Hard copy submissions are a thing of the past! We don’t have as many agents as you have, but we do have some agents who still like to [use hard copy submissions]. My assistants and associates sometimes do look at [them]. I don’t. It mostly is all done electronically. It saves so much time! It’s great.
Once I see all my suggestions, I analyze and see which ones I might want to see. I put them on a shortlist. Then to set up the auditions, we speak. That is all done via telephone. We call, we go over if I want to ask something like, “How old is she really?” and so on, and to set up the auditions, we call up the agents. And the agents will sometimes call up if they want to pitch somebody that I might not have scheduled. They’ll say, “I think you really should see this one.” We have an open policy that if agents call us we try to get back to them and discuss their suggestions.
Actors without Agents, Actors without Unions
It’s tough if an actor has no agent. If an actor has no agent, then they come in with their photo and their resume and we do have some actors with no agents, but it really is not a good idea. We always try to encourage everyone to get an agent if they can.
We make sure they are members of ACTRA like you have SAG. Do they at least have one credit? It’s very tough here to get into even auditions unless they’re very unique. It’s just very difficult to just bring them in for very small roles, people who haven’t had any credits yet and are not graduates of some sort of theatre school.
From Sessions to Offers to Deals
We schedule the auditions and usually we don’t bring any of the producers, directors, nobody. We do the prescreening ourselves. Sometimes I head up an audition in Toronto where I just get the studio, get an actor to read, and schedule people to be seen and I get it on tape. Sometimes in Vancouver the same thing. Or actors self-tape. Or I will look at demo tapes. Once we have all that, then we let the director — and if the producer wants to — see all that. Finally what happens is they say, “Well I want to see this one, that one.” And then we have the callbacks. I don’t show [directors] everyone. If there is anyone that I’m trying or that I haven’t seen or who hasn’t done too much, if they’re not good, we eliminate them. We will only show people who are possible.
At the end of all that, once the callbacks happen, then we have a meeting or they call us or they write us email to say, “Go ahead and book this one or that one for whatever role.” Then we do the negotiations between the producer and the agent: What they want, how much — scale, double-scale, scale-and-a-half, a picture deal — we negotiate and that takes time.
Once we have concluded the deals satisfactorily, then the next thing that we do is we send the production what we call a deal memo, which is all the deal points we talked about. We write them all out (that’s another step that has to be worked out; all their information, their Social Insurance, their ACTRA number, and how many days they’re going to be) and then the production sends out and writes the actual contracts.
That takes several weeks to do and once that is all finished and we send everything, we usually proceed because we also cast the extras (we three partners don’t, but our company does).
Casting Principals and Extras? What else?!?
We have two full-time employees who deal only with extras. We keep all kinds of extras on file and then two of our employees are in charge of booking them. It’s a horrendous job. We also have one employee, a French Québécois guy who works on all the French things that we do (mainly commercials). We do a huge amount of French commercials, so he conducts everything in French. He writes in French, the breakdown goes out in French, all that. We do oodles of commercials every week and there’s one person who’s in charge here. We do some theatre, we do commercials, film, television series, television film, miniseries, comedy, drama, anything that there is. We do it all. We’re non-specialized.
Actors work on everything here. Most working actors try to get into everything. Of course, everybody loves to do feature films the best. But they will do everything. Most of them will do smaller roles or bigger roles. There are exceptions. We have a few stars here in Canada. There’s a few Canadians who live in LA or Canadians who live in Montréal or in the other cities who are basically stars and will say they do not want to do television. They only want to do films. But that’s an exception. That’s a minority. Most of them will do everything. We get to do a variety of things.
Casting Outside of Montréal, Casting in French
In Montréal, on the English side, there is a smaller amount of actors than there is in say Toronto or Vancouver. However, in many of our projects, we see everyone that’s possible in Montréal and then they will usually tell us for certain parts we can go outside of Montréal (because it’s more expensive then they have to bring them in, they have to put them up, they have to pay them per diem and all that). Next step is Toronto and then Vancouver.
A number of the agents are French and Nadia and I occasionally speak somewhat in French. However Rosina, our third partner, is totally bilingual. She speaks perfect, fluent French. So, even on English projects when she’s speaking to agents who are more comfortable in French and who are French, she speaks to them in French. Everybody knows English. There’s not many casting people in Montréal who do English. There’s us and one other casting person in Montréal who does English work and then there’s a third one who does both English and French, but there’s not a huge amount of casting people here. There’s a lot of people in the casting society, but the majority are French. There’s a lot of French stuff going on here.
Wow! I gotta tell ya, I think it would require a fantastic partnership of bilingual casting professionals in order to juggle so many types of projects, each one evolving on a different timeline, each producer with a different set of needs and expectations. In a community where most casting takes place en français, the team at Elite Casting has found a way to do it all. So cool!
About Vera Miller
Vera Miller, along with partners Rosina Bucci and Nadia Rona, has worked in casting feature films such as The Last Kiss, The Sum of All Fears, Heist, The Whole Nine Yards, Johnny Mnemonic, and A Walk on the Moon. Telefilm credits include Within These Walls, Nuremberg, and Satan’s School for Girls. As for series television, Elite Casting has cast several pilots, contributed four recurring characters to ER, and populated 65 episodes of Student Bodies as well as 40 episodes of The Hitchhiker, just to scratch the surface. Additionally, the partners regularly cast commercials, theatre, and a half-dozen series for Lifetime Television each year.
This contribution originally ran at Bonnie Gillespie’s online column on January 15, 2007.