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MillimeterFade to Black - Anthony Edwards
Mar 1, 2002 12:00 PM, Darroch Greer
“The best advice I ever got from a director was from John Huston, who said, ‘the most important thing for you to do is to be a really good audience.’ You're the only set of eyes that actors should trust.” It's advice Anthony Edwards has followed while pursuing concurrent careers as an actor and director. Now in his eighth and final season playing Dr. Mark Greene in the hit TV show ER, Edwards has directed four of the shows.
ER's shooting schedule may not be as rigorous as the emergency room it portrays, but taking the helm of such a big show is demanding, and Edwards has certain rules he follows that have served him well. High on the list is rehearsal. “Anytime you shoot a scene before it's ready to be shot, it will take longer than taking the extra 10 or 15 minutes to over-rehearse — what people consider over-rehearsing. When I work, I get the actors and clear everybody out. You really get the scene up to speed, like you would in a play, and everybody knows what they're doing. And then when you're shooting, you can shoot it very quickly….Any movie I've ever done where the director took the time to rehearse, it's always paid off.” Edwards knows whereof he speaks, having worked with such directors as Huston, Rob Reiner, Tony Scott, Joel Schumacher, and Jonathan Kaplan.
The ER can be demanding when you have to get through 10 pages a day, which can mean five to seven different scenes, and 15 to 18 setups — if you're lucky. To accommodate the look of the show, the set is designed to shoot 360 degrees, with every nook and cranny pre-lit and ready for a Steadicam to swing by.
“I like to work quickly,” says Edwards. “The joy of directing and acting on ER is you pace your day according to how you want to work the material, not on technically what you need to do. We're basically pre-lit, and as complicated as you want to stage it depends on how complicated and interesting you want to shoot it. There are no rules, basically. I directed an episode where I asked the writer to write me an entire act in actual time. I ended up shooting 22 pages in one shot. I had to put a whip-pan in the middle of it because the Steadicam operator could only hold 700 feet of film. It's just too heavy to get a 1,000-foot load on there. The first part of it was almost eight minutes, and then we had a whip-pan, and then we did another take that was five minutes after that. But I was able to stage with the actors, and the crew and everybody, a continuous shot, and it was so much fun. It took an incredible amount of concentration, but in a day we ended up shooting 22 pages.
“I do little simple tricks that are fun for me. I'll take this storyline in the show, and I'll shoot all that long lens. And I'll take this other storyline and shoot it all in wide lens because it'll just help me visually. Hopefully, subtly, the audience will know where they are just in that format —' cause that's always the problem. You got a lot of people in surgical gowns or in patient outfits, and how do you keep them remembering what story you're at?”
Another rule is no monitors. “It removes people. Actors are left completely alone on the set with the crew and nobody else watching them — it's an alien place to put people,” states Edwards categorically. “The director can be there right by the camera and the actors feel you're there, and if they're performing, they're performing for you and you trust them, and they trust you. Technically, you're not seeing performances on a tiny six-inch screen, listening on headphones with your soundman going, ‘OK, there's a plane.’ There's all this chatter that goes on around the monitor that has nothing to do with the scene. It's fine for that to exist, but the director should not be there…. Most of the actors are of such high quality — they know what they're doing, they know what they're up to, they know the space that they're in — and, like an audience, you respond and they learn something out of your response. They feel like they're being taken care of. And that's all they need.”
