The Essence of Actor-Centric Filmmaking With Shekhar Kapur

Recently Shekhar Kapur posted on his instagram account about the essence of actor-centric filmmaking.

He says, My life depends on my actors. For ultimately it's the actors that make a great film. The best script in the world, the greatest visual effects, music, brilliant designs are all are there to complement the actors.

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For there is no greater landscape than an actors face, for since we were babies, we have been comprehending the world from the way adults interacted with us. We learnt how to interpret eye movements. We learnt to interpret changes in voice tones. We learn to interpret anger, compassion and love through watching and observing adult behaviour.

You know how excited we get when practically new born babies smile? More often than not, they are not smiling but copying the (say) the mother's expressions .. and they observe how by the act of smiling, they can evoke pleasure responses from adults
And so for the rest of our lives we emotionally connect with stories not by the written words as much, but by the actor's responses to those written words . Which is why a close up is such an amazing tool to tell intimate stories.

What is my role as director? To create a bubble, within which the actors are comfortable to explore their own selves and find the characters that the writer wrote within themselves. It's a bubble of trust, of love, and of compassion that we all explore together, it's a bubble in which we can together reveal our inner selves without fear.