Casting Pros Talk Harassment and Discovering Superstars Margot Robbie, Chris Pratt and More | Casting Director Roundtable - video Dailymotion

Hollywood Journal

Six top casting directors  Sarah Finn, Ellen Lewis, Margery Simkin, Victoria Thomas, Lucy Bevan and Nina Gold, open up about diversity and weigh in on whether they deserve an Oscar category.

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00:00If we go over there and you go over here, we'll be so much better at this.

00:12One of the actors that I think I saw something early on in would be Chris Pratt.

00:17He had done an audition for me years ago, which I thought was very noble and kind of heroic,

00:23and it really stuck with me.

00:24And that led me to think, even when he didn't want to initially do the role in Guardians,

00:29that he could be the right guy, had to convince him and then had to convince James,

00:33and he ended up being a perfect one.

00:35I would say Margot Robbie in Wolf of Wall Street.

00:39It was a challenging role to cast.

00:42We read many, many actresses for it.

00:45When Margot came in to read for Martin Scorsese, we kind of knew right away.

00:50Maggie Gyllenhaal came in for this tiny part she couldn't have been more wrong for,

00:55but she came in and did this incredible reading of this minute three-line part,

01:01and you thought, okay, that's something.

01:07My proudest casting moment, I'll say the latest one, is probably Detroit.

01:11This was a very difficult movie to cast, really intense just because of the storyline,

01:18but rewarding in that we got to cast a lot of new young actors.

01:22I'm proud this year of the ensemble nature of Beauty and the Beast, from top to bottom.

01:27All of those actors who had to sing as well as that did an amazing job,

01:31and that was really satisfying.

01:33Probably Star Wars.

01:35It was really exciting to find these two pretty unknown young actors

01:40who've really taken the story forward into a whole new area,

01:43and the audience has gone with them, and I feel really proud of them.

01:47I think in terms of diversity, I think we're no longer kind of leading the conversation.

01:55I think the studios, the producers, they're starting to lead the conversation,

02:00so that's kind of nice.

02:02Very, very lucky on Avatar that everybody's blue.

02:05We had a lot of challenges with that, and to this day, the agents call up and go,

02:09well, yes, but what ethnicity?

02:12They're going to be blue.

02:13It doesn't really matter.

02:14The male-female ratio in scripts is so often, when it's written by a man,

02:18so many more male roles in the script than female roles in the script,

02:21and I always like to, early on, with the director and producer,

02:24sit down and just say, there's this many men, there's this few women.

02:27That's where we can flip that, so that it doesn't come as a surprise later

02:30when you're constantly trying to up the female side of it,

02:34because it should really be 50-50 if we're reflecting the world we live in.

02:40One thing I'd like to change about Hollywood is I would like to see the stories

02:43that are being greenlit and financed be more reflective of the diverse world that we live in.

02:48The right questions are starting to be asked.

02:51Why couldn't this person be more or less anything, a man, a woman, a different race?

02:56Why can't we open up our thinking?

02:58And I think those questions are definitely now being asked.

03:04One thing I wouldn't change about Hollywood is that I hope that movies keep getting made.

03:08I love television, but I love the experience of going into a movie theatre.

03:13I've really enjoyed some parties in Hollywood.

03:16I hope they stay as they are.

Casting Pros Talk Harassment and Discovering Superstars Margot Robbie, Chris Pratt and More | Casting Director Roundtable

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