At the age of 30, Saoirse Ronan is already an industry veteran—and she recognizes that she’s been shaped as much by negative experiences as positive ones. “Oh, you started me now. I have a lot of thoughts on that,” she says with a laugh when we start to discuss what directors shouldn’t do. It turns out she doesn’t just have thoughts about this subject—she has a rubric. Here are her three essential pieces of advice for filmmakers who are new to working with actors:
Rule 1: “Making a comment on a take is not the same as directing someone. You need to know when to give an actor the space to explore [the scene] for themselves and when you need to very clearly guide them—but in a way that’s not manipulative or controlling, especially with actors who are more experienced, which I’ve [gone through] recently. I hate it when a director tells you what you need in order to give your best performance.”
Rule 2: “It’s as important for the director to read the actor as it is for the actor to understand their character. The director, of course, needs to have their vision and should have stability in how they work, even if that means being honest and being able to say, ‘I don’t know.’ But they also have to be able to adapt to the person that they’re working with.”
Rule 3: “I think it’s incredibly important—and it doesn’t happen enough—for directors to leave their baggage at the door, because they are essentially the parent in that dynamic; and as with a real parent, as with your mother or father, it’s so essential to
your feeling of safety and confidence [to know] that you’ve got someone guiding you who is solid. But I don’t think that necessarily takes the shape of someone who always has the answers.”
Ronan plans to write and direct her own material in the near future, even if it’s not totally clear what shape it will take. At the 2024 Telluride Film Festival, she made the mistake of telling a reporter that she’s working on a short film. Ever since, she’s been facing the question every screenwriter dreads: “How’s the script coming?”
“It was such a throwaway comment,” she recalls. “And then my mate sent me an article that said, like, ‘Ronan Announces Next Feature She’s Going to Direct.’ ”
There is something in the works, however, that she says is motivated by the last few projects she’s been a part of, as well as a desire to explore her voice as a filmmaker. She’s found herself drawn to surrealism, inspired by auteurs like David Lynch and Bradley Cooper, who experimented with nonlinear structure in his 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro.”
“Whenever I’ve tried to write, there’s always been some element of surrealism,” Ronan says. “Because if you can create a world for yourself in the way that you did when you were a kid, then you’ll let your imagination fly and let it go wherever it wants to go.
“When [a movie] is great for me, it’s when the filmmaker acknowledges that film is a kind of magic and that it is something other,” she continues. “As much as I love to watch movies that are just a very honest reflection of reality, I really appreciate those that acknowledge: We are making a movie here. This is a picture. This is something that people are going to come watch for two hours so they can disappear into it.”
This interview was originally featured on Backstage.
