Casting

STOCK COMPANIES

There is much in film folklore, if not in fact, about directors with informal "stock companies" of actors with whom they work again and again. The directors best known for utilizing a "family" of actors are John Ford (1894–1973), Ingmar Bergman (b. 1918), Mike Leigh (b. 1943), Robert Altman (b. 1925), and Spike Lee (b. 1957). Calling upon an established ensemble, both in front of and behind the camera, has enabled these directors, all of whom are very prolific, to put new projects together quickly. Altman, with his background in series television, learned his craft in "stock company" conditions. The stock companies of the non-Hollywood or post-studio Hollywood directors serve the purpose that production units had served in the studio system. Indeed, the stock company may have allowed Ford, who made one independent film per year even during his studio contract days and went completely "off the reservation" in mid-career, to become in effect his own studio, carrying his own resources with him from film to film.

The director with a stock company in the truest sense was Bergman. Liv Ullmann (b. 1938), Max von Sydow (b. 1929), Erland Josephson (b. 1923), Gunnar Bjornstrand (1909–1986), Ingrid Thulin (1926–2004), Bibi Andersson (b. 1935), and Harriet Andersson (b. 1932) all got their start with Bergman, played the major roles in his small-scale, intimate films, and contributed in essential ways to the intensity for which Bergman's films are known. None of these actors is in

fewer than seven Bergman films. Moreover, von Sydow's nine-film collaboration with Bergman produced many of the director's signature films, from The Seventh Seal ( Det sjunde inseglet , 1957) to Shame ( Shammen , 1968), as did Liv Ullmann's appearance in Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers ( Viskningar och rop , 1972), and Face to Face ( Ansikte mot ansikte , 1976), as well as three Bergman films opposite von Sydow. When some of this company, especially Ullmann and von Sydow, became internationally known, they may have "graduated" from Bergman—von Sydow, for instance, last worked with him in 1971—but they owed much of their training and screen image to him.

Mike Leigh is a somewhat similar case; as an independent European artisan making small-scale films, Leigh has a unique relationship with his cast. He finds players for his characters, researches and improvises with them for an extended period, then goes off and writes the script, which the cast returns to perform. A number of actors, including Lesley Manville (b. 1956), Jim Broadbent (b. 1949), and Timothy Spall (b. 1957), first made their names in Leigh's films, then became in demand in the industry. Thus, while the names of Broadbent and Spall are generally connected to Leigh, they have each made only three films with him, and one of Broadbent's appearances, in Vera Drake (2004), was a cameo.

This leads to an essential point about stock companies. Many actors and directors closely associated with each other in the minds of filmgoers actually worked together on just a handful of films. Commercial filmmaking, with its myriad schedule conflicts, makes stock companies difficult to keep together; directors often find that a favorite actor is not available, even if he or she wants to be, "unavailability" being in general one of the most common reasons that one actor is cast and not another. Moreover, an actor's work with a given director often takes place during a limited period. For instance, Shelley Duvall (b. 1949) is among the actors most associated with Robert Altman, but their six-film collaboration ended in 1980. Ford is also interesting in this respect. John Carradine (1906–1988) appeared in iconic roles in eight Ford films. However, after The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Carradine and Ford did not work together for eighteen years; Carradine was then cast in The Last Hurrah (1958), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964). Ford, at the end of his career, recalled actors from his heyday, like Carradine, Andy Devine (1905–1977), and Olive Carey (1896–1988), wishing to include them in nostalgic but bitter films that revised his earlier, more upbeat renditions of American myths.

Often the aura of a director lingers with certain actors; they trail their associations with him into other projects. This is true of many of the actors who worked with Ford, as well as Martin Scorsese (b. 1942) veterans like Robert De Niro (b. 1943), Harvey Keitel (b. 1939), Joe Pesci (b. 1943), and Lorraine Bracco (b. 1955), and also of Spike Lee cast members such as Giancarlo Esposito (b. 1958), Roger Guenveur Smith (b. 1959), and Bill Nunn (b. 1953). Sometimes the associations amount to a form of typecasting. Michael Murphy (b. 1938) began his career playing weak, insincere organization men in Robert Altman films like McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and Nashville (1975), then went on to play similar roles for other directors. Thus Murphy was ripe for a reunion with Altman, which occurred with the cinema-verité style TV miniseries Tanner '88 (1988), with Murphy perfectly cast as a struggling presidential candidate.

Members of a director's "stock company," then, carry that director's work with them throughout their careers and are more often than not remembered as having done their best work under the director's auspices. John Wayne was often little more than a self-parody away from his mentor, John Ford. De Niro's many films away from Scorsese have been largely undistinguished. Other close actor-director partnerships have included Johnny Depp (b. 1963) and Tim Burton (b. 1958), Toshiro Mifune (1920–1997) and Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), Marcello Mastroianni (1924–1996) and Federico Fellini (1920–1993), Jean-Pierre Leaud (b. 1944) and François Truffaut (1932–1984), and one of the few in which the director floundered without the actor: Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg (1894–1969).