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32 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: EVERETT; (BOTTOM) COURTESY OF ANA LILY AMIRPOUR "Every single detail of an actor's physicality not only tells the story to the audience, but gives them who that person is," says Amirpour. "To me, vampires are cats, so we watched a lot of big cat videos. Their perception of everything is super-heightened. Even if they look re- laxed, they know who's 30 yards behind and to the right. So it was a catlike physicality, and then mentally, we talked about old people, who are economical with their expressions. They don't waste energy. So Sheila spent time with her grandma, and realized, old ladies just take everybody in and look at them like they're fools." Ultimately, though, Amirpour wanted to make sure she pre- served Vand's own unique qualities as her haunted star. "Sheila's got a strangeness—a beautiful, ancient quality to her beauty, and these insane eyes. Hey, I wrote the part for her." When it came to the orbit of actors around Daniel Kaluuya in Get Out, Jordan Peele recognized he needed a cast adept at outer and inner layers, be they disarming and cagey, or accommodating and hollow. "What I found, for this movie, was that every character has a duality at play," Peele remarked in February at the DGA's 2018 Meet the Nominees symposium. "So the thing I was looking for out of ev- ery performer was that they possessed both sides of that duality." ||||||||||||| Ingenuity on a Budget H O U G H T H E S C H E D U L I N G realities of indie film- making didn't give Peele much time to get what he need- ed from his actors, he made sure that wasn't the vibe on set. "We did this movie in 23 days. We had no time. But the whole illusion that I like to present to actors is we have all the time in the world to get this right. And none of this other shit means anything if we don't get this moment right." That goodwill toward colleagues in the service of securing a vision can often pay dividends for a director in pressurized circumstances. When Krasinski was mere weeks from turning in the fi nal cut of A Quiet Place, he realized how to fi x the problem of providing a per- spective for his blind, marauding monsters without the kind of POV angle reserved for beings with sight: he needed insert shots of gro- tesquely oversized, pulsating ear canals. When he called Farrar at ILM and told him his idea, Krasinski was upfront about the fact that there was no money left in the budget. "Scott said, 'It doesn't matter. It makes it better, so we're gonna do it,'" recalls Krasinski. "I'll never forget that moment. It was very inspiring, because it was about the beauty of people who love fi lm." Other times, a director's ingenuity can provide a shield against possible creative interference later. Already imagining the resistance he might get from the fi rst scene of It, when a 6 year old crawls away from his fi rst encounter with Pennywise, missing an arm, Muschietti deliberately avoided getting shots that didn't include that graphic el- ement. "If I'd shot that coverage, and someone said, 'Oh it's too vio- lent, we have to edit it a di erent way,' I'd be in trouble. So I made sure I didn't have the coverage!" ||||||||||||| Maximizing a Sense of Dread LT I M AT E LY, M U S C H I ET T I WA N T E D the most na- kedly violent scene to occur at the beginning, to prep the audience for the tension to follow. "You have to estab- lish the lethal power of this monster, that he can kill a 6-year-old child in a gruesome way, so the weight of that, the dread, lives for the rest of the movie in the audience's mind." A horror audience may be primed to be scared, but a director's job is to lay the groundwork for what kind of fear is in play. Get Out starts with a fl uidly apprehensive Steadicam shot following Lakeith Stanfi eld walking, lost, in a ritzy suburb, because Peele sought a par- ticular feeling, and a promise that being in the wrong place would be the predominant emotion. "It became important for the audience to be immersed in the experience of being a black man walking down the street in a white T U Ana Lily Amirpour, below on the set of The Bad Batch, gained fame for her B&W vampire thriller, A Girl Walks Home at Night, which she saw as an "urban, small- town, weird and grimy fairy tale."