Steve Carell on Adam McKay’s Technique to Create and Capture Chemistry

As Ken Loach wisely said, “Everybody reaches a method of working by trial and error over the years”. As a filmmaker, if there is no one way to direct your actors, you do have one vision you’re trying to achieve. And to do so, you need to develop your own method.

Filmmaker Adam McKay, who has a singular way of testing a pitch to see if it has legs and whose made a name for himself writing and directing comedies, has developed his own method to obtain what he needs from his actors, whatever the genre.

During a conversation with Steve Carell, actress Rooney Mara pointed out the level of chemistry achieved in The Big Short by Carell and his peers, who were playing long-time colleagues. (In case you haven’t seen it, The Big Short is based on a true story and thus true characters, which means that McKay naturally went for a documentary feel while shooting.)

To Steve Carell there are a few factors that explain how McKay could create the right atmosphere to capture the right performances:

“Adam McKay directs in such a way, and it was the same way on his really silly stuff, like when we were doing Anchorman. He creates this environment where anything is fair game and the way this movie was shot, the camera could sit back in a corner with long lenses and you never felt it being intrusive in any way, and you really never sensed where the camera was or what the camera was looking at.

So I think that helped because you could be in the middle of what you think is your best take and then realise that the camera is doing a close-up of somebody writing on a piece of paper; but I think that was great because it forces you to just not think about it and not think about your part of the movie specifically and I think that helped create that chemistry because everyone is just letting it fly and throwing caution to the wind.

And again, I think it starts from the top. When you create an environment where everyone feels safe and comfortable and having fun…”

What Carell said reminded me of what Xavier Dolan said about how actors need to be taken out of their comfort zone by not being able to anticipate everything to bring out the best in them: “As actors we plan a journey but when someone interrupts us and asks us to organically integrate a new note in a scene, it pushes us to tap into our authenticity, to be less nervous and cerebral, and more basics.”

You can watch the full conversation between Steve Carell and Rooney Mara below: