Over the last two decades, Quentin Tarantino has built a reputation for revealing many actors’ range beyond what the general public was aware of with powerful and unexpected performance and seeing through actors’ potentials, reviving or kickstarting careers.

During a long conversation with friend and peer Robert Rodriguez, who interviewed him for a double episode of the Director’s Chair, Tarantino shares about many aspects of his self-taught trajectory, including his advice to filmmakers to best work with actors and get their best performance.

As I work and prep for my feature film, this seemingly simple advice resonated, and I thought it might with you as well:

Tarantino’s Advice to Get the Best Performance From Your Actors

Don’t be intimidated by your actors, don’t be scared, you’re there to find it together.

But I actually think that one of the best thing a film director today can do for an actor is not being stuck in the video village, not be watching it on a monitor, not be watching it on a TV set, sitting on a chair, oftentimes in a whole other room than where the scene is taking place.

That is a fairly new phenomenon that’s completely taken over.

So much so that I wouldn’t want to be starting over as an actor, with the director watching my work from another room.

I think you should be sitting right by the camera. If you watch the acting right by the camera, right in front of the actors, it’s as if they are acting just, and solely, and utterly only for you. The rest of the crew doesn’t matter, the audience, later in the theater doesn’t matter, it’s a million miles away and maybe it will never happened, they are acting only for you.

When you’re standing there by the camera, they’ve all acted it in front of you, when you say “cut”, they all turn and look at you: “what do you think?”.

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Like Christopher Nolan and Paul Thomas Anderson, Tarantino has been vocal about the importance of shooting in film and preserving films. Some will see it as a nostalgia for older times, but his stands not to systematically embrace the ‘new’, whether in terms of gear or work dynamic, reminds us that sometimes, what’s been done a certain way for a very long time has benefits that can’t be replaced.

For more about Quentin Tarantino:

– What Tarantino’s Experience at the Sundance Lab in 1991 Can Teach Us About Feedback

– Time Travel: Watch a 1h BBC Documentary About Tarantino Released in 1994

– How Sally Menke and Quentin Tarantino Cut Together: The Inglorious Basterds Example

– Quentin Tarantino & Friends: a Visual Recap of Tarantino’s Creative Remix of Actors