Originally I had a fear of rejection at the auditions, which is a lack of self-confidence ultimately. Now I have a production company and when you can look behind the scenes at the casting process, you know it's not about rejection. It might have been the most amazing performance ever, but if the person is too tall, too short, too brown, too white, has blond hair or whatever it is, then not getting the gig may have nothing to do with the performance. You have to learn to treat auditioning as matter-of-factly as drinking a glass of water.
Acting for me is liberating. It's almost like therapy, because I grew up in a blue-collar environment where you're not supposed to have feelings. So it's freeing to be in a safe place like a TV or film set where you discover feelings, and where you're supposed to be open and honest with everybody while exposing the weakest parts of you. And then when people congratulate you on revealing the weakest part of who you are, then you start realizing that that might not be weakness. It might be a different kind of strength.
Being behind the camera you have control; you have the ability to make decisions for characters, for where the story line's going to go, how you want to put it out there, how you want to edit it. Acting is like where you paint on the canvas, and being behind the camera is like being either the paint or the paintbrush. They're both a part of the creative process, it's just that they have two different functions.
I try to discover the character's primary motivation. In a screenplay, you can make up a hundred different variables of a character. Is he there for love or respect, or is he there out of fear? What's he doing? Why is he doing it? Then I can build on the intricacies. Does he pick his fingernails? Does he always do this when he's lying? All the little things that come with it. But it's also like, if you're doing a caricature and you're like, "I want to do a blue-collar guy from Jersey," you have to go and do the research on the region, the who, what and why.
