It's madness to hand in a script to a director, leave them alone, and for the director not to want the writer there with rehearsals and the shoot.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
A director should cast a person who fits into their script.
A lot of directors keep writers away because the writers know the script better than anybody, obviously they do, and they have certain intents. But a lot of people would be surprised to know that writers are pretty flexible when it comes to their work.
I always try to stick to the script because I want to respect the writers, and I want to respect the director. But if the director and my fellow actors are okay with me playing with it a little bit, then I definitely want to play with it.
Realistically, it's the great truism that screenwriters are fungible, that at the end of the day a studio is not going to want to fire a movie star. And they're really not going to want to fire a star director because the director has the hand on the tiller of a ship.
An actor really suffers when the director isn't prepared because you start running out of time for the shoot and then have to do it fast.
Actors are accustomed to doing exactly what the director or writer requests us to do, and rarely get involved in that part of the process.
Sometimes the odds are against you-the director doesn't know what the hell he's doing, or something falls apart in the production, or you're working with an actor who's just unbearable.
One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while.
Why hire these geniuses if they're forced to stick with the script? You want to empower your actors as collaborators.
It's not about the script: it's about who the director is and who the other people in the cast are. Because you can look at a great script and execute it in a very sophomoric way, and you can look at an OK script, and you can execute it in a very sophisticated way and come out with something really good.