Casting a Shoot

A campaign can survive an ordinary location. It can survive a rushed afternoon. It cannot survive the wrong face. Casting is the decision we spend longest on and talk least about.

What we are really casting

Not beauty. We rarely start there. A beautiful face is generous to a camera, but it can be generic, and generic is the enemy of anything we make.

We cast for stillness. A person who can be in a room without performing in it. Somebody who looks at the lens and gives it nothing to do but record. That calm is hard to find and impossible to fake, and it makes a luxury image feel confident instead of eager.

The first ten seconds

We watch candidates arrive. Not the audition itself, but the corridor, the door, the first moment of eye contact. People reveal an enormous amount when they think the formal part hasn't begun.

Some things that count in those ten seconds:

• How they take up space.

• Whether they look around the room or at the floor.

• What they do with their hands.

• The kind of silence they leave after a greeting.

We write nothing down during it. We just look.

Working with the agency

A good casting director, like Mirela Costa, whom we've worked with for years, will tell you things the portfolio can't. Who's easy on a long day. Who is punctual. Who goes quiet at four in the afternoon and needs coffee, not a pep talk.

We ask for two lists. People who fit the brief, and people who don't, but whom she can't stop thinking about. The second list is where we've found some of our best work.

Polaroids and people

On the day, we take instant photographs of every candidate, plain light, same stool, no styling. They go up on a wall in rows. After the last candidate, we leave the room for twenty minutes. When we return, the same three or four faces are always still looking back.

It's a ruthless method and a slow one. It stops us falling for the person who charmed us at three o'clock.

Looking after people. Casting is a transaction, but the people in it are not transactions. We keep the day on time. We tell everyone, in writing, what the shoot involves. Nobody is left in a corridor wondering. When we can't use someone, we say so quickly, and where we can, we say why.

The quiet candidate

Almost every time, the person we choose isn't the one who impressed us loudest. It's the one who seemed least anxious about being chosen. We have learned to trust that.

On the shoot, the same person will be still at eight in the morning and still at six at night. The photographs will be calm. The client will say it feels expensive, which is the highest compliment we know for stillness.