David Rubin began his career in New York on the production staff of Saturday Night Live, before working on the casting of Ragtime, Silkwood, and Amadeus. His career as a casting director includes more than 80 motion pictures, including The English Patient, Men in Black, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Lars and the Real Girl. He has also assembled the casts of TV productions such as Big Little Lies, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and Little Fires Everywhere. In 2002, he received the Casting Society of America’s Hoyt Bowers Award for outstanding contribution to the casting profession. David Rubin served as president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences from 2019 to 2022. (This interview was conducted during his presidency.)
DAVID RUBIN
What an academy was meant to be, going back to their founding, really is a group of people with a certain degree of passion and expertise and knowledge that want to get together and share. That's what I think academies are all about. So the fact that I've been helpful in spurring the Academy onto becoming a more international and global enterprise is a source of great satisfaction to me because I think it's important. It's not us versus them, it's everybody doing it together. I've been such a huge avid fan of international film my entire life. I got turned onto Scandinavian film at a crazy early age. I understood the power of it...and French and Italian cinema. And it's been great.
My position as President of the Academy took me to Rome this past year to spend time at Cinecittà studio and to meet with some of the great Italian directors, and we're establishing a relationship with Cinecittà. We're opening up a motion picture museum this coming year, and we're doing tributes to different Italian directors each year at the museum. Fellini being the first. So, the internationalism of the Academy is a source of great reward and satisfaction to all of us.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
When did your interest in the arts begin?
RUBIN
My connection with actors and with entertainment in general began very early. I grew up in New York, and like any child or most children who grow up in New York, there's exposure to tremendous cultural input and stimulation. And, for me, live theater was really my true love, even from a very early age. My mother in particular was an avid theatergoer and was part of a group of women friends who would buy tickets to a series of plays each year and, very often, when one of the women was unable to go I was brought along. And I saw some very adventurous theater from a very early age.
PORTRAIT OF DAVID RUBIN by MIA FUNK
The one amazing thing about the camera lens is that it is really the world's greatest bullshit detector. You know, the camera lens reads thought and reads emotion. As much as the human eye does, and anything that is false, anything that is premeditated, planned doesn't feel real. So a great actor has none of those false beats in their work. That's all extremely connected to who they are personally. The camera lens sees it, and the audience loves it.
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You know, it's a very personal service casting. It's a one-on-one conversation between me and a filmmaker or me and a filmmaker and a producer behind closed doors. Nobody sees the process happening, but us. It's one of the reasons why it's so mysterious, why so many people don't really understand what it is. They think it's, you know, let's make a list of our favorite actors and pick one. And it's so much a conversation about the psychology of the characters on the page and the psychology and the talent and abilities of the actors and to try to find a match between them and also to make no decision in isolation because the minute you cast one actor in one part that will affect how you look at casting the actors that are in the scenes with them.
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All of those things, you know, scripts are written in great detail so that anyone who reads them, particularly the people who write the check to finance the movie, you see the film in their mind's eye. Very specific, right? But when we come around to making this film, it's really incumbent upon the casting director to, in some ways, ignore all of those specifics about the character and only focus on how the character helps tell the story. That opens up a million possibilities of ways you can...it opens up gender possibilities, racial diversity possibilities. And it's very important not to get tied down to what a screenwriter, with all due respect to the screenwriter, to what the screenwriter says so specifically in the script, you just keep your eye on the story and experiment. I always talk about the casting room as a laboratory because it really is about using as much time as you possibly have to try various combinations of ways of playing these roles. It's a tremendously stimulating dialogue that we have that no one else who works on movies really understands because they're not engaged in it. And I always feel like everybody is an amateur casting director because they have actors they like. So you think, oh, easy job, here are my ten favorite actors. Pick one. So, the reason I think I'm as engaged with my work now, maybe even more so than ever before, is that each film is a completely new challenge. And I've been fortunate enough never to have been the go-to guy for a particular kind of movie. I think there are wonderful casting directors who are known for a certain kind of comedy, a certain kind of family film. It's the diversity in my career that has given me the most pleasure. I think just as an actor becomes an actor because they want to play a huge variety of roles in their career. I have found the most pleasure by the diversity. So, in my casting office, there's a waiting area where the actors wait before they come in. And I'm very happy that there's a poster of The English Patient very close to a poster for Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, very near Hairspray, very near Lars and the Real Girl, because I think of all of the unique experiences that all of those have represented and also the very specific challenges that each of those genres present. So, each time I open a script as a possibility to cast, I think, what adventure is in store.
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Sometimes when I'm sent a script and the first thing I do is I thumb through all the pages of the script just to sort of get a sense that there is more dialogue than there is stage direction because if I find that there's a lot of stage direction, that usually means that there's a lot of action, a lot of special effects, a lot of explosions, a lot of all the things that, to me, as an audience member–and this is just me personally–are less engaging than the human story, than the relationship between specific characters. That's what I've always been drawn toward. It's why I'm drawn toward actor-intensive material. I want my actors to be really challenged, their craft and their emotional lives to be really challenged in playing those parts. One of my proudest efforts at the Academy, really, that dates back to before I was elected president, is to foster an international presence for the Motion Picture Academy because at some point I sort of looked around at all the Academy does. And I thought it's very America-centric and honestly film is the most, among many but a truly universal international art form, not to mention the fact that it was started as much by the French, by the Lumière Brothers in the late eighteen hundreds, as anybody. But I thought this really has never been called the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but for some reason, it became that. And even the films that were up for recognition with an Oscar were called Best Foreign Film, which meant, other, different, strange. Two years ago, just maybe last year for the first year, we changed the name of that award to Best International Feature Film to have nothing pejorative attached to it. But part of this effort, because my focus has been on membership in the Academy, is to seek out great filmmakers all around the world, to invite them to be members of the Academy, which many of them thought was not even a possibility. They felt that they wouldn't be welcome, that they wouldn't be eligible, and what resulted was a kind of growth of the filmmaker community, really what an academy was meant to be.
THE CREATIVE PROCESS
Tell us a little bit about the Gold Program, because that's another program about opening out.
RUBIN
I am evangelical about the Gold Program. Talk about giving back. This is, again, a student program. It's a student internship for college students, generally in their third or fourth year of undergraduate work, although I think there are graduate students involved as well. It's an eight-week program over the summer months where you are in Los Angeles, and you are being exposed to professionals in the picture field who are there to give back. And that involves classes, symposiums, demonstrations. You're involved yourself in making short films during the course of the summer. And you are also connected with a mentor. Volunteers who are members of the Academy who want to give back, who have a one-on-one relationship with each of the students to the Academy Gold Program. And even after the eight-week summer program is done. And the people who attend the Academy Gold Program are interested in all facets of motion pictures. And some of them really don't even know which facet they're interested in. They want to be exposed to a variety of things and find their passion. You are connected with a mentor and even after the eight weeks are done, I think for the following eight months, you are still connected as you are graduating and entering the workforce with that mentor who's available to you on a monthly basis or whenever you need them, I think, to answer questions about things that you're encountering as you enter the scary real world. And it's been a huge success.
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But I also learned this through my entire life in terms of relationships that I've had in business situations that I've been in, people fundamentally want to be heard and want to be seen and that, you know, I think is essential. You can disagree with people, but really only until you've fully heard them because to disagree with somebody whom you have not officially and fully heard is a sign of disrespect. But I think if you hear people and see people for who they are and what they represent and how they feel, it's fine to have differences. And you need to acknowledge their differences as well as acknowledge that they'll perceive differences in you. But until you see and hear them fully, we're not really being citizens of this earth. And I appreciate that in working in a collaborative medium, as I do. And I think that it is a valuable lesson for everyone.
