The Director Whisperer: Judith Weston Teaches Filmmakers How to Talk to Actors

Actors can be needy, fragile creatures—they crave the spotlight, but often it just amplifies their insecurities, like a magnifying glass burning ants. When Judith Weston began working with directors, she was startled to discover how many were scared of their stars. “Directors come to me and say, ‘How do I keep control?’ ” says Weston, sitting in the idyllic back garden of her home near Venice Beach in LA. “If I tell them they don’t have to have control, it’s a relief to them.”

Weston has been coaching directors for close to 35 years, instructing them, among other things, in the care and feeding of the actorly temperament. “I find it almost like seeing a directors’ therapist,” says Lucy Tcherniak, a director on the streaming series Station Eleven and forthcoming Apple TV+ series Sunny. “You’re surrounded by people, but directing can be a really lonely job.”

Many devotees discovered Weston through her book Directing Actors: Creating Memorable Performances for Film and Television, updated last year for its 25th anniversary. Over the years, she has amassed a long list of clients, including Taika Waititi, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Ava DuVernay, Boots Riley, and Alma Har’el. Waititi says he considers Weston a creative, maternal figure in his life: “She’s basically Yoda, except she’s not small and she’s not green.” When he was making Thor: Ragnarok, he asked her what she thought of the screenwriters’ script, and she blurted, “Well, it reads like it was written by a seven-year-old boy.” Even this, he told Weston, inspired him: He could definitely get excited about directing a movie that a kid wrote.

Weston is usually gentler. She greets me in a bright turquoise tunic, talking quietly and radiating empathy. A former actor, Weston offers concrete ways to make performers feel like collaborators rather than dollhouse figures moved around on a set. “I want directors to know how wildly frightening acting can be, how vulnerable you are when you’re out there on stage or in front of the camera,” she writes in Directing Actors. That sometimes means doing a Freaky Friday–style swap where directors try acting. David Chase has never forgotten the experience he had in a Weston workshop decades ago, just before creating The Sopranos. He and another student were playing janitors: “We both really got into it, and when it was over, I felt like I had left my body. It was almost like an LSD trip. And I thought, Wow, no wonder actors want to do this.” It also struck him how hard it must be to maintain that out-of-body feeling if your director is asking you to do 20 takes. “The whole filmmaking process is kind of unwelcoming to the actor,” Chase says. You have to be sensitive—even to the guys down at the Bada Bing.

Iñárritu, who’s consulted with Weston several times since he first took her workshop in the 1990s, also found that his mindset changed when it came to directing actors: “The surprise was that something potentially so scary could turn into something so enjoyable.”

Now in her 70s, Weston concentrates on one-on-one Zoom sessions with directors—often deep-diving into specific scenes or characters. It’s a long way from the working-class Connecticut town where she grew up. When she was four, her mother developed polio, and young Judith was sent away from home for a while. It was a traumatic experience, and she found an escape in fairy tales. “In the real world, you can feel something and the plot doesn’t change,” she says, whereas in the world of fiction, “feelings have consequences.”

By her early 20s, Weston was in Manhattan toiling at clerical jobs designated for women at insurance companies and banks—the kind of places where, as she later wrote in a 1970s essay titled “The Secretarial Proletariat,” female employees were called “girls” and “had no rights, only duties.” In 1968, she found her way into an early women’s liberation meeting and became part of a group that merged consciousness-raising, activism, and guerrilla theater. Weston helped create a giant Miss America puppet wrapped in chains for the legendary 1968 protest of the pageant in Atlantic City. Later, as a founding member of the group WITCH, she took part in theatrical protests like the hexing of Wall Street and the Bridal Un-Fair, an invasion of a wedding industry convention.

After moving to the Bay Area in 1970, Weston planned to continue her activist work but instead became an actor. “In the early 1970s, people were looking for gurus,” she says. “You’d find a teacher and feel, This person is opening up the world for me.” So when someone recommended acting coach Jean Shelton, Weston embraced this new calling. Later, in Los Angeles, she landed parts in TV movies and shows like Little House on the Prairie and Newhart. But as the parts grew more generic, Weston’s enthusiasm crumbled. Shelton had always told her she would be a great teacher, so in 1984 she hung out her shingle.

Listening to Weston, I think about the cranky veteran showrunner played by Paul Reiser in the Hulu series Reboot. “Pissed off actors—they’re like children!” he says. “You jingle some shiny keys and you promise ’em a cookie and they’ll stop crying.” But wrangling talent isn’t actually that easy. Weston thinks we have a toxic attitude toward performers, simultaneously worshipping and disdaining them. When I mention the public mockery of Jeremy Strong’s devotion to Method acting, she says firmly, “There’s so many ways to put down actors. And I just don’t want anybody to ever do any of them.”

Weston’s suggestions to her clients are nuanced. She tells filmmakers not to issue demands, but rather to give open-ended invitations. Instead of telling an actor that their character had a bad relationship with their father, she might suggest saying, “Well, you probably had a better relationship with your father than this character,” which is more likely to provoke useful emotions. “You’ve created a little world and planted a seed,” as she puts it. Rather than issuing an abstract command like “Make it more aggressive,” she suggests using verbs that give the actor something visceral to play. Punish him, for instance. While shooting Station Eleven, Tcherniak needed an actor to look more frightened, so she borrowed an instruction from her teacher: “Act as if someone’s holding a gun to your head.”

At the heart of everything Weston teaches is an exhortation to listen to actors and let them play. Her approach had a huge effect on Boots Riley’s decision to direct Sorry to Bother You, the absurdist dark comedy film he wrote. “A lot of it can just seem like this crazy puzzle, but Judith seems so nonchalant about it all working and being whatever it will be—and that was very reassuring to me,” he says. Riley went back to her when the original star of Sorry (Jordan Peele) dropped out and was replaced by LaKeith Lee Stanfield. “We talked about how to relate what’s in my head to the actor—and find out what’s in their head.”

Many of Weston’s alumni are women and/or people of color, and she knows how bruising double standards can be for directors who are not white men. “Women that I worked with one-on-one, there’d always eventually be crying, because they tried to do something and they would get shot down by a producer,” Weston says. “So a lot of my work with them would be trying to give them some confidence to fight back.”

Weston is not immune to Hollywood gossip but won’t weigh in on specific projects except to give general advice. For example: “I would always tell anybody directing—male or female—not to have an affair with their leading actor.” Weston did once have a married director confess to falling in love with their producer. “I just said, ‘Can’t you wait until after the shoot is over?’ ”