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Trust Is the First Take

No performance of genuine depth happens without trust, and trust is built long before the camera turns over. On a British short, your rehearsal time is usually a few afternoons squeezed between day jobs, so the quality of that time matters far more than the quantity. Treat the first session as a conversation, not a download of your vision. Ask the actor how they read the script, what jumped out, what confused them. If they spot something you hadn't considered, say so out loud. That single moment of genuine curiosity will buy you more on set than any amount of clever framing.

Be honest about the scale of the production, too. Actors respond well to being told the truth: we have two days, one location, and the light goes at four. What they don't respond well to is vagueness. Knowing the constraints lets them protect their energy and make strong choices early.

Ask Open Questions, Not Instructions

Result directing — telling an actor what to feel or what the audience should see — closes a performance down. Questions open it up. In the room, these tend to work:

• "What do you want from the other person in this scene?" Every playable intention is about the other character, never about the audience.
• "What are you afraid will happen if you don't get it?" That gives you stakes without asking for an emotion.
• "What happened ten minutes before we cut in?" Actors build from the moment before, not from the line itself.
• "What are you doing with your hands?" A physical task often unlocks an emotional blockage faster than any discussion.

Write down what they tell you. If their answer changes the scene, follow it. Nine times out of ten, the actor's instinct is closer to the truth of the writing than your idea of how it should sound.

Rehearsal That Leaves Room to Grow

Don't rehearse towards a single perfect version. Rehearsal is for exploring, and the more versions an actor has in their body, the more they can offer on the day. A useful shape for a session might be:

• Read the scene sitting down, no performance, just to hear the words aloud.
• Run it standing, with loose blocking, letting them find their own movements.
• Try it with a different given circumstance — they're late, they're hungover, they've already decided to leave.
• Run it once at the very end, then stop. Don't polish it.

Leave something in reserve. An actor who arrives on set with a scene fully "solved" often has nothing left to give when the camera rolls. You want a little hunger in the room.

The Language of Adjustment

On the day, keep notes short, playable and physical. "Try it as if you're trying not to wake the neighbours" gives an actor something to do. "Be more upset" gives them nothing but an instruction to perform a result. So does "can you do it a bit faster?" — try "let's see what happens if you don't let her finish a sentence" instead.

Adverbs are usually a warning sign. If you find yourself saying "more angrily", "more sadly", "more nervously", you're asking for a feeling rather than an action, and you'll get something pushed. Reach for a verb, an object, or a circumstance instead.

Deliver notes privately wherever you can, and always frame them as an offer rather than a correction. "That was lovely — one more for me, and this time try..." keeps the actor in a state of play. A note given loudly across a set, however kindly meant, tends to make everyone tense.

Protecting the Performance on Set

Practical habits that consistently help:

• Don't call cut the instant the last line lands. Count to three in your head. The take often lives in the silence afterwards.
• Watch at least one take with your own eyes rather than the monitor. You'll notice held breath or tense shoulders that a small screen hides.
• Save your notes. Two takes before a note, unless something is genuinely unclear or unsafe.
• Get the master or the wide first where you can, then move in. Close coverage is easier once the scene is warm.
• Keep the set small and quiet for the emotional scenes. Only the crew who need to be there.

If a scene isn't landing, resist the urge to talk it to death. Take ten minutes, change the physical surroundings, move the actors somewhere new, or shoot it from a different angle. Fresh conditions often do more than fresh direction.

Knowing When to Stop

The final place emotional truth gets lost is the edit. Trust the pause, the half-second of thought, the moment an actor looks away before answering — those are the frames an audience reads as real. Resist cutting on every line, and watch your rushes once with the sound off to see whether the performance holds in the face and body alone.

Above all, remember that your job is not to manufacture a feeling but to create the conditions in which one can appear honestly. Build the trust, ask better questions, rehearse lightly, then get out of the way and let the actor do the thing only they can do.