wil’s fundamental rule for successful auditions (or, how not to go crazy in a crazy business)

I’m proofing the edit that Andrew and I have been working on, and something jumped out at me just now that I thought was worth excerpting here, for my fellow actors. I guess you could call it my fundamental rule for successful auditions:

I believe that actors have to find a way to enjoy themselves whether they book the job or not. We have to find ways to enjoy auditions, and as hard as it is, as counter intuitive as it is, we just can’t make success or failure about booking the job. We have to make success or failure about enjoying ourselves. We have to enjoy the process of creating the character, preparing the audition, and then giving the people on the other side of the desk whatever our take on the character is. We absolutely cannot go in there and try to give them what we think they want. The way we stand out, and the way we enjoy it whether we are hired or not, is to take the material, prepare it, and find some way to make it our own. Even if we don’t book the job (and the ratio of auditions to jobs is something like 20 : 1 for successful actors) we’ve been creative. Casting people will recognize that, and even if we’re not right for this particular job, they are more likely to bring us back in for other parts, because they’ve already seen us take a creative risk. I guess it’s kind of twisted to say that I enjoyed myself by being such an evil man, but committing to something completely, and refusing to look back until it was all over, was tremendously satisfying.

This particular excerpt is related to my audition for Criminal Minds last year, but I think it could apply to any job interview where you’re expected to be creative. I’ve been an actor for pretty much my entire life, but I didn’t figure out this really important truth until just a few years ago. Since I figured it out, I’ve had much more satisfying experiences in auditions, whether I’ve booked the job or not. I’m also more relaxed, and the whole process isn’t nearly as soul-crushing as it once was.

There is so much that’s out of our control when we audition, we need to focus on what we can control: how prepared we are, how clear our take on the character is, and how committed we are to that interpretation. I had an audition recently for a network show that everyone wants to be on. I prepared my scenes to the best of my ability, and I had a great time showing the casting people my take on the character. They sent my tape to the producers, and I didn’t get the job. They say that they really liked me, though, and they’d keep me in mind for a different role in the future. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I know that I did not suck and I made a good impression when I read for them. This is what I set out to do, so the audition was a success, because during the small part of the process I have any control over, I did my job, and that’s all I can do. It’s all any of us can do, and if we think that we can do something more, we’ll drive ourselves crazy. We just have to get in there, do the best we can do, and let it go when we walk out of the room. In fact, I throw my sides into the nearest recycling bin as soon as I’m done, so I symbolically and literally let the whole thing go once it’s out of my hands.

This may seem like a bunch of “yeah, duh,” information, but it took me over 20 years to figure it out, so if I can help anyone else get here a little bit faster than I did, my work here is done.

reminder: I’m on this week in tech today

After playing an epic game of “How about this Sunday? No, that doesn’t work, how about this Sunday?” that went on for months, Leo Laporte and I have finally gotten our schedules to match up, and I’m doing This Week In Tech in about six hours.

The stories we’ll be talking about are here, and Leo tells me that he may add some more before show time. If you want to add some of your own, you can add them to delicious.com with the tag for:twit.

The show starts at 3pm Pacific, and you can listen live if you like. If you miss it, it’s available as a podcast, and I’ll update this post with a link when it becomes available.

my other mother loves me

Yesterday, Anne convinced me to take a break from work so we could go see a matinee of Coraline, which was playing in 3D at a local theater. I love the book, and I love Nightmare Before Christmas, so it seemed like a no-brainer.

But 3D? I wasn’t so sure. I’m not a huge fan of 3D. It always feels gimmicky and intrusive, and I’m always wondering when Doctor Tongue is going to thrust a cat toward the audience.

However, my love of the source material, an excuse to play hooky with my wife, and how excited I’ve been to see the movie since I first heard they were making it was enough to get me into the theater without any real argument.

I am so glad that I went, because I loved the movie. I heard that Henry Selick wanted to use the 3D technology to give the movie depth, rather than shove things into the audience’s faces, and I thought he did exactly that. I told my friends that they don’t have to see it in 3D, but they kind of have to see it in 3D.

Speaking as a fan of the book, I was mostly happy with the adaptation. They added an entirely new character, which I wasn’t thrilled about, but he didn’t feel like Scrappy Doo to me, and if I wasn’t already a fan of the book, he wouldn’t have felt out of place to me, at all. Everything I wanted to see was there, and they managed to create the world that I’d created in my head when I read it with eerie perfection.

Speaking as a fan of movies and stop-motion animation, I was delighted. All the actors are fantastic, and the set design and animation was breathtaking. You don’t need to see it in 3D, but I thought they used the 3D experience perfectly, and if you have a choice, I’d take the 3D option (which is something I never thought I’d say.)

Coraline gets 4.5 out of 5 Beldams, on the Wheaton Scale of Randomly Rating Movies In A Way Which Is Amusing To Wil.

Seriously, people, go see it. I think you’ll love it.

Podcasts I love: The Night Air

I hope you know more stuff today than you did yesterday, because today's podcast I love is going to grab your mind and take it on a journey through The Night Air.

This incredible podcast comes to us from Radio National in Australia, and they describe it as "an audio adventure in which ideas, sounds and music are remixed around a new theme each week." They also call it "a listening experience" which would seem super pretentious to me if I didn't already listen to it and agree fully with that description. The best way I can think to describe it is "the lovechild of Joe Frank and This American Life, babysat by William S. Burroughs."

I discovered The Night Air pretty much by accident, just grabbing things that looked interesting from the Podcast directory in iTunes…

Imagine that it's July 2005, and you're sipping on an Anchor Steam next to the pool at the Mirage in Las Vegas. You've just busted out of your first World Series of Poker, but you're staying in town for a few days to play in another event. This is what you see when you look around:

Half of the pool area is populated by beautiful twenty-something girls in tiny bikinis that make me wonder why they bothered to put anything on in the first place. The other half is populated with middle-aged men and their unfortunate wives who may as well be wearing housecoats. Throw in a few frat guys unsuccessfully trying to put the moves on the aforementioned beauties, and it makes for great people watching.

You remember that you have this new Podcast on your iPod, so you lay back on a lounge chair, and listen to Islands. For the next 40 minutes or so, Las Vegas vanishes as you go on a journey: "Whether caught in the crosshairs of an exact latitude and longitude or existing somewhere in a faraway place of the mind, islands seem always on the horizon of fantasy. Tonight we venture to and fro' seeking, as Captain Cook once said 'a convenient situation' where we might trade commodities and replenish our stocks for journeys new. Way off the coast of Prosaic we fetch up on the shores of Speculation Island."

I was utterly and completely captivated. I didn't even realize that my beer had gotten warm, so after quickly correcting that egregious error, I played another episode, Holes: "Is there such a thing as a bottomless hole? Do they go on forever? Do some holes have a will of their own, durable, transient, and just waiting to stave you in? This Night Air is full of holes: architecture, the body and reminiscence. We fathom a suite of works about emotional absence and gutted structures; and finally see what's at the centre of a donut."

Each show combined interviews with music and soundscapes to create something unique and remarkable. I was hooked, and I've made countless commutes endurable by leaving my body on the train and letting my mind go wherever The Night Air takes me.

Unlike all the other podcasts I've featured this week, The Night Air truly must be experienced to be appreciated. I could tell you about it until I used up all my English, and it would still be inadequate. The audio archive doesn't go as deep as it once did, so you can't listen to Islands or Holes right now, but I wil direct you to a recent episode called Once Upon A Time. "Are you ready? Then I'll begin: Once upon a time there were fairytales, stories, fables and myths … distorted and passed down from generation to generation—some you remember and some you think you remember. This show re-tells many of them—as well as the art of telling the stories themselves—which lived on, and on, and on, sometimes happily, sometimes not but, of course, always ever after."

I hope that week's brief guide to some podcasts that I love has been informative and useful to you. I enjoyed writing these entries, so I made a new category here called Things I Love, which I plan to use for sharing…wait for it…things that I love, like board and video games, movies, beers, blogs, and other, um, things that I love in the weeks and months to come. If enough people are into it, I may even do a week of reader requests.

Until next time, here's a podcasts I love roundup:

Pseudopod

60-Second Science

Driveway Moments

Stuff You Should Know

The Night Air

one of the most awesome things i’ve ever autographed

When I was at the Phoenix Comicon, a girl came up to me on the first day and asked me if I'd sign this present she was making for her boyfriend: a papercraft d20.

She was taking it around the con and getting a few people she thought he'd like to sign it for him, and I was on the list. I needed to run around in a circle the way my dog runs around in a circle when she's excited for a biscuit, because I was just blown away by how cool this idea was, and how cool the whole thing would be when it was assembled.

I'm not sure if you can see, but I'm next to the Superman "S". I wrote, "Hope your birthday is a critical success!" Because, um, well, if I have to explain why, I don't think you could fully understand why this is one of the most awesome geek gifts ever delivered.

Here's the catch: I wasn't allowed to mention it on my blog or on Twitter, because I guess he reads them both, and his birthday was after the con. Since it's been delivered, and the images are online, I think it's safe for me to go ahead and share this, in the hopes that other boyfriends and girlfriends of geeks will do something similar. Speaking as a gaming geek, this is one of the most thoughtful, unexpected, truly awesome things one of us can get.

There's a gallery of the d20 after assembly that you can view here.