Casting FATAKRA!

With my theatre troupe and through my previous films, I’ve been producing South Asian work now for some time.  For the most part, I know the South Asian actor pool in Texas.  And unfortunately, it’s pretty small.

So for my latest film, FATAKRA!, I decided to open up the casting call to actors in New York and LA.  It was a terrific experience and taught me a lot about the ropes of the casting process.

Finding actors is definitely like a big ball of yarn that you’re unraveling.  As you start working, each contact or actor leads you to others.  I would think of an actor or a film, look it up on IMDB or watch it, and suddenly I would have the names of five other actors to take a look at.  I also scoured all of the names off of Hollywood Masala.  Even though, much of the info and headshots are old, it still proved helpful.  With names in hand, I could use google, youtube, and IMDB, to find photos, clips of their work, reels, and sometimes even previous auditions.  If they had done television work, I caught some of those episodes through Hulu.  Through all of this, I was able to gather a solid list of actors I wanted to contact.

Of course accumulating a list of actors is the easy part.  The harder part is actually making contact with them and getting them interested in your project.  Technology has made this part easier as well.  I checked out Backstage and LA Casting, but of all of the online casting sites, I had the most success with Breakdown Express.  Still chances are, you’re not going to find who you want through those sites.  You have to do the leg work to track down people yourself.  The running theory is that with a small indie project, you shouldn’t go through managers or agents because they may not pass the script on to their clients.  But luckily, many actors have websites with their contact info listed.  Some I even found on Facebook.  Others, I was able to contact through other filmmakers that they have worked with.  There’s the whole six degrees of separation thing, but with desi actors and filmmakers it’s usually more like two.

In the end, I flew to NYC and LA and auditioned several actors.  The physical process was much easier than I thought.  In LA, I used a friend’s office for the auditions.  In NYC, for just $15/hour I was able to rent studio space just minutes away from the theatre district at the Director’s Company.

It was wonderful to meet so many terrific actors out there.  I could only cast two for this piece, but it’s very encouraging for future projects.

~ by soham on July 13, 2009.