Casey Affleck said yes to A Ghost Story without reading the script: 'I just texted him saying 'wanna be in a weird movie?''
He'd later to discover he'd be acting almost entirely from under a bed sheet
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Your support makes all the difference.We often assume that actors and their agents spend hours pouring over scripts before saying yes or no to them, but when you have a good relationship with a director and believe in their artistic vision, sometimes you don't even need to see a treatment.
I caught up with A Ghost Story director David Lowery this week for our film podcast Kernels (listen to the interview in full below), and asked him how he went about approaching actors given the script was only 30 odd pages and the movie was really all about tone and not words/directions.
"The benefit of making this movie the way we made it was that it was designed to be made with just friends, with people who I would not have to explain it to," he told me.
"And luckily Casey [Affleck] and Rooney [Mara] trust me and - I know that Rooney read the script because we talked about it but whether or not Casey ever did I have no idea [laughs]. I have a feeling he may not have."
In the case of this low budget art movie, mostly shot in secret in a house in Texas, casting Oscar winner Affleck was as simple as shooting a text.
"I texted him and asked him if he wanted to come be in a weird movie and he said sure and he came.
"Obviously he eventually read it because he had dialogue, but I don't know at what point in the process - I know that he said yes before he read it."
Affleck apparently didn't know, however, that he'd have to act 90% of the movie from under a bed sheet, his character being a ghost of the traditional kind.
"I think I included that in the text message but I don't know if he really believed that until he got there," Lowery laughed, "until we started sending him pictures of the costume."
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