ON WORKING WITH AUSTRALIANS: DEBORAH AQUILA...LOS ANGELES CASTING DIRECTOR. 

Deborah Aquila has been a casting director in LA for over ten years. Originally from Brooklyn, she has cast over eighty feature films, including 'Mission Impossible 2', 'The Shawshank Redemption', Sex, Lies, and Videotape', 'The Core', 'The Majestic', 'Primal Fear', 'The Gift', 'Virtuosity', 'What Women Want', 'The Human Stain', and 'Runaway Jury'. She also cast the hit television series 'The Shield'. AUSUS Magazine spoke to Deborah about studying acting in New York, her career so far, and the emergence of Australian actors in the U.S. 

 Q: How come you don't have a Brooklyn accent? 

 I trained as an actress for almost seven years and that was part of the training with Stella Adler and Ron Burrus. It was New York University grad and undergrad in conjunction with the Adler Conservatory. They make sure that when you graduate you're fully trained. Speech, dance, Alexander technique and all the other stuff. So I learned standard American speech. 

 Q: Does that help you communicate with actors? 

Yes. I can communicate with actors in a language that we both can share. In my graduate studies I thought it was important to look at not only Stella's techniques, because I moved away from performance by the time I was a senior, but at all techniques that were floating around New York. To explore why different people chose different paths, why 'The Group Theater' broke up, what was behind that. And why people committed to different techniques and held by them fastidiously. Because in twenty five years of casting what I've learned, looking back, is that you need a little bit of everything from every "method" or technique to create a three dimensional character. That's if you believe in studying at all. There are those people that have no formal training and it doesn't seem to affect them. The Russell Crowe's of life. The Edward Norton's who never studied, but are great actors nonetheless. Edward read voraciously on every technique and he exercised it through the theater. But he had no "formal" training, so to speak. He studied linguistics at Yale. And then there are those people that believe that you must absolutely have training, such as Dustin Hoffman who swears by Strasberg. Whatever works. 

Q: Tell me about studying with Stella Adler. 

They actually just asked me to come back and teach there which I am planning to do next summer. There were very few of us that she passed the teaching baton onto. I concentrated my graduate studies on her script interpretation which was invaluable. She was such a person of passion who was in the moment and taught in the moment. She never wrote her teachings down herself so they would have a videotape on her all the time during my years there. I remember because it was whirring right next to my ear, you know, those big old dinosaurs. I use her script interpretation everyday in casting. It's how I break down scripts. I break down the script into acts, and then I break the acts down into scenes. And then I break the scenes down into little tiny acts, give each characterization it's proper back story, then determine how each character relates to others in the story. 

Q: How did you segue into casting? 

 I was lucky to have gotten a production job when I was in college with a company called Iris Films. I was very young, just turning nineteen. Morty Dubin, a wonderful man, was my mentor there. He brought Tony and Ridley Scott over from Europe. Introduced them to the U.S. in highly stylized commercials. As a production assistant the first set I was on was for Richard Avedon shooting Brooke Shields for Calvin Klein. You know, 'Nothing gets between me and my Calvins'. After about a year one of the principals of the company, Herb Schwartz, left and went to a company called Advertising to Women and took me with him. I cast all of their commercials there. They were the agency for the Gillette personal product division, fragrances, shampoos, etc. After a couple of years I missed the theatrical end of the business so I contacted my former master teacher at Stella Adler, Sondra Lee, and she got me a job as an assistant to Bonnie Timmerman. We did the first two seasons of 'Miami Vice'. We did 'Manhunter', 'The Pope of Greenwich Village'. It was casting boot camp. You could only stay at that pace for so long. It was me, a temp, and Bonnie. Twenty Four Seven. I eventually left there and got a job with Holly Powell at CBS, then I did the New York end of 'Thirty Something' with Marcia Ross and Judith Holstra. At one point, out of the blue, Constantine Films sent me a script called 'Last Exit to Brooklyn'. And because my father had worked in The Brooklyn navy yard for twenty five years, in Redhook where I was raised, I had to do the movie. At the same time Nick Wexler and Stephen Soderbergh also sent me a script, 'Sex Lies and Videotape', which I loved. In New York this was the heyday of independent movies, the late eighties, early nineties. We must have done forty of them. Maybe fifteen or twenty got released. Shoestring budgets all of them. Then slowly the studio films started to trickle in. In 1992 I had the good fortune of meeting Frank Darabont and getting 'The Shawshank Redemption' and moving out to California. In 1993 I was offered a job at Paramount and stayed till 1999. I cast nineteen films over there. 

 Q: How did you come to get involved with Australian actors? 

Around the time of Shawshank we, collectively, the casting community, producers, directors, casting directors, started to look beyond our own shores. We had already been raiding England pretty well and we started to turn our attention toward Australia because there was such a wonderful crop of actors coming out of drama school there. I actually met Russell Crowe for the first time for 'Shawshank'. I don't know if he was quite the right fit there but I was very impressed with him. He's a great actor who we cast in 'Virtuosity'. Australia itself really just evolved. Independent movies like 'Two Hands' and 'Romper Stomper' were starting to get attention here. Russell Crowe, Heath Ledger, Rose Byrne. We just cast Rose in two movies, 'Wicker Park' and 'I Capture the Castle'. Toni Collette, who I also just worked with, is also a gift. 

 Q: How did you come to cast 'Mission Impossible 2'? 

 It was a Paramount production. Unfortunately I didn't get to go there. Greg Apps in Sydney did the Australian side of the casting. He would send me tapes and we'd confer about casting decisions, but I had complete faith in him.

Q: When you look at tape on an actor what do you look for?

It depends on the role. More often than not it's a persona that immediately hits you, an energy on the tape that impresses. Then you have to look for the nuances. Auditioning by tape is an art unto itself. Some people do it well, some don't, but you have to be trained to look past that to see if there's a glimmer of something. Because they're doing it blindly. Usually they don't have the input of the director. Especially if you're self taping. You're just flying by your instincts. I always try to give direction, at least by phone, beforehand. 

Q: When you finally look back on your career what would you like people to say about you?