How I Learned to Hear a Face

Casting is usually described as a search for beauty, which is the least interesting thing it has ever been. What I am actually listening for, in the ninety seconds I usually get with someone before deciding, has almost nothing to do with the architecture of a face and everything to do with what that face does when it stops trying.

Everyone who walks into a casting arrives wearing an expression they have rehearsed, sometimes for years, in mirrors and photographs and other people's approval. It is not dishonest, exactly. It is armour, and armour is reasonable. My work is to find the two or three seconds when the armour slips — not through trickery, I have no patience for the casting director who tries to shock or unsettle someone into authenticity, which produces only a different, more brittle performance. I find it through boredom, mostly. I ask a question with no correct answer and then I simply wait, past the point where waiting becomes uncomfortable, until the prepared face runs out of things to do and the real one, briefly, has nowhere else to be.

That face is rarely the most symmetrical one in the room. It is often smaller than the rehearsed version, quieter, sometimes even a little disappointing to whoever is used to the performed one. But it is the only face a camera can actually use, because a camera, whatever people believe about lenses and light, is fundamentally a machine for recording the absence of performance. It cannot photograph confidence. It can only photograph the specific, unrepeatable way a particular person holds themselves when they have, for one unguarded second, forgotten to.

I think this is why I gravitate, outside of work, toward sound that behaves the same way — the fractured electronics of a track that refuses to resolve into a chorus, the acoustic disruptions of a piece that keeps almost becoming melody and then declining to. I am drawn to the same unrehearsed instant in every medium: the moment before a system decides what it is going to be, when it is still everything at once and therefore, briefly, true.

What I have learned, after years of this, is that "authentic presence" is not a personality type. It is not the loud people, or the calm people, or the people who have been told all their lives they were photogenic. It is a state anyone can enter and almost no one can hold — the state of a person who has, for the length of one frame, stopped composing themselves for an audience. My entire craft is patience: creating a room boring enough, safe enough, unjudging enough, that a stranger will eventually forget I am watching. Everything after that is simply light, doing what light already knows how to do with a truth it has finally been given permission to fall on.

— Anna

A note for the technically curious: this is not only intuition. The nineteenth-century neurologist Guillaume Duchenne first mapped the distinction between a genuine smile — which recruits the orbicularis oculi around the eyes, a muscle almost no one can move on command — and a performed one, which uses only the mouth. Researchers since (notably Paul Ekman) have confirmed it: the eyes rarely lie, even when the rest of the face has learned to.