How James Mangold’s Early Experience with Robert De Niro Began a Career-Long Love Affair with Actors

 Ever since he made his feature directorial debut with “Heavy” in 1995, James Mangold has been known for his range, deftly jumping back and forth between crowd-pleasing genre fare like “Identity” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” powerhouse character studies like “Copland” and “Girl Interrupted,” light romantic comedies (“Kate & Leopold”) and, perhaps most famously, musical biopics like “Walk the Line” and his latest film, the Bob Dylan movie “A Complete Unknown.”

What all of these films have in common is a sensitivity to performance that often yields the best work from actors as varied in styles and approaches as Joaquin Phoenix, Meg Ryan, Sylvester Stallone, Christian Bale, and Timothée Chalamet. “A Complete Unknown” is possibly Mangold’s best film yet in this regard, as it boasts superb work by not only Chalamet as Dylan but Ed Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (a fictionalized version of Suze Rotolo), and Scoot McNairy in a wordless performance as Woody Guthrie.

When he visited IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, Mangold reflected on how his approach to directing actors has evolved. “Over the years, there are a couple of things I’ve learned,” he said. “I don’t know if they work for everyone, but they work for me. One is I don’t rehearse much. I spend the time others spend rehearsing hanging out.” Mangold says that hanging out with his actors before and during filming is key, something he learned from Robert De Niro on “Copland.” “He worked three weeks on the movie but made a real point of asking me out to tea or to go on research trips with him in prep. At some point it dawned on me, oh, he’s getting to know me and he’s insisting that I make myself known to him.”

That time spent together created a mutual trust between De Niro and Mangold that the director has tried to replicate on every movie since. “Trust in the sense that what I’m telling you is the truth,” he said. “I don’t hide whatever bullshit I might be dealing with from the studio or anything like that from the cast, and I don’t want them to hide anything from me. I’m also unafraid to act silly or act out the scene. And because I’m a writer on the movie, I think it helps the actors feel like they can challenge the words and not worry about it, because if it’s better I’ll change it in a heartbeat.”

Mangold says that kind of openness creates a sense of play that allows people to take creative leaps. “As long as you establish you can kill something that you don’t like, you can let all these flowers bloom,” he said. “But if you live in fear of having to say ‘that doesn’t work for me,’ or that’s too intimidating to say, then you’re killing the possibility before it’s even born because you’re creating an environment that’s so restrictive that your collaborators won’t even express an idea that might occur to them because they know you’ve got a plan and you’re sticking to it.”

For Mangold, the key is having a plan but owning that plan so completely that when collaborators present new ideas, it doesn’t upend the plan but modifies or enhances it. “At this point I’ve known and befriended a lot of great directors, from Milos Forman to Alexander Mackendrick to Steven Spielberg,” Mangold said. “The one thing I can say consistently is that they may have a plan, but what we all do is if something better comes up, we jump on it and make it look like we thought of it. We don’t just shoot it, we own it, frame it in a way that looks like we planned it.”