The role of the Narrative is above all, catharsis. What we think of as entertainment or escape is, in actuality, release in fun's clothing. Escape is, after all, release from binds or predators, and "liberty" a concept born from the negative space of slavery. Your cast, your crew, your audience, and you, live in a perpetual state of bondage from which we must repeatedly be liberated or else find ourselves fast-approaching the bottom of the abyss, weighted with iron shackles of beliefs, identities, and maths. Each of these has its positives. Faith is necessary to prevent paralysis, archetypes are vital to empathy, and ratios enable our building of great structures and infrastructures that enable communication, cooperation, etc. But they are not the world—they are lenses through which we can expedite our mastery of it. Control is only useful so far as it is not the point. The point should be the opposite of control, as we have said: release. We must master the tools, not the other masters.
Assembling your cast and crew is the first and most important role of the director. If you cast your actors properly, and hire the appropriate craftsmen, you needn't direct much at all. The story will tell itself.
Every cast should have its hero, its plucky sidekick, its romantic interest, its antagonist. The thing of it is, they needn't be playing their true roles in the story. In fact, often if not always, it is the opposing type that is best suited for a role. Only a person of highest moral character knows precisely what evil looks like from the outside. Only the smartest person in the room knows the frustrating hilarity of the idiot. The loneliest actor will have chemistry with anyone played opposite. Only an antagonist has the ego required to think themselves a hero. Unfortunately, we cannot always control (nor should we) who is in our casts. A hundred factors can interfere with our “ideal" casts. Besides which, hiring true embodiments of epic characters may be untenable on a long shoot. In television, especially, one wishes to cast a series of roommates, for you will likely live with these people far more than your own family for large portions of the year.
If you find yourself with a somewhat random grouping, or decide to choose for maximum livability, another kind of guide should suffice. Every group, no matter how disparate or similar, will have a relative grouping such as I have described. Of your group, who is the most moral? The smartest? The loneliest? The most contrarian? List these out, and then cast them opposing type. To help, I’ll enclose my version of the call sheet and topsheets so you can see how you may keep track of this. As for crew, you may also find no small virtue in hiring a cinematographer known for their realism to shoot your fantasy film, or a sound designer known for their stylistic embellishment for your feminist drama. An element of noir can enhance a workplace comedy, and political thriller techniques add suspense to a horror film. Balance (without hiring someone who will argue down your every decision) is to be sought with each decision.
Once you've assembled your team, once again, you should be able to sit back and call “action!" and “cut!", but know that even that is somewhat superfluous. You are there to answer questions from crew and cast, and those should be minimal. If an actor asks about motivation, then there's something wrong—they should know this character already, instinctively, by being their negation. Remind them of a person unlike themselves. Invite them to be their opposite, in whatever way they can understand it. They will likely jump at the chance. This of course, requires an abundance of empathy. You will need empathy the entire shoot. It is imperative to predicting your cast's decisions, thus allowing them to improvise within the structure of the story.
Of course, things will not go as planned. If they do, or you fight the true direction of things, you will end up with a film that is dead on arrival. That is why, to keep things interesting, I incorporated an oracle of my own devising.
Your responsibility as director will be to handle as many of the non-method objects and concepts as possible, and divert actors by example back into the reality of the narrative whenever they stray into worrying about the outside world. I do not tell my actors to act, nor do I tell them to pretend they are the characters—I find this accepts the premise they are not the characters in the first place. Instead, I tell them to realize they always were these characters, and that they are only just beginning to remember another life, revealing their features to them in as organic a way as possible. If there are secrets no other character necessarily would know from a surface background story, I tell the actor in private. Things like sexual orientation or characteristics—which I will refer to my oracle for, so that no one is fetishizing anything through the act of choosing them as in a boutique. I do not believe these things to be choices, so why should any of us choose them? More on this in the chapter on characteristics.
When directing, I am the only traditional "actor." As the Dreamender, a shapeshifting, asexual1 dragon that can appear Cheshire Cat-style whenever and wherever I want and affect outcomes and chance, I roll dice, but can override the Fates at will. I "nudge" actors one way or another, all the way up to and including full deus ex machina, whereby Dreamender shows up and offers information (I do this by sending extras into a scene with lines or actions I’ve just composed).
This last tool should be used sparingly, if at all. The Dreamender does not like to interfere; a good storyteller lets their characters make their own choices and records what happens. Sometimes, however, your actors get stuck or are having a hard time. Any and all interference should be done in the name of making the work more exciting, engaging, faster-paced, and cathartic. In other words, less work, less boring, less slow, and less trauma-as-drama. Do not shy away from dangerous events or topics—push them into them. But once there, the process should be guided toward the disarming of the trauma, the unlearning of bad logics, the defeat of those terrors life brings us that cannot be surmounted in real life. We offer not mere escape, but freedom itself.
The Dreamender can appear in many guises (signaled by the colors of violet and purple somewhere on the form), to offer advice or help. If the Dragon shows up it should be because your players sought them out intentionally or the game has veered into friend-ending territory. Because my actors are playing themselves in new bodies, this is possible. Friction can be entertaining, but it is your job to know the line and when to step in.
For the modern reader: non-binary. —DC