Despite his occasional pangs of insecurity, Nichols's gentle but authoritative manner meant he was adept at handling actors.
Catherine Jelski's debut feature, "The Young Unknowns," made in 2000 but just now being released, reveals a real talent for handling actors but never quite overcomes a feeling of familiarity and staginess.
The movie is by turns loquacious and raptly silent, and Moverman, directing for the first time, is tremendously talented at handling actors; he gives them the time and the space to work out characters who have layers and corners and shadows.
In 1962 he moved with Hübner to Bremen where, along with designer Wilfried Minks, they developed the "Bremen style", a mixture of Pop Art and a cool, somewhat Brechtian way of handling actors: Bertolt Brecht, in East Germany, had advocated a style of performance in which the actor was to be objective and not identify with the role.
They had close ties to the executive who was handling actor-writer Jason Segel's script for a new Muppets movie - and who was looking for producers to take the project on.
He is talking specifically about how to handle actors - "I'll always ask them if they want to do another take.
But to direct one you surely needed concrete experience, every John Ford and Preston Sturges move at the ready and a proven ability to handle actors.
These decisions are aimed at making the show more immediately familiar to the conservative, American Christians, who apparently can't handle actors who don't look like them.
The director Ruben Fleischer can handle actors and action well enough, but to judge from the frantically unfunny caper comedy "30 Minutes or Less," he (or his advisers) doesn't know his B material from his Z.
"I choose what films I will work in on the basis not of the script but of the director, and he has the most complete mastery of the cinematic discipline, from technical aspects like sound and photography to the way he handles actors.
