Inside the Untold Drama: Crafting a Trump vs. Anti-Trump RomCom with Erik Bork
Ashley
Yeah. So, tell me about casting. Um, so you, once you radio, you had the script, you raise the money and then you get into casting. I thought your cast was excellent. Maybe you can speak to that. Did you get a casting director with these actors that were in your network that you could reach out to? Maybe just tell us how you went about the casting with this.
Erik Bork
Yeah, well, a couple of them were in my network, and I reached out to them directly. But the two romantic leads were not. It was during the actor strike. And so that was a whole other hurdle, because we’re going to use SAG after, you know, actors, which means a SAG after contract, which we got the ultra-low budget agreement we use, but then the strike was happening. So indie films like mine could apply for a, I forget what it was called, we weren’t supposed temporary agreement, right, to shoot even during the strike, because SAG wanted actors to make movies during the strike if they’re indie movies that aren’t against aren’t with struck companies, which we were the definition of that tiny little indie movie. So even though some people in SAG were like, well, you shouldn’t even do that, because it looks bad. But most people, I think, were like, no, that’s a good thing to do. So that might have made it harder or easier, harder, and some people might have been like, I don’t want to work during the strike for optics, because even though the union is telling me to, it’s still some people might take it the wrong way. Other people were like, I’m not working at all. So, I’m available during the strike and I’m out of money and health insurance. So yeah, let’s do this. I don’t know what my actors different points of view or the different people that I went out to. But I will tell you that there was one agent. So the thing is, the fact that we got this interim agreement is what they call it. The films that got interim agreements were published, their titles in the trades, like deadline Hollywood variety and stuff. And so I started getting queries from a lot of different people. But agents of actors were one of them saying, hey, we saw your movie. They must have found me. I don’t know how they found me. They had to do some online sleuth thing because it would just say the title of the movie and nothing else in the trades. And this particular agent at the Gersh agency was like, I want to help you cast this. And he was amazing. He started sending me people, sending me reels, and I would look at them and we made some offers and not every offer that they accepted and we would go to other choices or give me more ideas. And we ended up casting three of the six actors, including the two romantic leads from his pool at Gersh. And he made it real easy because he was trying to get them in there and he was sending me these great reels and then making the offers and then eventually we hit on the right people.
