Breathe
There's a lot of pressure to get it all right on set. The clock is ticking and the money is leaking out of your pocket faster than you can think. So take time NOW, when things are relatively calm, and get down to it. And DON'T expect all the answers to come right away. It's taken me years for some of the things I've learned to really soak in, and the biggest thing I've learned about film making is how much more I have to learn.
Take Some Acting Classes
Go to Adrienne Weiss' Directing Actors website. She's a really good director, and taught me a hell of a lot about how to talk to actors. Adrienne is bi-coastal, but if you can't get to her, find an acting group, play, or something going on in your town.
Get some experience, however you can. Even just watching rehearsals helps.
Get Physical
No matter what an actor's training is, I think that the best way to boost a performance is to give them something to do. This doesn't have to be an "action" in the running-away-from-an-explosion sense. Look at Ozu's Tokyo Story (or frankly, almost any of his work). There's not a whole lot of action going on - no one's getting shot or stabbed, or thrown around. There's a lot of dialog. But the performances are incredibly dynamic, at least in part because the actors are always DOING something. They're packing to go on a trip, eating dinner, fanning themselves, cleaning up... I don't know what Ozu's directions to his actors were. But by getting your actors to move around, do things, play, walk, or anything aside from sitting down, you get their energy focused on something outside of their heads.
Reading
Judith Weston has written two really good books about directing actors. Of the two, I think Directing Actors is the most accessible.
I found The Film Director's Intuition very slow going. I'm not sure why - it may be because of the mood I was in when I read it. But once she gets into script analysis techniques - and illustrates them with three really good examples - the book takes off and all the material in the earlier chapters comes together.
William Ball's Sense of Direction is a nice, slim volume that really gets to the heart of directing actors pretty fast. There are some skippable chapters (it was written for stage directing), but it's worth picking up.
Cathy Haase's Acting For Film is geared towards actors more than directors - and for this reason it's actually a valuable resource for you. It's very practical, written very clearly, and is also very brief.
I'm still reading Tony Barr's Acting For the Camera, but so far it's a very clear guide to how to act for film; again, a very good book for you to read.
Finally, pick up a copy of Michael Shurtleff's Audition. It's aimed at actors who have to audition. They have to analyze a play based on a small scene and find a way to the heart of both the scene and their performance, all in a very short period of time. Sounds a lot like film acting, right? Yup. As a writer, I found the "12 guideposts" Shurtleff posits to be absolutely essential to figuring out why a scene works or doesn't work. Similarly, I use the same guideposts to help me figure out the subtext of the scene, or prepare some playable direction to give actors.
Watch Films
Watch films with an eye towards editing and performance. Look past cinematography and production value/design as much as possible. It's not that that those elements aren't important - they very much are - it's just that in many ways those decisions are made by you AND others (the director of photography, mixer, production designer, costume designer, etc.). The part that's really YOURS on set has to do with working with the actors. The results usually manifest themselves later in the editing room as the editor (with your input) tries to build the drama from the different takes.
Some people have said it's good to watch a film without the sound on - so you don't get too sucked into the story. Others have suggested watching films in black and white (either watching a movie shot in black and white or turning the saturation down so that the picture is effectively monochrome). I don't know if I buy either of those techniques whole-heartedly, but they're there, and maybe they'll work for you.
Floorplans, Shotlists, Storyboards, etc.
It wasn't until I was storyboarding Caleb's Door that I realized that I could cut big chunks of dialog out of certain scenes. The reaction shots would communicate plenty. Something about working with my hands, drawing my silly stick figures (I'm not a really good illustrator), made connections in my brain that I wouldn't have made otherwise. During the reshoots I adopted a looser style without storyboarding but my DP and I went over the script and I did make notes on it that resulted in a shotlist and a floorplan.
Some people will argue that a floorplan done while on the shooting location is more useful than a storyboard done months before. I say whatever works for you is good. Just don't skip this step. Anything you can do to pull the script out of two dimensions and into three in your head is a good thing. It will also help you figure out where the camera should be, what should be in front of it, and what's important to hear - all those things that your crew needs to know too.
Okay, that's it for now. Actual real news about the film is coming soon, I swear! In the meantime, I'm chugging away on a rewrite.
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