If you’ve been to film festivals in the last 15 years, you probably recognize Frank Mosley. You’ve likely seen him give an understated performance in an indie drama, and another time you probably saw him on either end of a murder, and there’s a chance you saw him give a guy pinkeye. He’s one of those faces that pops up in all kinds of movies, and gives you comfort that, for a few scenes at least, you’ll be happy that you’re watching what you’re watching.

But! That’s only one facet of Mosley’s career. He’s also an accomplished director, with a couple features and a slew of shorts under his belt, supplemented by all the fellowships and awards that an indie filmmaker could hope to receive. You can find something he’s been involved with on any streaming platform (and some on his website!), and we’d highly recommend taking the time to do so.

We had the chance to chat with Frank, to get into his head a little bit and poke around. His breadth of experience is immense, so while this wide-ranging conversation only starts to scrape at the edges, it’s full of insights for anyone who wants to act or direct, as well as anyone who enjoys thinking about the roles of actors and directors. Give it a read, and then spend some time with his films. If you’re looking for a place to start, here’s a great one.

Jim Hickcox: You grew up in Texas, right?

Frank Mosley: I did. I grew up in Arlington, which is right between Dallas and Fort Worth. 

When you were a kid in Arlington, what did the kids tease you with? I mean, a name like “Frank Mosley,” there’s not a lot to jump on there.

There’s certainly lots to jump on with “Frank.” “Frankenstein,” “Frankenfurter…” Frank is a name I don’t think I grew into until my 30s. I was never comfortable in my name, like I should’ve been an uncle already or an old man. Which is fitting because all the roles I got in plays as a kid were never the young guy, but the old drunk guy or the priest or something.

I guess I didn’t see that because, looking at you, your name feels appropriate. But you’re right, Frank is a name that fits funny on an 8-year-old.

It’s also my godfather’s father’s name. So, my dad’s best friend’s dad. So having that connection and getting older, I love it. I love my name. 

Are there any traits from your godfather’s dad that you’ve taken on?

Sadly, I never met him, because he passed away when I was 3 years old. But my godfather, John Rainone, has had a major influence on my life. He was an actor and he went to SMU for theater. He was in classes with some greats, like Kathy Bates, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Beth Henley, who won the Pulitzer for Crimes of the Heart. They were all there and were friends. I wish I would’ve been old enough to have seen him in the late ’70s doing Mamet and all these really cool plays. But he was the guy who made me realize, as much as I liked acting as a kid, that I could actually do it professionally, because Uncle John is doing it. He has a small part in the John Ritter movie Problem Child, but his big deal was that in the ’80s he ran a public access kids show in Arlington that I was on as part of the crowd when I was like six. He played Bonkers the Clown. His wife at the time was also on the show as Poppy the Clown and they ran it all through the ’80s. He used that show to make the transition into being a full-blown clown, magician, piano player, and entertainer. He’s a true entertaining renaissance man. He was very inspiring to me, so much so that in my first short films made in college, I cast him in all those films and I’ve continued to do so in every film if there’s a role for him. He’s sort of a good luck charm for me. 

Since you come from an acting background, a major element of your filmmaking style seems to be engaged with performance. Have you ever looked at working clowning into your films as an actor or a director? 

As a director, it’s been in the back of my head, because of my Uncle John, to someday do something on clowning. But in terms of physicality and directing actors, I haven’t done that because I do so few comedies. I would say that the closest I came to getting into a different kind of physicality was using dance in a short film I made called Parthenon (2017). I wrote that lead role for Lily Baldwin because I was really a fan of her work. I thought, how can I make a film that is dialogue free and the body becomes the weapon of expression? How do I use that?

But as an actor, I feel like I’ve certainly toyed more into the clowning realm. I would say the closest I’ve come to that was in a film called The Ghost Who Walks (2019), where I play a kind of Ratso Rizzo character. I’m all scarred from head to foot and he’s kind of this Dickensian sidekick character to the lead. I got to play with my voice and my look and it was the first full-blown opportunity I had to try to transform my voice and body. He’s a fool, a clown, a rat who lives on the streets, so I really got to do as much as I could to incorporate a scuttling kind of clownish buffoonery. He’s always putting on a show and performing for his friends. He’s kind of a pimp so he’s gesticulating wildly and a chatterbox. It was freeing, but man, oh man, it was exhausting. I got so used to playing quieter characters, that to do a character like that, I had to be ready to bring that energy take after take. 

It’s funny that you bring up the word “clown,” because I’m about to be in a feature this summer by Josh David Jordan set in a monastery. The supporting character I play is an ex-circus clown who has seen the light and is going to become a monk. He’s wrestling with giving up this thing that he loved. He’s not even the main character; it’s like 12 Angry Men, or “12 Angry Monks,” all wrestling with their own ideas. But in preparation for this, the director has asked me to learn how to juggle. So I’m about to start that process. I’m so impressed by people, like my Uncle John, who can play the piano, sing, play guitar, ride a unicycle, and juggle, and they can act and dance. It’s so inspiring, but if I could even do a fiftieth of what they can do…

I used to live in L.A. for a couple of years working in small, 99-seat theaters. Those actors, who make like $50 a week, would get these roles and be like, ‘Well, my character plays guitar, so I have to learn how to play guitar.’ And they would learn guitar just for that play. I realized I am not the same kind of human that these people are. 

To be honest, as an actor, that is actually something I look forward to. It can make a role exciting if it feels like something I’ve never done before, and if I can learn a trade along the way because of that character, then all the better. I’ve learned that the more the character has a “thing,” a hobby or a trade, then I can lose myself in that trade on camera. If it’s a guy who builds chairs, I focus on building that chair and not think about the lines or the scenes because the task becomes the focal point. 

That makes sense. If you’re trying to say the right words and express the right emotion, that seems a lot harder than just thinking, ‘I’m going to hammer on this wood.’

Right, but then the tricky part about that is you don’t want to look like a novice. If you commit to it, you have to learn how to hammer the fuck out of that wood, so then you can really be in the scene and make a great chair.

The characters I have seen you play, you tend, for the most part, to be rather subdued guys. Does that feel accurate?

It’s been a range. I tend to go through periods. Like, in my 20s, I played nothing but bad guys. I was hijacking planes and Gary Oldman-screaming in people’s faces and splitting throats. After that period, I started getting roles where I was able to push myself as an actor, but there’s the old idea that, for a young man getting into acting, it’s all about screaming and being intense and angry. That’s kind of what I was doing. I had a lot of repressed anger. I wasn’t good at letting my anger out in life as a kid. So I found an outlet in playing antagonists. As I got older, I started asking how I could do less — push myself by internalizing as much as possible to where I only show little leaks and cracks. That approach became more provocative than showing the whole earthquake that’s happening inside the character. 

But I would say that since that period, it’s kind of been back and forth, where one role will be really big, outlandish and wild, and then I’ll try to follow that up with something totally different. I never want to keep the same energy for too long from character to character. I think my natural disposition is pretty laid back though, so for directors who are looking to cast people based on their personality, that’s the easy boat to get me into something.

A huge percentage of directing is just getting the correct people to be in the movie, so I think there is a lot of that in casting, where it’s like ‘OK, that’s the thing they are going to show you, that’s what I’m not going to have to push to get, so that’s what I’m going to cast.’

Right. And for an actor like me, people only know what you can do based on the last thing they’ve seen you do. That’s how they will define and see you. So you want to do different things and it’s a constant battle to update the reel so people will see different things. I also believe you aren’t right for every part. But I do believe that people sometimes have more range than they are given an opportunity to show. 

I believe that about almost everybody. I feel like when I am watching someone who is a full-out maximalist, like Nicolas Cage, that seems fun, that kind of acting. But when I am watching someone who is taking a more naturalistic or subdued approach, it feels like that style might be more challenging.

I feel like it’s more about the role and the style of the film that you have to approach differently. Hal Hartley movies, for instance, are so stylistic in performance and tone. If you went into an audition and didn’t know who Hal Hartley was, you might play it in a very naturalistic way, rather than that rat-a-tat-tat energy. I have to understand the vision of the director and what they want for the film. So for me, it’s about, ‘What is the style? What’s the director after? And what is my part to play? How do I fit into the story? You don’t want to stand out. You want to be able to blend into everything but it depends on how much heavy lifting you have to do. So that dictates the work that I have to do to get into a character. If it’s something like The Ghost Who Walks, I worked hard on that character for like six to eight months before we shot. Just walking around like the character and trying things on. And I think it worked for me, as I was able to make certain choices because I had time to experiment. But we aren’t always given that time as film actors. Sometimes you get a call asking, ‘Hey, you want to be in a movie next week?’ And that’s how you normally get cast as something closer to yourself. Like in The Ghost Who Walks, my buddy wrote that role for me and I knew about it for a year in advance. It’s such a gift to have somebody do that for you, but also to have the gift of time to prepare. It’s such a privilege. 

I got to do an Austin Film Society workshop and my mentor was Catherine Hardwicke. She said the big thing is to demand time; demand time to rehearse before you start shooting, which I’ve never had the luxury of doing. I’ve always been like, ‘We have four weeks and no money, let’s go!’

I’m a big fan of rehearsal, so whenever I direct, I try to allow time, depending on what the project necessitates, but if I can have a rehearsal, I will absolutely do it. More often than not, a lot of directors, especially young directors, don’t want to do them because they think they have to pay the actors — and sometimes that does happen, if you’re dealing with SAG actors of a certain threshold because that is another day of work. But a lot of the time, the actors will do it because they want to do it because they believe in the film.

It’s definitely worth the conversation, to ask them to come sit in your backyard and run lines.

And sometimes those two hours spent will make it so much easier on the day [of shooting.] It can change everything. 

Watch Parthenon on Frank Mosley’s on Vimeo

When you are going into directing a film, what does your project look like a month out? I ask this because the films I’ve seen that you’ve directed feel like you’ve done a lot of prep work with the actors. There’s a flowiness to them. Like Parthenon, it feels like a dance film and that takes choreography, which you have to work out with the actors.

If I’m lucky, I like to be cast months and months out so I have lots of time for costume fittings and rehearsal and, if I’m lucky, doing some test shoots with the actors and the DP in the space. You have to make time to do that. I always try to factor that in, if I can help it, to see if I can swing it on a scheduling level and just on the availability of the actors if they want to do it. In the case of Parthenon, there’s no dialogue, so the action was everything. Every beat was specifically written ahead of time, but when we got into rehearsal of that bedroom scene, as we worked it out, because Lily is such an incredible dancer and performer, we realized there were some beats that we didn’t need. So we ended up cutting out certain beats or tightening up a certain movement to get from one part of the bedroom to the other more quickly. Without those three days of rehearsal, in the actual space, the film wouldn’t have been the same. By contrast, I didn’t want to rehearse the actors for the scene in the art studio. They knew the beats and the look and I was even kind of directing off-camera. But I didn’t want them to meet, to give a sense of freshness as they were looking across the room. 

In the case of The Event (2022), a film I did with Hugo de Sousa, Hugo wrote that script so he knew it like the back of his hand. Since we were directing that film together and were the main actors in it, we really just rehearsed for a couple days. We were hanging out, but we’d been talking about it for so long as we were developing it, that it all became intertwined. So it was a really easy thing to be like, ‘Oh, now we’re directing, now we’re acting together,’ because it was such a joint effort.

A lot of people who are working on the indie scale work generally with the same small community of people. But I feel like you are in every movie. What does your film community look like?

I like to work with the same people as much as I like to work with new people. I feel like a lot of people work with the same team over and over and they want to stay in that. But for me, if you’re lucky, you get certain collaborators that you work with again and again because you keep exploring each other, and you keep pushing each other to do a different thing. Like, my friend Cameron Bruce Nelson, who directed Some Beasts (2015), we shot that movie over the course of a year on a farm in Virginia. That was our first feature together, but I had acted in two of his other shorts and since then, he has shot and produced some of my films, and I’ve acted in some of his new shorts. When you have a certain collaborator of that level, you don’t think, ‘Will I ever work with them again?’’ it’s ‘how will I work with them again?’ 

But as an actor, I’m always trying to work with people whose work I’m a fan of. If there’s someone whose work I love, I’ll write to them and ask if we can work together. I have agents in L.A. and in Texas. I’ve had agents since probably 2006. And the number of times I’ve booked a role through my agents, I can count on both hands since then. That’s not a knock on any of them — it’s as much of me and auditioning and many other factors as well — but my point is, the only way I’ve been able to be in films and make movies is just by reaching out to people. I’ve been doing it since the MySpace days, writing to say, ‘Hey, I saw your movie. Would love to work with you!’ and it has led to a lot of friendships and a lot of collaborations. Some of those, like Calvin Reeder, I was writing to him about his short Little Farm back in 2006, and years later, we made two short films back to back (The Bulb and The Procedure, both 2016). So you never know what’s going to lead to something else. Otherwise, and I’m not knocking them, but I remember friends from my early 20s who were like, ‘I’m going to wait, I’m not going to push, people are going to call me so I’ll play it cool.’ And I was like, ‘You can if you want, but who knows who the hell any of us are? Nobody knows who the fuck I am!’ If people don’t know you’re there and if they don’t know you’re into their work, then they’ll never know. You don’t have a shot. I’m one of those people who hates the idea of playing it cool. Let people know how much you love their work. Tell them. Be honest. Maybe it will become infectious and you can get on board and work with them on something.

I do feel like you’re an actor who, when you show up in things in supporting roles, people are excited to see you. You’re like Stephen Tobolowsky.

When I was a kid and I wanted to be an actor, the guys I liked were the characters actors. The ones who would show up and you’d be like, ‘Oh, it’s that guy!’ Those are the guys that I wanted to emulate. I had this idea that if you did those roles you could do more movies and a range of parts. Because you’re not always the lead, but you get to come in and have some fun and shake it up. I’m thinking of guys like Claude Rains, Steve Buscemi, Harry Dean Stanton, Dean Stockwell… and the great Dick Miller. And Scoot McNairy is certainly a guy I look up to these days. 

You can do five times as many movies!

[Laughs] Yeah! You could do six movies instead of two! That was really what I wanted to do, so if, even on an indie level, people see me that way, that’s a compliment. That’s all we can do. We try to be seen and hopefully people put us in something else. 

I mean, if I could cast the main character in a movie, that is the pool I would like to pull from. I would rather have a Brian Doyle Murray than anyone else.

It’s cool that you say that because I’ve been trying to prepare for some potential next features to make, and all my casting lists feature the character actors I love, but I want them as leads. I told a friend about these lists and he was like, ‘Nobody is going to give you money to cast that guy as the lead in a movie.’ I go, ‘Yeah, but you know who he is!’ ‘Yeah, but as the guy who shows up in a small role. It’s going to be hard to sell that movie.’ But, in my head, it’s like, why not try to get your favorite actors and give them meatier roles?

As an actor, it’s two-fold. In these small roles, it’s easier because you have less in a sense of quantity, so you don’t want to fuck it up in the one scene you have, where you give the exposition that the dog was just killed or whatever. So it’s more pressure and you want to blend in. But on the flipside of that, if you’re the lead, you have to be able to sustain a consistency from beginning to end and give an arc over the course of the movie. Depending on how vividly drawn that arc is, it can be easier or harder to play that. 

What were the movies or who were the filmmakers that sparked your interest in filmmaking?

When I was growing up, I was always making horror films. Romero and Carpenter made me want to be a filmmaker.

That’s interesting, because your aesthetic feels very opposite to genre filmmaking. 

All the films I wanted to make were like that, and then I went to college and discovered Antonioni and Michael Haneke and, all of a sudden, my style started to fit to themes I wanted to explore more.

But the next script I want to make, my fiance wrote, and it’s my first horror film as an adult. It’s a short film which I’m really excited to direct. 

Are there big expensive scenes? Does anyone explode into blood or catch on fire?

There is some blood. No fire.

Smart. 

But there are some severed prosthetic things… I won’t say what.

You mentioned you started making movies as a kid. What does that mean?

When I was about 4, my dad had a Sony Handycam Hi-8 camera that he had on loan from his brother-in-law. My mom was out of town, and he said, “Let’s make a movie.” So we made The Wizard of Oz, which he directed and I played all the parts. We made it in an afternoon and he played it back for me. It was all edited in-camera. It’s probably five minutes, but I was transfixed, watching it like Sesame Street and realizing I can make things just like the things I like to watch. So we kept doing things with dad filming and me being the actor. By the time I was 7 or 8, I wanted to direct. I started getting all my friends and cousins and making horror movies and Terminator 2 remakes. 

When I turned 13, I attempted to make the biggest thing I had ever made. It was an alien invasion movie called Invaders from Venus! It had a cast of like 30. It was about a 40-minute movie when edited together. We had all these locations and special effects. For someone my age, it was like It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I was like, ‘I’m putting everybody in it! It’s an epic spectacle!’ And my dad still claims it’s the best movie I’ve ever made. He says I can’t beat Invaders from Venus! 

Do you find that insulting?

Of course! [Laughs] But at the same time, there is something charming about it. There is something magical about the people involved in the making of the movie as much as the movie itself. It was a special time and it was me transitioning from making small movies to trying to make something bigger. And it took me all of high school to make. I started when I was 13 and didn’t finish it until I was 17 or 18. And then I went to college to get my English lit and film degrees and discovered European cinema and dramas. But that was my last spectacle movie as a kid. 

Have you watched it recently? Does it hold up?

I showed it to my fiance during COVID. And she was like, ‘This is crazy, because you can see your roots in here.’ And she saw how it’s so much bigger than it seems like it should be when you tell someone you made a movie as a 13-year-old. And I was like, ‘I know, it took me five years!’ [Laughs] But I am really proud of it. It was a lot of fun.

I think it was a nice contrast, too. Because as I got into theater in high school, I was doing these stuffy Molière plays and then on weekends I was making Invaders from Venus! I would steal actors from the theater department and be like, ‘I need you to get your brains sucked out in my movie. Can you be there?’ 

That’s so beautiful. There’s a lot of love that has to go into something like that. Which is always true, but there’s a different sort of enthusiasm and love that comes out from a bunch of teenagers making a movie.

Exactly. There’s no end game. What I liked about making movies back then, is we were literally just making them to make a movie. It was the purest form of expression. You’re not trying to make money off it. You’re emulating the things you love to make something new that you love. It was very pure. And people took time out to make this movie. My uncle was one of the leads in this movie! As an adult now, I realize he took off work and gave so much time to be in this movie to play a soldier who gets captured by aliens! I can’t believe he did that. That was so great of him. I realize how lucky I am, not just in that time, but in the last 15-20 years, that I have worked with some really great people. And I am thankful that it has been relatively easy. You hear horror stories all the time of people having to work with assholes.

For October Horror 2023, Split Tooth hosted the online premiere of Invaders from Venus! Watch the film here

When you’re crewing up or casting for a movie and you’re gauging people for each job, how much of it is ‘I want the best person for the job?’ and how much is ‘I want a person I will have a nice time standing in a room with for 12 hours a day?’

It’s a project by project thing, but I think it was Cassavetes who said he would rather have a boom operator who’s a sweetheart than an asshole who’s the best in the business. I heard that in my 20s and have sort of taken that to heart. I definitely want a good energy on the set if I can help it. But if it’s something, like for special effects or an actor for a cameo role, where the guy is a total jerk but he only has to be around for one day, I go, ‘OK, we can take it for a day dealing with it.’ 

And then you can talk about them for the rest of the shoot! 

Yeah! [Laughs] But it is a fine line. I try to cast friends in roles. That’s also one of the reasons I don’t like to cast myself very often in my own films. It’s a chance to cast a friend who can hopefully have a fun role and then I get to work with them on a project.

Making movies is, at its best, hanging out with your buds.

I think so! And I don’t think you have to necessarily lose that, but it gets tricky depending on availability or what the film is. To me, the perfect hybrid is a 50/50, where I’m meeting new people, but I still have my core team. I think a shorthand is a beautiful thing. It means you can work fast if you have experience with certain people. But it can also make you spoiled. And you can forget how to communicate with other people.

Watch The Event on Vimeo

If you’re working with, say, a new DP, and you want to build up that kind of conversational repertoire, what kind of stuff do you share? Do you send mostly other film clips?

Once I have a script, I start a Google Drive of images from other movies. These can be for casting, for location, lighting, or tone, but I spend weeks thinking of films that might have a connection to that project. With the DPs, I’m a big storyboarder. Every film I’ve directed, I’ve also edited or co-edited. I try to shoot to edit so there’s no waste. I like to be as economical as possible. So I plan very specifically. When I bring on the DP, it’s like, ‘This is what I’m thinking. These are the shots I want… but what do you think?’ Then we will usually do a location walk and take stills and see what it will look like. Then we talk it through. Sometimes I’ll change my mind or they will give me a great new idea. Then we redo the storyboard or shot-sheet. And then you knock on wood and hope it all goes smoothly on the day of shooting because you’ve had that time to prepare. But as for what I’m spending the most time on in pre-production, I try to spend as much time with the DP and the actors ahead of time as possible.

I’m a real stickler for sound design and picture editing, but a weakness of mine is color. I’m terrible when it comes to the idea of color correction. I have a hard time looking at the overall color palette and how it can change in little and/or big ways. I know the image and the frame, but the color is something I struggle with.

In my experience, when color has been really important, that’s been a really fun meeting to have with the DP, gaffer, the wardrobe, makeup, and set people. You get them all in a room and say, ‘Let’s talk colors…’ 

[Laughs] Absolutely! There are some things you get to do that are very deliberate and very cool. My first feature, Hold (2009), is a home invasion film and it’s a guy’s paranoia spiraling out of control after something happens to his wife. A police officer says the perpetrator had on red shoes. I had this idea where, throughout the movie, more red starts to appear until it starts to overtake the movie. 

You mentioned earlier that you shoot for the edit. Has that ever bitten you when you get to the edit?

It’s actually been more about wishing I would’ve had more takes to get it better. Maybe the performance was really good or the frame was good, but something could’ve been better. I’ve also gotten better about realizing whether I need certain shots. As I’ve gotten older, I’m always trying to find ways to condense and trim as much as possible. It’s like, when I was learning about lighting, my professor would say lighting isn’t adding light, but taking it away slowly. In that same regard with editing or shooting, it’s asking how I can strip something down to its essence as much as possible. I think Kiarostami was a big influence on me in that sense. It almost feels like he’s just shooting what was in front of him, but it was all planned. When you see it, it feels so effortless and raw. But you know it was painstakingly arranged. 

I think about personal aesthetics as a filmmaker and 90 percent of what creates that is how you react to the disasters that happen. Because making a movie is, fundamentally, impossible. Making all of the elements come together at the same time is so impossible that most of what you’re doing is constant damage control. Sometimes it’s only tiny disasters happening, but sometimes it’s very big things and it’s all about how you react. If you have a bunch of money and you demand the most control possible, then you become David Fincher. But if you are rolling with the punches and dealing with whatever is coming at you, you become John Cassavetes. 

I credit starting making movies as a kid, when I didn’t have any resources, because it makes you learn all the parts of movie making individually. You realize you don’t just want to be only a director, because you have to learn about lighting and all the other parts. Also, you don’t have anything to make the movie with, so you have to work around your resources. I think it makes you stronger. There’s a short I made a few years ago, and in some ways, it was a perfect translation for what I was after, but in some ways, I feel like it wasn’t what it could’ve been, because everything went so according to plan. There was a certain pulse, a certain life or spontaneity that I should’ve infused the movie with more and allowed for more surprises along the way. So the next two movies I made, I feel, were better combinations of preparation and surprises. I felt there was more life in them. But again, that’s why I think preparation is everything. To make a movie and get it done is a miracle. But you know things are going to fuck up on your movie. So if you know that already, you know you have to do as much prep, only to hope you have less issues to worry about, because you’re expecting so much. 

If you come in underprepared and something goes wrong, then you’re like, ‘Well, I guess we’re done…’ 

You have nothing! Even as an actor, you prepare as much as you can. Because you know on the day, it won’t be what you expected. There was a movie that I actually got cut out of, but I had this really cool character and I was rehearsing it and I was planning for all the cool things I wanted to do with the couple of scenes I was in. And I’m so glad I did, because when I got to set — the scene was supposed to be a conversation between two people who are really close together and sharing a cigarette — I was ready for this. I had the vibe in my head and I was excited. And then the director goes, ‘We’re going to shake it up, Frank. We’re going to have the conversation, but she’s over on that end of the parking lot and you’re right here. And there’s no cigarette.’ So I walk over to her and he goes, ‘No, no. She’s over there, you’re right here, the whole time.’ And I was like, ‘But the dialogue is so intimate. How do I project it without losing the closeness and intimacy?’ So I had to adapt and throw everything out the window. How do I retain the character I’ve been building but put it in this scene where, all of a sudden, he can’t go over and have that connection with the other character? That’s an example I often think of as an actor, where it feels so diametrically opposed to the preparations you’ve done, but as long as you have the time to think about it, you will have enough of the core of the character to spin it in a new direction.

Do you have a preference between shooting in order or out of order, as an actor and as a director?

As an actor, I think it’s a gift to be able to shoot in order. It’s like doing theater and you can feel the arc more easily. Ninety-nine percent of movies shoot out of sequence, so you have to recognize where your arc is in each moment. But I understand as a filmmaker that there is so much more to consider than the actors, it’s about locations and when a certain person is available and you do what you can to make it work. I honestly think the biggest thing I’ve learned as an actor is how to maintain your energy. When you’re on a movie, acting is all about hurry-up-and-wait. You have to centralize your energy, conserve it, and not lose it as you wait on set. The resources of an actor are not infinite as to when you can do a good job. And it’s different for each actor. Some do it better on the first take and others grow into it by the 10th take. So trying to make that clear with the director for what each of your needs are. 

When you’re on set as an actor, are you stealing things from the directors as you’re watching them direct you?

I think we always learn from who we are watching and a lot of the filmmakers I work with are friends. You’re always looking at what you can take from your friends. I was in a film a few years back called Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes (2018). Graham L. Carter, a sweetheart of a guy and a talented director, and I became friends when I was in Austin and he told me he was working on this musical. The way he pitched it was like early Linklater meets Eagle Pennell with a lo-fi musical element to it. I thought that sounded fantastic, so he developed a character for me. All the songs are John Prine songs, so I got to do this off-kilter rendition of a Prine song as a drunk guy who’s barely able to stand. It brought me back to that energy of doing theater in high school. And Graham let me cut loose. What I love about him is he’s very collaborative. Originally, he was like, ‘You’re going to be in this scene in the bar and you’re going to start singing.’ I was like, ‘OK, but what do I do?’ And he goes, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know. Maybe I could walk around?’ So together we choreographed these minimal, sort-of jokey gags with the other patrons in the bar. Graham was just down to play. We did two takes and that was it. It’s such a sweet movie and Graham is a great guy.

Watch Shoot the Moon Right Between the Eyes on Vimeo

But that example is an anomaly. As an actor, I try not to wear the director hat or to think in that way if I can help it. I don’t even really like to watch playback, unless it’s key from a technical point.

There have been a couple times when things haven’t felt right on set. I used to kind of make more of a stink, but now that I’ve gotten older, I don’t want to overstep because it’s not my job. It’s a fine line and it’s got to be something you really want to fight for. Because at the end of the day, it’s not your movie. And if you have trouble with the director and you have problems with too many scenes and how they are envisioning the film, you need to think about why you agreed to work with that director in the first place.

My dad raised me to appreciate the things you get because you don’t know when you’re going to get it again. In my 20s, I said yes to everything. There were definitely lessons learned, but I said yes when I sometimes shouldn’t have. Because of that, the work is all over the place. But it taught me I had to be more careful with my choices. Time is precious and you work on a movie or a couple of movies over a year and you’ve got to do the best you can. And the only way you are going to do the best you can is if you really believe in what you’re doing, or else you run the risk of dialing it in.

I’ve met people who are always shooting for a masterpiece. I don’t feel like you can do it that way. I feel like you just have to be making a movie and be like, ‘Oh, look what happened.’ 

I’m with you. You can’t go into anything thinking it’s going to be the best thing you’ve ever made. When you have that mindset, you stop listening and when you are making anything, you have to constantly be listening. You have to be a receiver and each movie is an evolving creature. You’ve got to listen to your gut as much as the shot sheet. 

There’s got to be a little jazz in it.

Absolutely!

Frank Mosley stars in Christopher Jason Bell’s Boundaries, a film that premiered online on Split Tooth in 2022. Watch it at the link below:

Find a selection of Mosley’s films on his Vimeo page and on his website
If you are curious about Invaders From Venus!, keep an eye out on Split Tooth once October rolls around…

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