Casting Directors Can Win Oscars Now, But It’s a Lost Art

Ask a casting director about their job — usually her job — and you will hear words like intuition and alchemy. Ideally, they work closely with their director to create the human canvas of a project. They serve the filmmaker’s vision with their encyclopedic knowledge of the acting community and an innate sense of what each role requires, both in terms of what’s on the page as well as the ensemble as a whole. Legends include Ellen Lewis, who has worked on every Scorsese movie since GoodFellas ; or Nina Gold, who found every human role on Game of Thrones ; or Francine Maisler, who has cast more than a dozen Best Picture nominees. Over the years, a casting director develops a sixth sense for star potential, that charismatic “It” factor you just can’t look away from. “I got to the poi