Directing the Non-Actor

In the 1960s, filmmaker James Blue embarked on a Ford Foundation—funded odyssey across three continents. His mission was to interview over sixty directors about their methods for unlocking the exciting potential of cinematic performance as revealed by Italian neorealism: coaxing authentic human behavior from people who have never acted. Now, six decades later, editor Richard Herskowitz has fulfilled Blue’s vision with this landmark collection.

Volume One of Directing the Non-Actor brings together, along with a comprehensive account of Blue’s motivations, process, and findings, extraordinary conversations with Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Satyajit Ray, and others, and revelatory testimonies from the non-actors themselves. What emerges is a master class in the craft of capturing life on screen: from Bresson's exacting control to Godard’s improvisatory freedom, from Italian neorealism's streets to Québec’s New Wave.

Essential reading for filmmakers, scholars, and anyone captivated by the mysterious space where cinema meets reality.

Directors interviewed: John Boorman, Robert Bresson, Shirley Clarke, Miloš Forman, Jean-Luc Godard, Gilles Groulx , Susumu Hani, Claude Jutra, Paul Morrissey, Satyajit Ray, Jean Renoir and Jacques Rozier. Actors interviewed: Carroll Baker, Warren Beatty, Richard Grenier, Johanne Harrelle, François Lafarge, Macha Méril, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Barbara Ulrich and Anne Wiazemsky.

Volume 2 here. Volume 3 here.

James Blue (1930–1980) was a groundbreaking filmmaker, educator, and advocate for public, accessible media. Born in Oklahoma, he studied at the University of Oregon before earning a scholarship to Paris’s prestigious IDHEC, where his classmates included Costa-Gavras and Johan van der Keuken. His debut feature, Les Oliviers de la Justice, received the Critics’ Prize at the 1962 Cannes Film Festival. His USIA documentary The March (1963–64), documenting the Civil Rights March on Washington, was later added to the National Film Registry. A Few Notes on Our Food Problem (1968) earned him an Academy Award nomination. As an educator, Blue taught at UCLA, the American Film Institute, Rice University, and SUNY Buffalo, where his students included Paul Schrader, Joan Churchill, and Jim Morrison. With initial support from a Ford Foundation grant, he conducted and recorded over 75 interviews with major international filmmakers, considered one of the most important film history archives of the 20th century. He died of cancer in 1980, just before turning 50.

Richard Herskowitz is a media arts curator and administrator who has served as director of Cornell Cinema, the Ashland Independent Film Festival, Virginia Film Festival, and Houston Cinema Arts Festival. He has been a programmer multiple times and president of the board of the Robert Flaherty Film Seminar as well as chair of its 50th Anniversary Committee. He has taught film studies and curated media art museum exhibitions at University of Virginia, Cornell, and the University of Oregon, and has written extensively on film and other cultural subjects in Social Text, Wide Angle, and other publications. He leads the James Blue Project, affiliated with the University of Oregon Libraries’ James Blue Archive, and oversees its website at jamesblue.uoregon.edu.