Casting characters
“When you come from L.A. to Virginia, my false preconception was that there was no business here, so I wasn’t going to work at all. I figured I’d be a full-time mom and paint,” Erica Arvold said of her move to Charlottesville a few years back.
She was moving to support her husband, who had agreed to take over the family business, but she’d built a career as a casting director in Chicago and Los Angeles.
“I moved dragging my heels,” Arvold said. “I was having a blast and I was really happy with my life and career in Los Angeles. But I’d also just had a baby.”
To understand why it was gut-wrenching to leave her career behind, you kind of have to understand how she built it.
Arvold, who describes herself as having a visual memory “that’s fairly unique,” fell in love with film as a 16-year-old extra on the set of Dirty Dancing, which was filmed at the Mountain Lake Hotel outside of Blacksburg, where she grew up.
“I remember the sounds of the generators on set and I remember how kind Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze were to me,” Arvold said. “To this day when I visit a set and I hear the sound of the gennies it’s like giving a baby a blanket.”
She went on to attend the Goodman School of Drama at DePaul University in Chicago, where she got an internship in casting on Ron Howard’s film Backdraft. She found casting to be the perfect mix between theater and business, and remembers crying tears of joy after her first day on the job, knowing she had found her career.
Since then she’s worked on television projects like “Frasier,” “Wings,” and “The Untouchables” and films like Natural Born Killers, Rudy, and The Horse Whisperer, alternating between higher-profile money gigs and indie films, all the while building credibility in the industry as a casting director, which is a very particular kind of job.
“Our brains are like vaults and every time we see and like an actor, they might not be brought in for seven to 10 years literally,” Arvold said.
That’s where Eichling comes in. In Chicago, Arvold cast him as the daytime front for an Al Capone-owned drugstore for the television series “The Untouchables.”
“I considered myself one of the usual suspects in the sense that whenever it was character actors over 40, the same 20 people showed up every time,” Eichling said.
Eichling grew up in the Land of Lincoln, born in Evanston, Illinois, but he only began acting in Charlottesville in the mid-’70s before moving back to Chicago to see how far he could push his passion.
“The hobby became manicky and I decided to go pro. I don’t think I was thinking of it in terms of a profession. I was very much a blue collar actor,” Eichling said. “I’d have an audition or two a week. A job a month. A day or two and I’m playing the homophobic mechanic, or the perplexed policeman, or the Little League coach.”
Eichling returned to Charlottesville in 2008 and opened up his store. He still chases the occasional part on stage and he works in film and television commercials when they come up. They come up more often now that Arvold is in town.
“Any time there’s a role appropriate for an actor I know and love and who is professional, I’ll bring them back again and again,” Arvold said.
Right after Arvold moved back to town, she saw Eichling on screen in an ad that aired during the Adrenaline Film Festival, immediately recognized him, and approached the director.
“I said, ‘How did you get Ike Eichling from Chicago?’ and he said, ‘No, he’s in Charlottesville,’ so I tracked him down,” Arvold said. “Another part of being a casting director is being a cop.”
New York-based casting director Avy Kaufman was in charge of Lincoln, but she hired Arvold and her colleague Anne Chapman (another Chicago connection) to find people to play roles like “radical Republican” and “black Union soldier” as well as principals like Hiram Price and William Dennison.
For Lincoln, Arvold was looking for people who embodied a time when life was much, much harder.
“It felt at one point we were constantly saying, as long as they look like they’re starving and have as much facial hair as possible, that’s what we need,” she said.
Screen acting is a different animal from stage acting and a Spielberg movie is a different scale from most movie projects. Finding the right extras requires creating a palette of the right faces, but it’s also about trusting actors not to screw things up.
“Having a good actor doing a part is such a small percentage of what’s important when you look at a part. Being a great actor is a given,” Arvold said. “But are they going to be professional and respectful on the set? Do they know how to handle themselves around the likes of Steven Spielberg and Daniel Day-Lewis in his method of acting?”
Or as Eichling puts it: “Anybody can say, ‘Yes, Mr. President,’ or ‘Can I take your horse, sir?’ But that’s not the point. The meter is running. It’s costing them thousands of dollars per hour and one little glitch of someone who throws a kink into things, the mechanisms grind to a halt.”
Eichling spent his time on set in a recreated soundstage seated at a table with Day-Lewis, who as Lincoln, was laying out his seemingly insurmountable problems to his cabinet officers as he plotted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. In a recent New York Times article, Tony Kushner called Day-Lewis’ performance in that scene “one of the great things I’ve ever seen.” So, is he really that good?
“It was his ability to make subtle changes. He and Spielberg would have little in-the-ear conversations. I’m watching this three-page monologue being repeated for two days and it was always fresh. I didn’t see anything that was a bad take,” Eichling said.
The power of Day-Lewis’ performance, Eichling said, came from the way he balanced humor and gravity.
“The Lincoln humor is always there and, being from Illinois, that’s something you grow up with,” Eichling said. “Daniel Day-Lewis keeps this wry, laid-back little muse of humor that you can feel regardless of what he’s talking about.”
Eichling said the filming environment was intimidating. Spielberg was energetic and upbeat, Day-Lewis serious, in character. But the magnitude of the production made him uncomfortable. He said he normally ad libs a line or two to see if it will fly, but he laid off this time, a decision he now second-guesses.
“I was fully aware, and I think the other actors were too, that this is going to be the definitive history culturally for a whole generation if not two, because there isn’t another Lincoln biography out there,” Eichling said. “Just as you cannot think about the Holocaust without thinking Schindler’s List, you cannot think about World War II without thinking about Private Ryan.”