Actors talking about their craft can be either completely self-indulgent or wildly entertaining. This Sundance panel was luckily more the latter than the former thanks to the cast of characters participating in it: Viggo Mortensen, Thomas Middleditch, Diane Ladd, Bryce Dallas Howard, Rebecca Hall and John Krasinski. Asked what attracts them to a role and whether or not insecurity comes into play, Bryce Dallas Howard shot it down with confidence: "For me it is ‘I can do this!’ Not that there aren’t sometimes scary elements to it, but I wanna feel not just I can do this but I must do this” siad the actress, who premiered her first short as a director here at Sundance. "Sometimes I’m offered parts that I am absolutely not sure that I wanna do but sometimes (it’s) because of the script” , proclaimed veteran actress Diane Ladd to a lot of laughter from the audience. "But that’s not usually the case”, she added. "Usually it’s something that speaks to my soul where I say‚ by golly, I can do this’.”

Rebecca Hall, the only non-American on the panel, remembered how after Vicky Cristina Barcelona she decided to do theater instead of taking advantage of the many roles she was offered: “Maybe not the best move. But I didn’t think about it until Vicky Cristina Barcelona won awards. The way I pick a role is instinctual.”

Getting a lot of offers is a luxury, contended John Krasinski: “Being on The Office was the greatest thing that ever happened, so for me it’s always where the good story is. I’ve never been a typical dramatic or comedy guy. After ten years on The Office I just wanted to do good stories rather than just getting a lot of work.” When asked whether being on a big franchise gave him the leverage to do the role he always wanted to do, Viggo Mortensen joked: “You mean Texas Chainsaw Massacre, right?” before talking about The Lord of the Rings trilogy: “In the beginning of my career it was just about having a job and to learn something and at times just to pay the rent. After Lord of the Rings I just kept trying to find interesting stories and – this goes for the whole cast and also the crew – everyone had more opportunity to do more things. When I read a story that I liked no matter how strange it was, by virtue of me saying yes, it got financed.”

Mortensen is a strong proponent of getting films into movie theaters as opposed to releasing them on streaming or cable networks: “That’s what I’ve always been most concerned with, as an actor and on three movies as a producer, is that the movie get to a movie house. I think, no movie reaches its full potential until it’s seen on a screen, by people who bought tickets of their own free will. I know this makes me very old-fashioned, I suppose.” He sees the trend towards the opposite as damaging in particular to independent films. “I don’t know if the old way of showing films the way they deserve to be seen will die off completely but as long as I am a producer I will fight for it. I wanna see movies in the movie theater”, he declared. Krasinski agreed: “I think, people choosing to pay money to see your movie is the biggest compliment you can get as a filmmaker.” But , ina more realistic frame of mind, he added “at this point you can’t stop what’s happening and people will choose to see a movie however they wanna see it.”

Elisabeth Sereda