“I had to text Lily-Rose Depp and say I’m sorry,” casting director Kharmel Cochrane explained this afternoon during a Q&A session at Scotland’s Sands Film Festival.
The apology was on account of Cochrane dismissing Lily-Rose Depp as a serious contender for a leading role in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. The vampire remake is one of the many buzzy titles Cochrane has cast in recent years. Her other credits include Saltburn, Rye Lane, and Bob Marley: One Love.
“I had said absolutely no way to Lily-Rose Depp,” Cochrane continued, breaking down the Nosferatu casting process.
“I didn’t think she could act. I hadn’t seen anything that I thought showed she could act. And I’m not even bothered by the nepotism thing. I think that’s a whole other conversation. And then she auditioned. I was wrong. And I’ve got no shame in saying if I’m not right.”
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Cochrane ultimately cast Depp alongside Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Nicholas Hoult, and Willem Dafoe. The film went on to become a surprise box office hit, crossing the $100 million mark and becoming Focus Features’ second highest-grossing movie at the domestic box office, surpassing Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain.
During this afternoon’s session, Cochrane described Eggers as one of her staple directors with whom she feels most comfortable collaborating.
“It’s Emerald Fennell, Alex Garland, Robert [Eggers], and Lena Dunham,” Cochrane said of her favorite directors. “We’ve just got a really good thing going. And I genuinely feel safe in my workplace with them. I feel like I can say to them, ‘Oh, look what if we do this,’ and I’m not worried about getting fired, because that is a real fear, especially when you’re on some of the studio stuff. I got fired recently. I don’t want to work like that. I can’t do my best work if I’m scared to offer an opinion.”
Cochrane also gave the audience at Sands an insight into her unique casting process, which has often been praised as dynamic and diverse. The casting vet said she never lets her work be entirely dictated by a film’s script or a director’s casting brief. She used the idea of a character’s race to illustrate her process.
“If something is clearly written as white, for example, a script reads ‘she tied her blonde hair back,’ but there’s no specific reason for it, I will just put people on tape,” Cochrane said. “And then it’s almost like I dare someone to question why I’ve done it, and they don’t. So then it just becomes normal. Years ago, I would get people saying, ‘did you read the brief?’ And I’d say yeah, and this is my interpretation of it, just like when you can read a book.”
The casting vet said she is currently catching a lot of heat for her work on Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights adaptation. Aussie-natives Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi have been cast in the film’s central roles.
“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” Cochrane said. “But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”
Further teasing Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, Cochrane said, “there’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy” in reference to the film’s artistic interpretation of the source material.
“Wait until you see the set design because that is even more shocking,” Cochrane said. “And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.”
Sands Film Festival runs until April 27.
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