Here’s Russell on what makes a good director:
A good director also knows when not to direct. Nobody ever tried to direct Gable. They let Gable be Gable. I don’t mean that he wouldn’t take direction, but when he walked in with the gun and the uniform, and he’d just been over the top, what more could anybody do about that? Gable was the same sitting on the sidelines as he was when he got up and played the scene, and nobody wanted him to be anything else. People like Gable, Wayne, they’re personalities, and a personality is an asset, you don’t destroy it or mess with it.
Cary Grant was different; he wasn’t just a personality, he could immediately go off into a spin and become any character that was called for. He was terrific to work with because he’s a true comic, in the sense that comedy is in the mind, the brain, the cortex …
Grant loved to ad lib. He’d be standing there, leaning over, practically parallel to the ground, eyes flashing, extemporizing as he went, but he was in with another ad-libber. I enjoyed working that way too. So in His Girl Friday we went wild, overlapped our dialogue, waited for no man. And Hawks got a big kick out of it.
Then I started worrying that all this noisiness and newsroom high spirits might seem too chaotic to a watcher, and one night after we were finished I again went to Hawks. “I’m afraid,” I said, “that audiences won’t follow us.”
“You’re forgetting the scene you’re gonna play with the criminal,” Hawks said. “It’s gonna be so quiet, so silent. You’ll just whisper to him, you’ll whisper, ‘Did you kill that guy?’ and your whispering will change the rhythm. But when we’re with Grant, we don’t change it. You just rivet in on him all the time.”
