Casting Director Francine Maisler on Why Actors Need Someone Like Her on Their Side

variety.com:

Will Tizard Contributor Francine Maisler, longtime collaborator with Aaron Sorkin and Steven Soderbergh and casting director for “The Revenant,” “The Big Short,” “Little Women,” “Dune” and “The Bikeriders,” says she’s always been obsessed with performance. “I’m always looking and seeing and my eye is taken with things,” she says. “I love the theater,” she told an audience at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this week, recalling being “mesmerized” by actors onstage long before she had the inkling to follow her career path.

Sorkin has said, “Francine has an eye for talent like no one I’ve ever met,” to which Maisler jokes, “We fight all the time.” The longtime New Yorker started her career working for the Actors Equity union before moving into casting and professes she’s neither competitive nor did she ever dream of going bigtime.

But after a few films in which “I just kind of kept my head down and did the best possible job I could do,” she founded a casting agency and at some point was hired to find the talent for the brilliant crime ensemble piece “The Usual Suspects.” And at that point, Maisler says, she began to get major name director and studio projects. “Somehow the work just started coming.” She recalls thinking she’d certainly never get the chance to work with directors like Michael Mann and James L.

Brooks, both of whom she now teams with regularly. “When I did ‘Reality Bites,’ that’s when people took notice, maybe, of my work.” The Ben Stiller-directed Gen-X chronicle starring Ethan Hawke and Winona Ryder drew attention to Maisler’s gift for not just scouting but for finding alchemy.