"I encourage the discovery process when working with actors," says director Lynn Hamrick. "I want to leave room for the suprises. I don't always know what I am looking for initially, but I do know when I've found it!"

Originally trained as an actor at Tanglewood, where she studied Stanislavski’s Method, and later as a director at UCLA, where she earned her M.F.A. in film, Hamrick has built her directing career around the belief that “Eighty percent of filmmaking is casting.” 

In auditions, she looks for how actors “play the arc of a character, how flexible they are, how they take direction.  It’s about chemistry,” she says.  “Do you feel sparked by this person?  Can you spark them?”

A DGA Award winning director, Hamrick has directed features, TV, and documentaries. Hamrick’s eye helped her cast both Leonardo DiCaprio and Adam Sandler in their first films, which she directed.  To keep her eye for actors sharp, she continues to work with actors as a directing member of the Actor’s Studio, because “the more you know about what makes a better actor, the better the actors you can attract.”