S2E3: Casting About With Victoria Burrows

In this episode of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast: Horror Stories From The Movie Making Trenches”, we sit down with one of the biggest casting directors in the business, Victoria Burrows. Or, as we prefer to put it, we go “Casting About With Victoria Burrows”.

In season one of “The How NOT To Make A Movie Podcast, we spent a long, long, long time talking about casting. If you remember (or, if you don’t), casting was among our most significant failures while making “Bordello Of Blood”. That is, how we cast our three leads. Or, rather, how our executive producer Joel Silver cast our three leads. Joel was our boss. He had final cut. Though we had three terrific actors in mind, Joel had ideas of his own and that’s where we went.

To be honest, “Bordello Of Blood” was never going to be a horror classic (or even a semi-classic like “Demon Knight” is). But, had we cast the movie the way Gil Adler (the movie’s director), Victoria Burrows (our casting director) and I (its co-writer and producer) originally imagined, it absolutely would have been better.

As “Bordello of Blood” demonstrates, cast your movie or TV show wrong and you’re doomed.

Headshots

As Victoria tells it, the day she realized she wanted to be a casting director was the day she found herself. Casting is (most of) her life. Animal rescue also is very important to Vic; she talks about that passion (and what listeners can do to help support this very worthy cause). She also talks about softball.

For years (before the pandemic), Victoria hosted a yearly pickup softball game/birthday party at Rancho Park in West LA. Six, seven, eight hundred people showed up every year including lots of celebrities. Here’s a blog post written by one of the event’s attendees.

Hopefully, while we’re casting about with Victoria Burrows, you’ll get to know her, too. Hanging with Vic is always a pleasure!