How to Use Extras Like a Great Director

I worked on a pilot once where I was tasked with directing background actors. It was a wide shot, and the extras appeared way off in the distance, but I took my job incredibly seriously. Because I know how important background can be to a scene.

These performers give an environment necessary texture and realism, because most spaces in the world are occupied by many people at the same time.

If you’ve ever watched something, maybe a scene in a restaurant, and felt like something was just slightly off, it might be that there weren’t enough extras. (You’ll see it in indie film a lot, where filmmakers are just grabbing their friends or whoever is available.)

We love Thomas Flight’s recent video about working with and directing background actors. Check it out below.

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Why Background Matters

Most filmmakers think of extras as just human set dressing. They’re warm bodies that make a coffee shop look like a coffee shop. And honestly, as we’ve just discussed, that's not wrong.

Flight describes them as "a blur of nameless bodies that are almost a kind of set design, adding context and realism to the story without drawing the audience's attention away from the story itself."

At the baseline, extras exist to populate a world so audiences aren't distracted by its emptiness. It’s uncanny if a lead actor is in a space all by themselves, unless that’s part of the story.

But this approach undersells background actors, and it might be limiting what you're getting out of your background. Background talent can be a character unto themselves. Do they all dress the same to express uniformity? Do they move against your lead actor as an obstacle? How do they react to something going on in your world, whether it's a natural disaster or a sporting event or something else?

Don't Let a Thin Budget Hollow Out Your World

Again, this is a specific kind of problem that's hard to diagnose in the editing room. You’ve got good performances. The lighting looks fine. But something feels off and artificial in a way you can't quite name.

Chances are, your locations are just too empty.

"Extras can kind of be like the seasoning that ties a scene together, really adding a sense of life and visual interest and motion to a film," Flight says.

Extras make things feel more real. It's one of the quieter budget casualties in indie filmmaking, and it compounds throughout a film.

Granted, there might be practical reasons for not hiring abackground. You might have a small budget. It might be too hard to coordinate and block a big crowd scene.

But have options that don't require blowing your budget.

Invite your local community. Filmmaker J. Rick Castañeda told us that opening background roles to locals costs little and pays off in authenticity.

Shoot where people already are. Godard hid his cameraman in a cart to capture real Parisian streets for Breathless. Sean Baker shot parts of The Florida Project among real people, securing releases afterward. Jafar Panahi hid a camera in a car. Terrence Malick hired real farm workers for Days of Heaven.

If real crowds work for your scene, use them—you just need a small, discreet setup. This NFS piece on guerrilla filmmaking in New York is worth reading for lessons on that approach.

Wolf of Wall Street Credit: Paramount Pictures

Use Your Background to Reinforce Subtext

You probably already know that you can be really intentional about every single detail in your project, if you have the time and brain capacity.

For instance, Flight points out that in Past Lives , director Celine Song stages a park scene where two potential lovers walk together but haven't closed the emotional distance between them. She fills every inch of the background with romantically paired couples.

“It inverts the way these scenes usually play out, as if all the extras are the ones in the romance movie and the two leads are the characters just going about their lives."

Once you start thinking this way, the possibilities get more ambitious. As Flight says, "The most interesting uses of extras are not the most realistic ones."

Jacques Tati pushed this furthest in Playtime , where the background talent stops being background at all—"they are the subject," Flight says, performing a kind of maximalist, choreographed chaos that expresses something about modern life that dialogue never could.

Roy Andersson takes the opposite emotional approach in Songs from the Second Floor , where extras stand motionless and dejected, drained of life, the collective mood of every background body building the film's tone.

Know your story and your themes. And use everything at your disposal to support them, including your background talent.

Choreograph for Composition, Not Just Coverage

Filling a frame with extras is one thing. Thinking about where they move and when is something else entirely.

Even when I was working on that pilot I mentioned up top, the extras moving back and forth across the scene had to look a certain way. On an early take, they were too sparse, so the director asked for more, and I sent them around faster until we got the look he wanted.

“Background looked good on that one” was exactly what I wanted to hear.

Directors will want to use their background talent in different ways. For example, Akira Kurosawa treated his background talent like instruments in an orchestra.

"He would carefully choreograph the movement of his extras within a scene to create a sense of rhythm and composition in motion," Flight says.

Spielberg does this too, like when extras create motion and visual rhythm in the background of Jaws. Wes Anderson takes it further, posing background talent in frozen tableaux in many of his films, including The Phoenician Scheme and The French Dispatch. They move with clocklike precision.

Some directors want their talent to cross close in front of the camera for a sense of realism or to hide a cut. In The Player , Altman deliberately let extras obscure the camera mid-scene.

The possibilities are endless. The question worth asking isn't just how many extras you have, but what they're doing and how they support your vision.