Rob Adler — Filmmaker
Fiction and non-fiction cinema grounded in performance, political urgency, and live behavior on camera.
My theatre training in ensemble, improvisation, and actor-centered rehearsal informs how I direct for the camera, train actors, and build courses that hold industrial craft and intellectual inquiry in the same hand.
Selected Films
iVote
2012 short narrative — director and writer.
Starring Eric Roberts, Dan Lauria, and Sharon Lawrence. Official Selection, Bahamas International Film Festival; Best Short finalist, City Film Festival.
You Too?
2018–19 hybrid fiction — director and writer.
A film about political rage and the language we give young people for living in a damaged world. Official Selection, Pasadena International Film Festival and Chicago REEL Shorts; Best Film finalist, Collected Voices.
Fat Lamb
2016 short film — director and writer. Starring Mike Stutz.
The Alchemy of Space
2025 essay documentary — director.
A peer-reviewed film for Theatre Journal / Johns Hopkins University Press arguing for Viola Spolin’s space work as theatrical invocation rather than illustration.
Otto Frank
2020 theatre on film — producer. Featuring Roger Guenveur Smith.
The Camera and the Actor
The camera does not reward performance; it rewards behavior. My job is to create the conditions in which behavior becomes visible, repeatable, and compositionally precise.
The same tools that make a theatre ensemble alive in space make a film scene alive on screen. The discipline changes; the intelligence does not.
Great Acting Looks Improvised.
Teaching Film
At USC and DePaul I have taught in both film and theatre schools—directing students and acting students, often in the same week. My teaching combines visual grammar, composition as information architecture, constraint-based exercises rooted in ensemble practice, and Walter Murch’s emotion-first framework for understanding why the edit serves the actor.
I created an MFA Filmmaking for Actors course and on-camera curricula that take students from screenplay format and visual language through shot lists, coverage, performance, and the cutting room.
On Screen
Rob has been a SAG-AFTRA actor since 1986. Working professionally in front of the camera across the same period he has directed and taught provides the inside view that shapes his filmmaking and actor training.
Available For
Narrative and documentary directing, university teaching, curriculum development, actor-centered production coaching, and creative collaboration.