One of the great pleasures of director Duke Johnson‘s haunting and beautiful new film “The Actor” is, appropriately enough given the film’s title, the abundance of terrific performances. André Holland anchors the movie as the title character, an actor struggling to figure out who he is and where he belongs after an accident leaves him with amnesia. He’s surrounded by a gallery of equally fascinating supporting players — most of whom play multiple characters, with the actors often unrecognizable under layers of elaborate hair and makeup.

For Johnson, the decision to create a troupe of actors who would play different characters throughout was both practical and philosophical. “There are the limitations of shooting in Europe and getting your actors,” Johnson told IndieWire on an upcoming episode of the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast, noting that getting a huge cast to Budapest for production would have been prohibitively expensive — once he got talented performers like Tracey Ullman and Toby Jones to the location, why not use them as much as possible?

But having each actor play different people Holland interacts with on his journey served a deeper conceptual purpose as well, having to do with the ideas raised by the Donald Westlake novel (“Memory”) on which Johnson and co-writer Stephen Cooney based their screenplay. “There’s the theme of acting and how we’re all playing roles in our daily lives,” Johnson said. “It leans into the idea of ‘What can you really trust?’”

The effect on the audience is hypnotic, and at times disorienting, making “The Actor” a profoundly subjective viewing experience as we’re sucked into the lead character’s point of view. As actors reemerge in different guises, there’s a sense of déjà vu exacerbated by the film’s approach to production design. Multiple sets are repurposed to serve as different locations — again, a financially sensible decision that also carries deep emotional resonance.

Johnson’s background is in stop-motion animation — he’s best known for co-directing “Anomalisa” with Charlie Kaufman — and he found that directing the actors in his first live-action feature was a far cry from what he had experienced in his previous work. “In animation, you do voice records, and there’s a lot of opportunity for actors to contribute, but then you take that and make the film and the performance doesn’t change much after that point,” Johnson said. “Making a live-action film, it’s evolving on a daily basis.”

Johnson also discovered that the time pressures in live action made his job exponentially more difficult than on a painstaking project like “Anomalisa.” “I was like, ‘I’m not going to do another stop-motion movie,’ because they’re too hard to make,” Johnson said. “And then I did a live-action movie, and they’re so hard! Because you have no time. It’s like a ticking clock, and if something goes wrong, it’s really, really challenging. Sometimes things aren’t working and you have to stop and figure it out with your collaborators, but sometimes there’s just not time to do that.”

The biggest thing Johnson learned on his first foray into live-action was to leave some of his film school assumptions behind. “I come from a pretentious background where coverage is for losers, or not for artists,” he said. “There’s a David Fincher quote that there are two ways to shoot a scene, and one of them is wrong. And I would just say, get some fucking coverage. You need it to control pacing and to have something to cut to in the editing room. If you shoot digitally, it’s so easy to throw in another camera — even if you know the shot you want to get, cover it with something else if you can.”

“The Actor” opens in theaters on Friday, March 14. To make sure you don’t miss Duke Johnson’s upcoming episode of Filmmaker Toolkit, make sure you subscribe to the podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform.