Catholic and Enjoying It!
It’s been a busy couple of days. The other day we re-shot scenes on the roof of the house (a very tall house with a very very long plummet from eave to brick garden pathway. Joey was happy with what we got and it went in the Macbook I am typing this on. So that’s finished. By the way, one fun thing about shooting movies is that mornings work just fine as evenings. All we have to do is tell you it’s evening and you believe it, cuz you don’t know which way the west is. Nyah nyah!
In the afternoon on Thursday, I got to run around brandishing a huge black pistol, drawing down on our hapless Dr. Warner, and then being carted away by the Van Man to the goofy booth, laughing my head off the whole time. Deliberate, dissolving into a puddle laughter is, it turns out, something I appear to have a knack for and can do on cue multiple times. I don’t know what that means, but I hope I use my newfound superpower for good and not for evil. I took all afternoon for Bruce and Sharkey, our brawny orderlies, to get me into the car, what with multiple camera angles and what not, but eventually we got the scene in the the can and it was good.
Dale Ahlquist, the President of the Chesterton Society, turned up on Thursday and we had big fun over the past two days. Alas, he had to leave this AM. But I’m sure we will cross paths again since we will be shooting more stuff in April up in Washington State (for Innocent Smith’s Excellent Around the World Adventure).
I’m learning a lot about the filmmaking process. There are two basic subcultures on a film set and it is the task of the director to get them to mesh seamlessly. The first subculture is the crew. Don’t kid yourself when you hear actors go on about their “work”. The guys who are doing the vast majority of work on a shoot are the crew: the guy who moves all the gear around and holds the mike boom for take after take while his arms and legs slowly harden into sculpted pillars of granite, the camera guys who figure out all the lighting, hang the lights, put up the reflectors, make sure no shadows or water bottles are in the shot, get the sound just so, frame the shots, operate the jibs and dollies and download the stuff into computers. These are the guys that make a film look like a film and not a cheap home video. They work their butts off.
Meanwhile, there are the actors. We spend a lot of time hanging around, cracking jokes, running lines, figuring out how to do each beat of each moment in order to milk it for all the emotion/laughs/tears/etc. we can find. The trick is to do all that character stuff without screwing up the hard work the crew has put into figuring out the way to shoot it. It’s a fascinating bit of collaboration. The cast is very free with coming up with character ideas and gags for one another. Ashley Ahlquist (Rosamund) had an invaluable tip for how I should deliver a line yesterday. When we shoot it tomorrow, I will do as she suggested cuz it’s way better than what I had planned.
Most of yesterday and all of today, they don’t need me, so I’m sort of hanging out on the fringes of the set, watching as Michael Moon and Rosamund fall in love, or flip out, or dance the macarena depending on what is happening in which scene. It’s all out of order. I think of principal photography as the process of digging up precious gems. When it’s done, Joey will have all the gems he needs to assemble a mosaic. Then he goes into the editing room and constructs the mosaic out of the sack of gems he’s mined. Our job as the cast is to give the best performances we can, make them as funny and emotional as we can (with restraint, since the camera makes everything way bigger) and leave him with a many tasty choices as possible.
What all those “extended edition” and “making of” documentaries on DVDs never convey and are designed to avoid conveying is the sheer volume of empty time involved for the actors. The crew is pretty much always busy. Those guys work *hard* all day long. Meanwhile, we actors spend copious amounts of time being useless: reading, chatting, napping, eating. Sometimes the crew can use a hand and we try to help out by holding a reflector or doing whatnot such as saying our lines off camera so that the guy who is in the closeup has something to respond to. But much of what we do is wait for the take. On the bright side, everybody is very prepared for their scene and in the moment when it comes. Being in the moment is all since the scene you are doing now bears no relation to the scene you just shot or will shoot next.
Oops! They need to download this afternoon’s scene on to the computer. Gotta run! Later, dudes and dudettes!
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