this may be anticlimactic, to report the last week's events in retrospect, but there was simply too much going on every day starting last monday for me to take time to report on it. Nonetheless I want to write it all down for the record.
I also invite the key cast and crew members to write their thoughts as well!
MONDAY, MAY 26. Dreary downpouring day. Key cast + Will and I met up at the location at 11AM to do a read-through. We really started at 1130 as people came late. When Kevin Jackson came in I instantly knew it was going to be a rough day -- he looked jetlagged and tired, and the weather wasn't helping to get him going either. Plus he didn't take the read-through well -- after how we had worked through the first 5 scenes on Sunday, it was like taking a step back for him. But I had wanted to do this so I could listen to everyone say their lines. It was a good way to get everyone on the same page and see where everyone was. On the other hand, it may not have been as critical given the improvisatory nature of the script. In any case, it was hard to get through, especially in that cold dark lobby.
At 12:30 Leland came in with Chris Weck, the gaffer he had brought in to help him with lighting and operating the second camera. We started running through each scene and staging our actors so we could get a sense of what each shot looked like. It was a bit chaotic -- Leland had been under the impression that I had already blocked my actors and that they were ready, when in reality this was the first day I had to work with all of them! We got through it all right, though Kevin J looked miserable -- if you look at the stills we took that day it's almost funny how many shots had Kevin slumped over with his head down.
By the time we were done it was about 2pm, the time that Kevin J and Dave Koenig were to begin a 4 hr rehearsal of their scenes together. We were supposed to have had lunch at 1 but they decided to go upstairs and get to work -- big mistake. You HAVE to make sure people are fed if you expect them to have the energy to work on their roles. We did not have a productive rehearsal. Kevin J expressed his confusion over what had happened downstairs with the read-through and the shot blocking. He said something to the effect of, I didn't know you were making a Movie movie, I thought you were just going to play it simple and natural, go with a documentary style, isn't that what you wrote on your journal? The fact of the matter was, he was right. Somewhere along the line, through Will's and my conversion of our treatment to a shooting script, through the shot blocking and discussions I had with Leland, the vision of what the project was to be got obfuscated. Actually it wasn't *that* bad -- it was just that Kevin J was seeing things going on around him that were making him feel that this project was going to be a lot more complicated than he anticipated. And looking at it from his perspective he had a point. In the time between he had first read the script and had gotten here for rehearsal, I had found someone in Leland who had a real appreciation for the craft of cinematography and was going to try to make this into something that looked really good and professional, which was more than I could have hoped for back when this thing started. I had to protect Kevin, put him back in a sense of safety, make him feel that he was going to have the right environment to do his work as naturally as possible.
Unfortunately all of this was going by so fast that I couldn't think straight. And what's worse is that my animated exchange with Kevin was putting Dave Koenig in an uncomfortable spot. While Kevin's point was, What exactly are we doing here? Dave's point was, look, we've got only a few days to do this, so why don't we just stop arguing about it and do it? And both of them were right. Unfortunately, again, all of this was happening so fast that I couldn't take charge and tell them both to settle down and get to the business at hand. Kevin J excused himself from the rehearsal, which was just as well because he looked pretty roughed up by the day anyway -- but this only made Dave more unhappy because a day of valuable rehearsal time for him was shot.
This day was to get a sense of where we were. Well we certainly got it.
After Dave excused himself Karin, Will and I talked things over. Karin, with her unfailing sense of perspective, said, This day needed to happen, and now we can go forward. We got a reality check of how much we were in command of our vision and what we needed to do to communicate it with our actors. We should have been much more prepared in giving our interpretation of the scenes, without having to look at the script constantly. These actors, they have so many questions to ask, and they want so much to figure out their characters inside and out -- and Will and I simply hadn't taken it that far. The last two weeks we had been so caught up with production issues; all my creative energy had been devoted to developing shots with Leland. But even if we'd had the time, I still doubt that we'd have been prepared to work with our actors that day, because we have such a different way of approaching the material as they do. Will and I seem to be more intuitive with our ideas of story and situations, or at least I seem to be -- I like to just put things together and see what happens without an overriding idea of where it's going to lead. Which has its merits, but when dealing with a feature project involving dozens of people, perhaps more is required -- especially if its to be done in 72 hours.
Anyway Karin left Will and I with plenty to think about -- what Will and I decided to do was to look at each scene and really drive the key points of what we wanted to accomplish in each scene into our skulls. Karin had a birthday party to go to -- namely, hers -- which Will and I could no longer attend. We went to Subway to finally get our lunch at 5:30, then we spent the next 5 hours going over each scene. I was exhausted by the time I got home -- still optimistic, but exhausted. It was the first day I had really been challenged on an artistic level, as opposed to a logistic one. It was the first day that I really needed to be a decisive and clarifying presence for others, and I wasn't.
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