It was a very full day, without a lunch break as a non-stop parade of Maggies, Sarahs, Dean Beltons, Bobbys, Nicks, Doctors, Psych Attendants, and another Robin all came through to perform.
When Jim returned to our production office, he gave me a quick call to gush about the latest round of performers - especially Sarah. The mother of Maggie, Sarah is a bit of a bohemian, and owner of Soul Food Books. While she is not as central to the story as Donovan or Maggie, it is still a pretty important role, as there are a couple very emotional scenes for her to pull off.
For the longest time, we had actually been considering Alanis Morrisette. However, we were getting a lot of pressure from our sales reps to go for a bigger name actor (Alanis has acted in many things... but not enough to be considered marketable). Even so, we all felt that her innate personality is Sarah. It wouldn't be a stretch for her to play the part. I follow AM on FB and she often posts pictures of things like her huge aromatherapy and colour therapy collections, her sage smudge sticks, and pics from new-agey events she has attended. Ultimately, she's the perfect Sarah.
Despite our sales reps' original lack of interest, Jim has been pushing for her and pushing for her. Finally, our producer (who also liked the idea of using her) gave our casting director the go ahead to check in to see what her availability was like. We all knew that she had announced her pregnancy back in August - but we weren't sure just how pregnant she really was. However, when her agent got back to us on Thursday, as it turns out she'll be unavailable come November. (So we're assuming that she's pretty preggers....)
Even though we had been rooting for Alanis for so long, surprisingly we weren't crushed to learn that we couldn't get her. In my heart I do believe that if she wasn't pregnant, she would've done the movie. I also know that we will find the right Sarah, just as we've found the best Donovan and Finnley. And when I got to see the auditions last night, I was very impressed with what I saw.
A few of the Sarahs were very good... but the first one... wow! Not only was she attractive, sweet and very natural, but she really was something special. When she screamed out her lines and ad-libbed further emotion behind them... man! My eyes unexpectedly welled with tears. And even though it was Jim's second time watching her audition, his did too. She's amazing. She brings our words to life in a way I never could've expected. And while we can't officially offer her the part until the rest of our Sarahs audition next week, there's no denying who we want to give it to. Just awesome.
Another nice surprise was one of the Bobbys who auditioned. A very minor character (with maybe only 5 lines), Bobby is in his late teens and is in charge of taking Donovan under his wing at the grocery store. I always imagined Bobby as more of a dude. Shaggy hair, laid back demeanor... y'know, a dude. Meanwhile, Jim said that he's always imagined Bobby as more of a clean cut keener.
Anyhow, about eight Bobbys were auditioned, and the best of the bunch is this McLovin' type guy. Well, I guess he's not *that* geeky, but he's probably the geekiest of them all, and definitely the funniest the way he ad-libbed. I have to say, I'm McLovin' him!
I love surprises like that. Like when you have one sort of character in your head, and then these actors come in with a completely different take that adds so much more colour. It's really, really cool.
I could probably go on and on about other performances, but instead I'm gonna feed two birds in one hand, and switch gears by showing you around our production office now.
So, first of all, it's bigger than I expected. I mean, I had an idea of it's size after Jim described it to me... but originally we both thought that we'd just rent out a couple small rooms. But as it turns out, a movie production needs a lot more space. As it is, we already require offices for Jim n' I, our three producers, our locations guy, our set designer, and our production manager... and there'll be more joining the team as we go along. For instance, I think next week our cinematographer and assistant director (also called the First A.D. Not to be confused with the director's assistant, who is yours truly) may officially start. Costume design and hair n' makeup people have also been hired, but I'm not sure if they'll require an office or not?
I was also kind of surprised/excited to see that we have a front desk person, who is also known as the production assistant or P.A. So when you first come up the stairs to our floor, her desk is there to greet you in the middle of the open space.
Wait... here, lemme show you...
Okay, so this is taken from the back wall, and that's her sitting in the middle of the room way up ahead. The staircase is to her left. And if you look beyond that second pillar in the distance, you can kinda see that there is another hallway with even more offices.
Then below is our conference room, which I think might double for our production manager's office, I'm not sure?
If you look at the wall, you'll see two calendars with all kinds of post-it notes. This is where we're trying to figure out our shooting schedule puzzle. We have 20 days to film our movie (with weekends off). We want to rent out each location for as little time as we can, and arrange our locations to be as close as possible, so we're not shooting at one location, then driving across town to shoot at another location.
It helps if our locations are within the same block or two, and if we can find ways for locations to do double duty. Like we might film Don's bathroom in the same house that we use for Finnley's living room. We need to shoot 6 pages a day, which is extremely ambitious. (Four pages a day is ideal.) So it makes it very hard if we've written a location that is only used once in the script for a half page scene, because it means more set ups, more time wasted, more money...
Am I boring you yet? Because there's more...
Where things really get tricky (besides the money and time spent at each location, the distance apart, and whether it's shot day or night) is that we only have some of our actors for a limited amount of time. For example, kids can only work 8 hours a day, not 12. Our Finnley actor is only available for 2 weeks. And our Sarah - once we hire her - is unavailable the first three days of November because she's shooting another film.
SO, this long winded explanation is to describe the need for all those post-it notes on the calendar. Each note has different scenes written on it that need to be shot on the same day. It's reeeeally effin' complicated to work out the perfect solution to this convoluted puzzle. I don't envy our Production Manager AT ALL!
Alright, so to the left of this conference room is TC & AS's office, and to the right is ours...
Here it is from another angle...
So, yeah... fun, huh?!
It's crazy to think that all those evenings, weekends, and eventually weekdays we spent in our jammies, tappin' away on our computers has amounted to a big production office, people getting hired and paid, and actors breathing life into our little story. Even though it's been such a long time coming, now that we're finally here, it's really quite surreal.
What's also surreal is that Jim learned the other day that our Finnley loves the script so much, that he actually passed along his personal cell number to our producers in case Jim wants to call him to talk about it. Nutty! However, Jim doesn't plan to do so, because he really doesn't have anything to discuss at this time. And he's not the sort of weenie who'd call just for the sake of calling, as I imagine some people would. :P But it's still pretty cool nonetheless.
AND, another thing that's cool is that all these people we work with are so super friendly and nice. They don't make me feel unwelcome... not that I was expecting them to. I guess because they're all so qualified at what they do and are actually required to be there, I just figured that once the writing was done, they'd wonder why I was hanging around. I've always assumed that I wouldn't have much of a place in the production and would gradually bow out of the process at this point. But according to everyone else, that's crazy talk. I'm one of the top key creatives, and therefore, I am important to this production. It's kinda neat to feel like I matter, because I didn't expect it to be this way. Everything I've read suggests that writers are shit on once pre-production starts. Then again, that's Hollywood. And I guess they're not married to the director either. ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment