Wouldn’t it have been great if I could have updated this after every day of production? Unfortunately, I am usually way too exhausted by the time I get home and I have to review scenes and shot lists for the following day.
So, regarding this past week… One of the most fun (and sometimes frustrating) aspects of filmmaking for me is the little challenges that come up through the day. Take yesterday for example. We were shooting a scene in which Victoria tries to go on a date and completely falls apart while getting ready. Sophie comes in to comfort her. We shot the first take and it was really good – Pat (our wonderful actress playing Victoria) gave a great performance, but she was so into it that she landed with her back to the camera. Naturally, I wanted to see her face, so we tried it again. The blocking still wasn’t quite right and the performance wasn’t as good. We rethought the blocking and realized that we needed to push a dresser further down the wall to give Pat enough space to fall and still allow Sarah (Sophie) to make it through the door. However, once we pushed the dresser down, we found that the wall behind it wasn’t wallpapered (our art department is very economical). So we took ten minutes or so adding the wallpaper (thankfully we had enough extra to work with). So we tried it again. The performance still wasn’t there. So Pat requested that we give her a few minutes to go off alone and let her get in the proper state of mind. We decided we could shoot it as a pick up and only do the second half (the most emotional part) of the scene.
So we sat in the very hot bedroom for about ten minutes, waiting for her to come back. We wanted to be able to start rolling as soon as she walked in the door. When she came back in, however, she started apologizing to me. She said she needed me to yell at her, to tell her how she’d disappointed me, because she just couldn’t get there emotionally. While saying this, she started getting really upset and choked up, so we rolled and she just went right into the performance. It was completely amazing – the best performance I’ve seen her give (and that’s really saying something). However, our process had been that when I was ready for Sarah to come into the room, I would signal Mike, our first AD, and he would whisper into his walkie talkie to someone that was waiting out in the hallway, who would then signal Sarah. Worked like a charm the first three takes.
But on this particular take, Pat had gotten into the performance and had pushed Mike out into the hallway. So when it reached the point where Sarah was supposed to enter, I realized that we had no way to signal for her. So the performance went on and on (and Pat was still completely blowing us away) and the entire crew was waving their arms, hoping Sarah would see through the slightly cracked door. She finally did (after probably 2 minutes or so) and they finished the scene. I was nearly in tears afterwards, because I thought we couldn’t use the performance because it took so long and I didn’t want coverage – I couldn’t make Pat go through that again. So quickly Jay, Marco (our DP), and I put our heads together to figure out what we could use as a cutaway – something we could shoot to cut to and then come back at a later point in the scene, thereby cutting down the duration. So we shot two options – Sophie’s entrance from a different angle and a really cool reflection in Victoria’s mirror. So it was a terrific way to end the day and I couldn’t be more pleased.
This week we have been on a 7:30 – 7 or so schedule. I’m not really a morning person, so it’s been kind of a rough schedule, but it is really nice to have evenings off. We shot the entire downstairs this week, so next week we just have the upstairs. The rooms looks absolutely gorgeous on camera. Christine, our production designer, and her team did a great job.
This week was really pretty smooth for the most part. A few minor setbacks (such as yesterday, we lost half an hour trying to find stuffing for a dinner scene) but nothing too terrible. It gets pretty questionable sometimes as to whether or not we’re going to make our day, but so far, so good! Let’s hope this coming week is as good.
