Live on Tape: Day 3

Thursday, June 25, 2009. This was our last day in the house, and it was the biggest scene on the location, with two more actors and a bunch of practical effects. It ended up being both a better and a worse day than Wednesday.

It was better in that the shooting went more smoothly and more quickly, partly due to our new workflow and partly due to my slowly returning sense of confidence in what I was doing. Also, I got to direct my dear friend Samara Frame (who was playing Oswald the female FBI agent) and the very funny Adam Donshik (playing Thompson the male FBI agent) in the most straightforwardly comic scene in the movie. That was fun.

Why was the day worse? I’ll get to that in a little bit . . .

The day started off well. Jasmin Kuhn, our very talented B-camera operator, took some hilarious portrait shots of Johnathan in his argyle sweater-vest. Kate arrived with the FBI jackets, though the “large” jacket was actually not large at all, so she had to run back to North Hollywood to get them to replace it.

Shooting got off to a surreal start when we shot the FBI agents’ “epilogue.” The script calls for each set of characters to get their own quiet moment that plays out over the end credits. The FBI agents’ epilogue has them naked in bed together, which is weird to do as the first shot of the day with two actors who have never met each other before. But they were both complete pros, and we got the shot without any trouble. And, really, what better icebreaker for the rest of the day’s scenes?

After that, the day went pretty smoothly. I had a chance, finally, to chat a bit with Joanna, Sam and Johnathan on breaks, and was able to slow down long enough to marvel at the fact that these tremendous actors were in my movie. At some point I mentioned to Sam that I was from Palo Alto. He shocked me by telling me that he’d lived there for a year when he was growing up, and had gone to Palo Alto High School. I couldn’t believe it! My friend Kate, who also grew up in Palo Alto, was nearby and joined in the conversation. The Palo Alto Sam described bore almost no resemblance to the one I knew. It was a rough place where there was a serious class war between “preppies” and “greasers.” It was fascinating.

Then at lunch, the “worse” part of the day happened. I went off to sit on the patio alone and eat. I sat out there a while, just being by myself, trying to let go of some of the stress and get ready for the afternoon. I was enjoying the sunlight and the view out over the valley, when Nathan joined me. He closed the door to the living room, sat down and explained to me as gently as possible that we probably weren’t going to get either the street location we needed for the big crowd scene or the hilltop we needed for the final scene.

We’d had no time to scout those locations, so I hadn’t even seen the options we had for them. It turned out the permits would likely cost 25% of our production budget, far more than we’d allowed for. And today was the deadline to file all the paperwork, so we’d have to just go with whatever unscouted places we’d found and be done with it. Then maybe, maybe we’d get them both. It was not an acceptable course of action.

We discussed options. One was to rewrite the movie without those two locations. I thought through what the movie would look like: no big street scene, and instead of leaving the bowling alley at the end and running to the hilltop, the movie would just have to end in the bowling alley. I rejected that almost immediately, since it seemed a very unpoetic way to end the movie. That image of them on the hilltop was one of my favorite things about the movie, and I wasn’t going to give it up.

So what was our other option? Basically, we could shoot out the locations we had, and then put all the resources we had into trying to get the other two locations after we finished. As soon as we got them, we’d just add two days of filming and finish the movie. That was obviously risky in that actors become unavailable, crew drifts on to new projects and so on. But it was the only way to have the movie I’d written. So we tentatively decided to do that. We brought Becca and James into the discussion, and together decided to wait until the end of the day to figure out how to tell all this to the cast and crew.

We got back to work, though with a bit of a pall over the day. The scene was complicated to shoot, and I was particularly grateful to have Diane Collins, our wonderful and very experienced script supervisor, on set. Several times she pointed out coverage and inserts that we needed to pick up, which likely saved us from having to do pickups later.

As the day went on, we started falling behind, and by the time we got to Joan and Frank’s epilogue, we were really racing against the clock. The sun was already below the horizon, and by the time James and his guys got the shot set up, the dining room looked completely dark to me. But through the monitor, it looked like a beautiful sunset shot. It was sort of shocking how little light the high-definition cameras needed to capture an image. In the end we got the shot, and it looked beautiful.

And that was a wrap for Sam McMurray. We had a round of applause for Sam, and I thanked him for working with me. There had been a scene in the kitchen where his character draws up a list of pros and cons. Of course we’d had to do many takes of it, so I had this pile of Sam’s pros-and-cons lists, and he graciously signed one for me as a keepsake.

After that we grabbed two nighttime shots involving only Owen, then wrapped everything out of the house, which only took an hour or so with everyone working together.

I headed home and worked on the next day’s script pages, as well as my one production design job, which was to make a little program that would display text on Owen’s computer monitor in his lab. We’d need that the next morning, and I hadn’t had time to do it before.

I finally went to bed at about 1 a.m.

pictures from day 3 »