Live on Tape: Day 5

Saturday, June 27, 2009. This was a long, hard day. I guess I knew it would be. We had an incredibly long shot list, the only one of the entire shoot that wouldn’t fit on a single piece of paper.

We got started at about 8 a.m., and it was the first and only day that Johnathan was the only actor on set. I think we’d both been looking forward to having that one-on-one time. Given what had gone on the day before, I wasn’t sure what the vibe would be like, but in the end it turned out to be just fine.

We were in the garage all day, which was just brutal. It had to have reached 100 degrees in there. I’d been a sweaty mess when we’d shot there the day before. At some point early in the day today, someone had the genius idea to soak a bunch of small red rags in ice water and pass them out to everyone in the garage. I rolled mine up and kept mine on the back of my neck all day. It helped like you wouldn’t believe. I had to resoak it a couple times over the course of the day, but it made a huge difference. Also, on one of her many runs all over creation to get things we found ourselves lacking on set, Kate took the initiative to buy two little handheld fans with spray bottles attached. Those turned out to be a huge hit, and pretty soon people were fighting over them.

Speaking of Kate going all over creation, she had to make two separate trips all the way back to Los Angeles (a solid hour and a half round trip), once to drop off a carless crew member, and once to pick up two stuffed koalas from my place. These were key props that I’d somehow forgotten to bring.

The day’s shots went slowly, and we fell further and further behind schedule. By lunch we were running significantly behind. Nathan and I joined Becca and James in the backyard and we talked further about our options for picking up the last two days of shooting. What I’d left the night before thinking would be possible now looked very iffy. James and Brandon had come to this movie straight from shooting their own feature, and they needed to get back to it, meaning they’d have no time to prepare to shoot two big days the following week. My heart just sank.

Though I didn’t say it out loud until much later, I think that was the moment I made my decision that we were going to have to rewrite the movie to completely cut the last two days of shooting. We adjourned the meeting and I had a private meeting with Nathan and told him I was leaning toward rewriting so we would be guaranteed to have a movie once these seven shooting days were done. We decided to sleep on it and see how we felt the next day.

We got back to work, but it soon became clear that we were not going to come close to making our day. We discussed the idea of coming back the next day, which was meant to be our day off, to finish it up. But I thought we could finish with just a couple hours of overtime, and Nathan worked out that it would be much cheaper to do that than to come back for another full day. So we each talked to our people, and everyone said they wanted to finish what we’d set out to do.

We kept shooting and Katherine ordered a bunch of pizzas for a second meal, which people grabbed whenever they had a moment. We were shooting the scene where Owen realizes he’s created a black hole, and we worked as efficiently as we could and ended up cutting out a few of the originally planned camera setups. I think the limitations actually helped in a way, and I was quite happy with the results. We finished up at about 10:30 p.m.

Though everyone was exhausted, we all stuck around to wrap out of the location, which took a long time. It was probably close to midnight by the time we were ready to go home. After the hour-long commute I fell into bed after 1 a.m., so relieved that I could sleep in the next day and have a day to regroup before the crucial last two days of filming.

pictures from day 5 »