Often I’m struck by the absurd discontinuity between a movie itself and the moviemaking process. There’s a shot in Velvet Goldmine in which Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys-Myers) sees his future wife, Mandy (Toni Collette), across a crowded dance floor and takes her hand: Roxy Music’s “Ladytron” begins to play, everyone else fades away, snow starts to fall on the dance floor, suddenly the club itself dissolves into a beautiful forest, and the two are dancing under a storybook moon. It sounds clichéd, but the sheer lyricism transcends any schmaltz—it’s a lovely and intimate and magical moment.
Of course, when we’re shooting it, the snow machine is making a horrible racket, the AD is screaming “ROLL SNOW MACHINE!” “ROLL SMOKE MACHINE!” and we’re trying to make the “Ladytron” playback loud enough so that the actor can hear it over the clamorous din and be able to lip synch; and we’re trying to get the extras out of the way so that they don’t trip over the smoke machine or get flattened by the zigzagging dolly…
It’s all mechanics. And sometimes in the middle of the confusion you realize that you’re so far from the original impulse that you forget what that original impulse was: why you wanted that scene, where it fit into your overall design, what your overall design even is.
That’s why things like shot-listing and storyboarding are so important. Early on, before you’re beset by machinery and personnel and cost allowances, the director, in consultation with the producer, the director of photography, and the designers, thinks deeply about the best way to tell this part of the story—so that, on the thirty-fifth day of shooting, when you’re so exhausted that you can barely remember what the movie is about, you have something to look back at that you trust, something devised in tranquility, from a time when the initial inspiration burned brightly.
I know that in this book I’ve been rattling on about money and locations and equipment, but it’s important to remember that they all surround a thing so fragile, a thing that requires imaginative leaps and an incredible emotional commitment. And yet, there’s no other way to approach it, is there? No matter how deep and poetic and delicate an onscreen moment will be, you still need lights, a camera, and a location in which to shoot. And in the middle of the most intense, hushed scene, when your actors are plumbing their most profound emotions, the AD will still turn to you—as an AD turned to me, recently—and point to the clock that shows you’re three hours behind schedule, and whisper: “We suck.”
Before You Shoot
Ultimately, a smooth production depends on the strength of the preparation that came before it. In addition to assembling a reliable crew, that means storyboards, shot lists, and a thorough tech scout.
Not every director does storyboards, but many do. On large-scale Hollywood movies, storyboards are big productions in themselves, and artists will spend days designing these beautiful little frames. In this part of the world, Todd Haynes draws boxes with small pictures in them, a few for each scene. He shows them to the DP and the editor (who tends to be involved on his films before a frame has been shot)—but mostly he draws them for himself.
I’ve heard people complain about too much storyboarding in movies these days—how it makes a film feel canned, drained of spontaneity, like something on MTV. And I think that’s largely nonsense. There will always be improvisation on a movie set, but, barring that rare miracle, it’s better when improvisation comes within a set structure. Then it’s much easier to insert a found object, a new line of dialogue, or even an extra shot. Miracles happen to filmmakers who create a framework for them.
Most productions can’t handle surprises. That’s when things get crazy. Some surprises you can’t help. You’re thrown off a location. The actors took longer than you thought they would. The weather changes violently, without warning. The bigger the production, the more difficult it is to handle the unexpected. A director who suddenly decides that instead of shooting in this room—which is all prepped—he or she wants to shoot in that room—which hasn’t been dressed—will send the crew into a tizzy. So will shooting stuff that’s not on the shot list. As far as crews are concerned, if it’s not on the call-sheet, it’s not happening that day.
There’s nothing more sickening than watching directors try to work out their shots on set because they haven’t done their homework. There’s always a certain amount of working out to do, especially if you’re there for the first time with the actors. But starting from scratch on the set—hammering out shots and setups with the crew standing around glaring—will wipe out morale in no time.
Everybody schedules by computers nowadays, most with a program called Movie Magic. The program might be magic, but making a schedule is anything but—it’s grueling.
The first thing to do is schedule around what you know—an actor’s calendar or a location with specific hours or days. Certain actors and locations will probably be your greatest expense, so the idea is to minimize time with both. You should plan to “shoot out”—that is, complete photography on—each location and make an assumption that, say, the parents’ bedroom and the kids’ bedroom will be in the same house and not across town from each other. (This isn’t always the case, but it goes without saying that the more locations you can combine—and the more you can make one location double for another—the easier a time you’ll have.) Be careful, too, not to spread actors out over the entire schedule, so you don’t have to pay them when they’re not working.
Something will always trip you up, like an actor with a limited amount of time. We had only four weeks with Ewan McGregor on Velvet Goldmine, and ended up having to go back to some locations twice. Ewan’s schedule pretty much dictated ours. We did some very intense scenes the first week, when people barely knew each other. That isn’t always a bad thing: James Schamus maintains that you should film the big love scenes first, before the actors have a chance to hate each other.
The Tech Scout
If, when you start a day, you know where your lights and camera will sit, what your shots are, where you’ll put the equipment, and where the actors will be made up, you have a good chance of sticking to your schedule. But like any unwieldy army, you need to send out scouts first.
The tech scout should take place the week before the shoot so that you have time to alter the schedule or locations. It’s nightmarishly dull, not to mention exhausting, but it’s an utterly crucial expedition. The director must attend, along with the line producer, the AD, the 2AD, the location manager, the heads of the departments (including sound), and however many note-taking assistants you can cram into your stationwagon or van. In the course of one, two, or three days, you should visit every one of your locations and get down to the nitty-gritty.
It works something like this. You enter a house and smile pleasantly at the nice, gullible owner. (“My son is a senior in high school and wants to work in the movies. Do you think he could help out?” “Oh, sure, no problem. We’ll definitely find something for him to do.”) The AD announces: “In this location, we’re shooting Scene Thirty-five, where Clive makes a sandwich for Biff. So Clive will start out in the kitchen over here, and he’ll walk from here to here.” The DP confers with the grip and says, “I want to use a dolly, but this floor is a mess, so we’re going to need a dance floor brought in.” The production designer says, “I had planned to paint the wall green,” and the DP says, “Don’t paint it green, paint it yellow, because then we’ll get more light.” The location manager confirms that the wall may be painted, but emphasizes that it must be restored to its current color by week’s end.
One of the characters needs to walk into a bathroom, but there’s no bathroom in this hall. “Let’s cheat the closet for the bathroom,” says the director. The DP checks the angle and confirms that it can be done—that, on screen, you won’t be able to tell that actor saying, “I gotta use the john,” is actually hurrying into a coat closet. In the film, you can cut to the interior of a real bathroom if you want to show the character using the john.
Meanwhile, the 2AD and the location manager are figuring out what happens behind the scenes: where the actors will be made up and dressed so that they’re out of the way but within easy reach; where the trucks will park (and if you’ll have to put up “No Parking Thursday” signs, reroute traffic, or possibly tow away the cars of soon-to-be-irate motorists); where the caterer will set up; and where cast and crew will settle down for some of that four-star film-shoot cuisine.
When shooting in a public place—say, a restaurant—the DP, the director, and the AD go over the shot list and determine which way the camera will be facing and how many extras will be needed for how many tables. The DP takes readings and ascertains how many and what kind of lights will be required, makes a note of any bulbs to be replaced, and checks to see if major fixtures or doors will need to be removed. The director might pace out a complicated shot: “We’ll start with the camera over here with the waiter in focus, then rack over to a passerby dumping his garbage here, and then tilt down onto Bill and Mary. That’s a single shot.” The location manager then reminds everyone that, on the day of the shoot, they’ll have to be finished and out by six, when the restaurant opens for business.
Next, it’s back into the van because there’s going to be a driving shot in the same neighborhood. Here’s a typical exchange:
AD: Okay, Scene Fifty-four. This is where Bill drives Mary home. Where are we rigging?
LOCATION MANAGER: At the holding area, which is four blocks away from the restaurant, in the parking lot of Rocco’s Mattress Heaven.
DP: We’re looking at one two-shot of Bill and Mary, and then two side-mounts.
AD: You want a hood mount?
DP: Yeah, a hood mount for the two-shot.
AD: This can be done in any weather, right?
DIRECTOR: Scene 54 doesn’t have to be matched to anything, so it can be in any weather. But Scenes 17 and 99 are also driving scenes, and they have to be in good weather, so if we shoot all the driving stuff on the same day we need to do it in good weather.
2AD: Isn’t this road kind of bumpy?
DP: Yeah. Shit. I think it will show up on film.
PRODUCER: Is it bumpy because it’s bumpy, or because this van is so overloaded?
AD: That’s a good question. We’ll have to get a car out here and drive it.
DIRECTOR: I don’t want to find out in dailies that it’s not smooth. I’d rather pick another street than chance it.
LOCATION MANAGER: Well, this is the best street for miles in terms of the houses you want and the absence of intersections. We scouted four towns and you won’t find a better street.
AD: Okay, let’s make a note that we come back here in a process truck, and if it’s still bumpy we’ll use the backup location.
…I’m falling asleep just writing about it.
But what happens when you don’t do that grueling tech scout? You leave yourself open to nasty surprises. It might be that a subway runs under a house and rattles everything and you had no idea it was there, or the location’s on a major uphill bus line and every ten minutes you get a thirty-second roar from the street. It might be that there’s an antiquated electrical system that you can’t plug into and you didn’t bring a generator; or that the elevator isn’t big enough to accommodate a piece of equipment or furniture so you, one PA, and a ninety-pound 2AD have to haul it up twelve flights of stairs. Do the tech scout.
Location, Location, Location
As I’ve said before, on a low-budget shoot, where you can’t afford to build a lot of sets from scratch, good, flexible locations—and a good, flexible location manager—are paramount.
We’re at a point now where most major cities—certainly New York and LA, and maybe Vancouver, which doubles for every other city—are overshot. People have gotten savvy. They know that having a film crew in their store or building or apartment will be a huge pain. And they want a lot of money. The days when you can get someone in a city excited about the glamour of a movie shoot (in your very own home!) are gone. Outside a metropolis, you can still find places where people will cooperate with you. Filmmaking, even on a low budget, is great for a small town: A bunch of people come in, spend a lot of money, employ a few people, mingle with the locals, and leave. Fantastic. For a movie that we want to shoot in the Midwest, a producer whom I work with flew to Nebraska and was met at the airport by the state film office, escorted around for three days, and even given a reduced rate at a decent hotel.
Most big cities (and most states) have an Office of Film and Television that can provide you with lists of locations. When I was working as a production assistant in the early eighties, there was one New York police station that wasn’t used anymore, but the city kept it up solely for film and TV shoots. I recognize it in movies—that same old precinct. The courthouse in Swoon is in Harlem. It’s in session only once a week, as a small-claims court. The rest of the week, you can shoot in it, provided you bring your own electricity. Sometimes a city has a hospital that’s no longer in use where they let people shoot. Or you can go to a working hospital, although it’s unusual that they’ll let you anywhere near real patients. If you can find a wing that’s rarely in use, most hospitals are more than happy to take your cash. Just don’t plug into the same power source as the life-support systems.
For Safe, we didn’t have enough money to build the New Ageish camp where Carol ends up for treatment of her environmental poisoning. We needed to find a facility that already existed and then modify it. The location manager heard about a Jewish retreat-cum-summer-camp in California’s Simi Valley that wasn’t used in February. It had something else you look for in a location: Other places to shoot. At the top of a hill there was a scary-looking modern center—part synagogue, part study area—to promote Jewish theology. It was the kind of place that people leave their money to when they die. We used one of its rooms to shoot the large gatherings, when the resident guru is speaking to his patients. At the end of the film, Carol is living in a sort of igloo. Finding it was serendipity. While filming in LA, we read an article about prefab, igloolike houses that could be set up in a couple of hours, the invention of the LA Coalition for the Homeless. We contacted the coalition and asked if we could buy one, and it wasn’t very expensive.
If you’re going to try to shoot in a school during the year, you’ll be limited to places that are no longer functioning, which gives you a lot less to choose from. Movie shoots are always being tossed off campuses for being too disruptive. If you agree to involve film students, though, the administration might be more accommodating. We built a reform school for Poison on a sound stage at SUNY-Purchase. In exchange for letting us shoot, the chairman of the film department asked that we use students as production assistants, and it worked out great. That sort of quid pro quo is not uncommon. When you get a movie financed by private investors, you’re often pressured to give jobs to their sons, nieces, or nephews. We’ve never had a problem, though, because the bottom of the barrel on a film set is pretty far down. Somebody always has to be doing something so menial almost anyone can do it.
Let’s say the villain of your film is a big Wall Street baron who’s supposed to have a Long Island mansion. You need something that looks like it costs ten million dollars, except your entire budget is under a hundred thousand.
There are a couple of things you can do. Number one, call your parents’ friends. Is there somebody in your circle who knows somebody who knows somebody? (Six Degrees of Separation and all that.) Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan was an extremely low-budget film about extremely high-budget people. However, the director was intimate with that super-rich milieu, so he was able to use his friends and his contacts to get into all those Upper East Side apartments.
If you exhaust your connections and still can’t find your mansion, you can go to a place like Long Island, find a likely-looking home, and shoot the exterior. Are you allowed to? Well, ask your lawyer, because you might well be trespassing. However, you can often get permission to shoot an exterior only. At the very least, you could give the owner a couple of hundred dollars (not that he needs it) to have an actor walk up to the front door. Then, for the interior, you need only fill a big room with the ritziest looking props and furniture you can borrow, or find a private club or fancy university library that’s willing to let you shoot at an off hour. Law firms will sometimes let you shoot in empty offices. (Empty offices in most cities are easy to find.)
When all else fails and you can’t reconceive the character, try stylizing the scene: Put the Wall Street baron in a big, blank white room behind a big, beautiful desk. That might be all you need to get the point across.
More and more often, you do need permission to shoot exteriors. When we were filming on Portobello Road in London, we learned that the exterior of one of the antique stores—a quaint, ye-olde-London façade—had been copyrighted by the owner. So you can’t just shoot it. You have to pay. A distributor, if you have one, will often make you get permission in order to preempt a lawsuit down the road..
The Shoot Begins
Shoot the big scene of the day (the “meat”) first, if you can. You’ll be stunned by how quickly the time will disappear, and you don’t want to spend five hours on an insert shot and then suddenly realize you have a whole, complicated scene to do before you lose the light. But on those occasions when you’re shooting out one location before moving to the next, you have to do the small stuff first. That’s when you have to set priorities ruthlessly to keep from devoting a disproportionate amount of time to relatively minor material.
Every so often an actor or director will make a request that brings the shoot to a halt. It happened on Safe, when we were just about to shoot a scene in the heroine’s bedroom, with Carol (Julianne Moore) on one side and her husband on the other. Then Todd Haynes noticed the alarm clock. “I wanted an alarm clock with bigger numbers!” he said.
Now, Todd is a reasonable man; he isn’t a prima donna who’ll stop a shoot over trivia. But he felt he needed that big-number alarm clock. So we dispatched a PA and had to wait around for half an hour. The AD approached me and whispered: “Shouldn’t we just tell him he can’t have it?” But I respect Todd so much that if he tells me that a clock will make a difference in a scene, then I think it’s worth holding things up. And, in the movie, the clock does register: It’s one more oppressive modern appliance in a sea of oppressive Reagan-era appliances. Obviously, my relationship with Todd Haynes is close enough that I could wait that half-hour confidently, even if it meant that people would be standing around.
One thing I hate on a set—I can see it coming, like some awful black funnel cloud—is the discussion about a sightline or “crossing the line.” God, does that suck up time—you can kiss half an hour good-bye. It looks like a demented Robert Wilson piece: For what seems an eternity, the cinematographer peers one way, the camera operator paces the other, the director swivels his or her head, the script supervisor leans in and points to something in the script, and then they all turn to the actor: “Okay, Joe, look a little camera left.” They whisper among themselves: Bzzz bzzz bzzz. “Joe, raise your eyes a tiny, tiny bit.” Bzzz bzzz bzzz. “Here, Joe, look at my fist.” Bzzz bzzz bzzz. “No, lower.” Bzzz bzzz bzzz. The poor actor is trying to do a scene!
Some people have an innate sense of the line, some don’t. I always have to think about what’s right and what’s left; others just know that there’s a rightness to the world and a leftness to the world. And, be it the script supervisor, the cinematographer, or the director, you should have one of those people on your set.
The Production Report
Call-sheets, prepared by the AD, are what you have before your day starts. On the other side of the day is the production report, again prepared by the AD and signed off on by the line producer, which tells you how much film and how many setups and scenes you shot, and what you didn’t get that’s still on the call-sheet. The report tells you what time people got to the set, what time you broke for lunch, and it also documents your minor annoyances and major crises.
Here are the “Remarks” from an actual production report. It was the first day of the shoot for a film that will remain nameless.
1. Costume Designer’s car hit hazardous boulder on edge of road into location, bent rim and flat tire—to be repaired today.
2. Key lost to back of Grip/Electric truck. After genny was placed, lock was cut at 7:20 A.M., resulting in ½ hour delay.
3. Due to lack of rain, scene 80 was shot first. TKs call pulled 1 hr. earlier.
4. Stand in for star got lost, arrived ½ hr. late.
5. Office PA’s personal car got stuck on boulder at the edge of road into location, and needed to be pulled out.
6. Camera department had a broken lens—the aperture stuck on the 24mm, resulting in a 15-minute delay. Another lens ordered did not arrive.
7. Main dressing room experienced power outage due to overloading breaker. Electric department provided tie-in.
8. Lunch delayed due to camera set-up on tripod in water. The lens kept fogging. Non-working crew were broken at 12:40 P.M., the rest of the crew at 12:45. The 1st AC was last man to lunch due to getting camera out of the water and showering and changing before eating.
9. Craft service gave notice at 9 A.M.
10. Scenes 82, 83 omitted, scenes 85, 86, 87, 88, 89 not shot due to time constraints.
11. Scene 80 owed one setup for first thing day 2.
12. Due to miscommunication of directions, most of the crew arrived on set 6 minutes late.
It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad. Actually, it’s pretty frightening. Even a small thing—the craft-service person quitting at 9 A.M. on the first day of the shoot—suggests that all is not well.
TED HOPE
Co-Chair, Good Machine, Inc.
One of the greatest skills that a producer can develop is extreme paranoia. By concentrating on where things can fail, you build up protections, and that itself gives you a confidence that you can instill in others. A big part of producing is being a confidence man. Not a con man, but someone who makes sure that everyone around—fellow producers, actors, financiers—always sees how something can happen and will happen. The film Walking and Talking collapsed three times, and The Ice Storm didn’t actually get a green light until the second week of postproduction! On almost every movie I’ve produced there have been moments when anybody could have thrown in the towel. So I’ve had to learn that even if everybody says “yes,” and I’ve already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars, I still better have a Plan B. And that’s true of all stages of production, particularly in the kind of production where you can’t afford to buy your way out of a problem. Even if you’re shooting in a house, you’d better know what the backup houses are. Even if your key grip is fantastic, you’d better know who else is available.
Maybe I’m lucky in that ever since I was a kid—I was raised by a single parent in a house with a tiny black-and-white TV, no rugs, a beat-up car-I’ve had a serious chip on my shoulder. I’ve been told so many times that I couldn’t do the things in life that I wanted to do, a tear-it-down attitude was a big part of what drove me. And that, actually, is a big part of what drives independent film. There’s this method of business that a whole industry has followed for generations, and there are things that you’re told that you May Not Do: “It’s an insult to hire this kind of actor for scale.” “You can’t put your assistant director in the main titles!” “What do you mean, this is a period piece?” “No one’s going to see a gay film!” “No one’s going to see a gay film in Chinese!” If I had actually believed all the stuff that people told me, I wouldn’t have done anything. I mean, it’s gotten so I actually love it when someone says, “You can’t do that.” When I show a script around like Todd Solondz’s and executives say: “Oh my God, how can you make this film?” that’s, like, a rallying cry—I know then what I’m going to be doing for the next year.
Watching Dailies
Watching your scenes of the day is a different process now that all the footage gets put on video. It’s not that you get your dailies any quicker—actually, it often takes longer because it gets processed first and then transferred to video. It’s that people rarely watch them as a group anymore. The producer gets a tape, the director gets a tape, the DP gets a tape, and that’s about it. There is something to be said for the sense of camaraderie that comes from watching dailies together, so sometimes I’ll put a monitor on the set so people can watch them during lunch. The problem with that is they get treated a little cavalierly—and actors can get their hands on them, take them home, obsess over them, etc.
Because video is so much more forgiving than celluloid, dailies can obscure fundamental flaws on the negative. In one of the most elaborate shots in Velvet Goldmine—the one that opens the picture—a spaceship passes over Dublin rooftops, and the camera descends to a nineteenth-century street to show a baby (Oscar Wilde) on the doorstep of an elegant townhouse. Todd Haynes and I watched the dailies on tape to pick the take we liked best. Later, the editor went to look at the footage on a projector and discovered it was out of focus. In fact, of the six takes, five were slightly blurred. It was a real lesson in the imprecision of video dailies.
The Producer During the Shoot
As with any position of leadership, a producer has to be a bit of a performer. You have to fake confidence a lot. You have to fake calm a lot. You learn early the consequences of showing doubt, of acting in the middle of a crisis as if you’re in the middle of a crisis. Don’t. You want the mood to be productive, which means not ridden with anxiety. You don’t tell a director bad news when he or she is on the set, unless that news relates directly to the next shot. One thing that’s hard with Todd Haynes is that he and I know each other so well that he can read me instantly. So if something’s wrong, I can’t go anywhere near the set: He only has to look at me, and even if I’m faking like mad he’ll panic: “What’s wrong? What happened?”
As a woman, I bump up against that well-known double standard: How do you command respect without being called a “bitch”? It’s hard. Every time I go onto the set it means taking a deep breath and…here we go. I know that my reputation is more in the direction of being a bitch than a fount of niceness, but I don’t really mind. Well, I mind, but I try not to think about it. When I started out, the people I worked for said to me what I now say to other young producers: “It’s not a popularity contest. Don’t worry about that.”
I’ve decided that people need to earn my respect. It’s not that I start from a point of disrespect, but I don’t assume that they’re terrific and competent at what they do until they show me.
Even on low-budget movies, you’re still dealing with king-sized egos. I’ve worked with actors nobody’s ever heard of whose egos are bigger than Tom Cruise’s. The same goes for crew members.
Low-budget shoots, no matter how well planned, are always under the gun and producers always come up against crew members who grumble about the hours and the conditions. Every production manager has lists of additional crew members, and we bring them in frequently. I get disappointed when crews don’t give a hundred percent. I try hard, especially on nonunion films, to make an assumption that people are there because they want to be, and not to have an us-versus-them mentality. But if you’re a producer, however progressive you fancy yourself, you can end up in situations where it’s clear that you’re management and they’re labor. And you can negotiate and tell them your sob stories, but ultimately, it’s not their problem.
I don’t know if it matters so much how the cameraman feels on Terminator 6 because it’s not that kind of movie. But on a lot of films it does matter, and the lower your budget, the more it helps to have a let’s-pull-together attitude. Much of that will emanate from the director, of course, because ultimately most people are there to please the director.
Pam and I work a lot with first-time directors, and that’s really tricky, because you have to gauge, as a producer, when to supplement your director’s inexperience while at the same time making sure that you don’t undermine his or her authority. You’re working with crew members who are probably more experienced than the person whose vision they’re trying to put on celluloid, and it won’t take much for them to conclude that the director is hopelessly out of his or her depth. My respect for first-time directors rarely wavers, but my confidence in their ability to pull something off can get shaky. I never, never show that to a crew, though.
With Office Killer, there were times when it was important to make everyone understand how lucky they were to work with a world-class photographer—Cindy Sherman—without expecting her to transform overnight into a bona fide film director. Cindy was a gracious student. Larry Clark, of Kids, was also an established artist, but he had a more difficult time admitting that he didn’t understand every nuance of filmmaking. Invariably, on a low-budget film, the crew is under thirty. Larry was fifty, and wasn’t happy having children tell him, “This is how you do it.”
Is the producer on the set for most of shooting? It depends on the director and the movie. On Velvet Goldmine, I was there every minute, and closely involved in the minutiae of the schedule, helping to jigger and re-jigger: We need more time for this, less for that; can we move these actors to this day? I was in constant touch with the AD, asking: Are we on track? How can we get through the day without a disaster? Some ADs, at the beginning of the day, almost to cover their butts, say, “We’re never going to make it! This is ridiculous!” So I’m the voice of reason (or optimism), saying, “Of course we can!” And often, because the director and the crew are so far inside the process, laboring to get the shot, thinking about a hundred different things, someone like a producer needs to step in and say: “You know what? This part of the scene we don’t need to shoot here. Let’s concentrate on that part, and then we’ll shoot this one somewhere else.” A producer can see solutions that no one else sees, because everyone else is too enmeshed—and too freaked-out.
Which doesn’t mean that the on-set producer is busy constantly. Usually, I don’t have much to do except wait for those one or two problems a day that only the producer can solve: “The AD needs to see Christine right away!” I sit around for a long, long time waiting for a call. Meanwhile, I run up cellular phone bills talking to the financiers and the office.
Do directors ever not want me around? I don’t think so—at least, not that they’ve said to me. Todd Haynes wants me on set more than I am. Some directors work so hard to project confidence that they need to have at least one person on whom to lean—a person who they can show just how needy and put-upon they really are.
Crises, Annoyances, Disputes
A crisis is a) someone getting hurt and b) not being able to shoot. In that order. Anything else might be an annoyance, a headache, or a drag, but it’s not a crisis.
The first rule is to make sure that everybody’s safe, and if they’re not, to get help as quickly as possible.
Then comes shooting. Say you’re a PA, out on a run for sandwiches for the actors’ lunch and a piece of equipment for the next scene. If the restaurant where the actors wanted you to go is closed do you: a) Drive around for half an hour looking for a comparable restaurant? or b) Get the piece of equipment and go back? If you said a), congratulations: You’ll soon be eligible for unemployment compensation.
You hope there won’t be too many disputes, although there are departments that are traditionally at odds. The 2AD’s job is to get the actors through the works and in front of the camera by the time the AD calls for them. Friction tends to develop between the 2ADs and the costumers and makeup people, and it all comes down to estimates made the day before, when the first AD, who’s preparing the call sheet, consults with costume and makeup about how long they’ll need with each actor. ADs usually err on the side of caution, but even so, a director might not like a costume, or an actor might show up after a terrible night needing an extra half hour in makeup. So the first AD is yelling at the 2AD, who’s desperately trying to get the actor onto the set, and the costumers are screaming, “You’re not making it go any faster by breathing down our necks!” It’s all a lot of hot air, except you don’t want that tension to get to the actor, who’s often feeling nervous about going in front of the camera.
Other classic conflicts are between the location manager and the production designer (see “Crewing Up”) and between the location manager and the sound person. On one of our films, the sound guy was always turning off the refrigerator to get rid of the hum and then forgetting to tell anyone that he had. So we kept having to pay for refrigerators filled with spoiled food.
I haven’t had two actors who despise each other, but I’m certain it happens. What I have seen a lot is actors vying with one another for attention. It’s important that the director and producer give everyone his or her fair share, that no one becomes the obvious favorite. You don’t want a good performance only from your star, you want one from all your actors. It’s a bit of a balancing act.
Sometimes an actor and a director don’t get along, but provided they both do their jobs, this falls under the category of an “annoyance.” Most actors can tell you a story about a movie they were on where they loathed the director, but it’s rare—unless the person was horribly destructive—that you can see it in the work.
An overly perfectionist DP can often be a source of tension, especially if you’re doing a scene that the director just wants to bang through, a scene that’s just a matter of getting Person A to Place A. The cinematographer, of course, doesn’t want the shot to look like crap, but how much time can you actually spend on a character crossing a street? I’ve had cinematographers tell me that the schedule wasn’t their problem, and I know it’s important for them to fight for their right to take the time they need. That kind of care shows on screen. But I’ve also seen directors driven crazy by the slow pace of a DP, and forced to reduce the number of shots. It’s not fair to the director—if you have three hours in a location before you’re thrown off, someone has to make a sacrifice.
Going Over Schedule
On a very low-budget film you don’t go over schedule—you just cut scenes. If your schedule is really tight, you should have a sense going in of what you could stand to lose if push came to shove.
Shooting extra days is enormously expensive. You have two options if it looks like that’s inevitable and you can’t lose those scenes or lose something else in order to shoot those scenes. First, try to schedule those days while you’re still in production and you have all your equipment. The other, chancier option, is to finish shooting the days you have scheduled, do a rough assembly of the footage, and see if you really do need that scene or scenes. The problem with that is it’s like you’re starting up all over again if you have to shoot more footage.
If something is minor, a “pickup”—an insert, an establishing shot, even a close-up—you can always do it later with a skeleton crew.
Four Crises and a Headache
1. THE END OF VELVET GOLDMINE
As my production diary relays, the last two days on Velvet Goldmine were excruciating. I felt so helpless, because we were asking Todd to do the impossible, to barrel through so many important scenes. It was a nasty, impossible call list, and the executive producer had phoned me to express (hysterical) concern, maintaining yet again that Todd had no choice but to cut shots. I didn’t want Todd to be exposed to that, but I knew than we were in trouble. So I went to Todd and said, “This is going to be a fourteen- or fifteen-hour day. This is how we’re going to have to get through it. We need to get in and out of this scene in two hours, this scene in two and a half, this scene in one and a half…. I’m making the assumption that this scene is more important than this one, so we’ll give it more time. Then we’ll need to do this one in forty-five minutes…” and on and on and on through every scene. Todd nodded okay, looking dazed.
We executed that schedule. And it was an awful, awful way to work. The very last scene we did was the most difficult. It was when Todd sort of hit the wall. Until then, he’d been great about just gritting his teeth and doing it. But the last scene was something he cared about, and the actor just kept getting it wrong, and the clock was ticking…and he just had it. We finished, but he was as miserable as I’ve ever seen him. He said: “What’s the point?” And what is the point if you have to settle for something you don’t want?
The day after we wrapped, Todd and I went out for lunch. I said, “I just wish I could have helped you more.” And he said, “You did. You helped. Because every time I looked at you, you just seemed so calm. You’d stand where I could see you, but you didn’t hover over us. And it made me feel so supported.”
So sometimes that’s what a producer does.
2. KIDS AND ANIMALS…
There weren’t many actual minors on Kids, although it looked as if there were. People always ask: Were they really smoking pot in the movie? Were they really drinking beer? Not on my set. I’m not naïve; I’m sure they went off all the time and got smashed and came back. But most of them had spent every day of their lives drinking beer and smoking pot, and frankly it didn’t worry me that much. The single biggest incident involving Kids had nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. It came after the shoot, and involved a scene in which one of the leads, Telly, kicks a cat.
It was our office cat. Big, lethargic. It had wandered in and we had adopted it: We took it to the vet and got rid of its fleas and whatever else it had. And it sat around and slept in people’s In and Out boxes.
One day, Larry decided he wanted Telly to kick a cat. So we brought the animal to the set. What happened was this: The actor playing Telly nudged the cat with his foot and someone called it with food from behind the camera. (This was the kind of cat that you could nudge for hours and it would just look at you like: “Huh?”) The cat wasn’t hurt; it went back into the box and then back to the office. At the end of the shoot, one of the crew members decided to take it home with her. She moved to the Midwest and that was the last we saw of the cat.
But not the last we heard of it. Someone in the ASPCA read a review that said: “…and then Telly kicks a cat, so we really hate him.” What followed was a barrage of letters, many from ASPCA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The gist was: “We think you abused an animal in the making of this film, and we’re coming after you.” I asked the distributor to deal with it, but they never did. To stave off an ugly incident—not to mention a lawsuit—I phoned the ASPCA and told them what had happened.
“We need to see the cat,” they said.
I called the crew member in the Midwest and explained the situation to her. She declined to cooperate. She and Larry hadn’t gotten along, and anything with the potential to make life miserable and embarrassing for him gave her great joy. She even phoned the vet in New York and forbade him to release the cat’s records.
The ASPCA reluctantly backed down, but only on the condition that I sign an affidavit swearing that the animal had not been mistreated and was entirely unhurt. In retrospect, we should have delayed that scene until we could have hired someone from the Humane Society to come by and supervise. That’s what you do if there’s ever any doubt, because animal-rights activists are, no pun intended, dogged.
3. DOTTIE GETS SACKED
Just before we made Safe, Todd Haynes directed and I produced a short film called Dottie Gets Spanked, about a young boy who’s obsessed with a Lucille Ball-type slapstick TV comedienne, and about how seeing her get spanked on her sitcom led to the birth of a radiant fetish. For Dottie, we approached an actress who at the time was the toast of Broadway, and it was a genuine show-biz coup to have her tell us—at supper, at Orso’s, after a performance—that she thought the script was fabulous and she’d love to play the part.
Because the boy in the film had glossies of Dottie in various guises all over his bedroom, we needed to make a load of costumes for the actress and to take photos of her wearing them. The actress was fitted and then posed for the pictures without incident. We scheduled the shoot around her, so that we could do her major scenes on days when her show was dark. We shot our first two days (of eight), and then called her to say that a car would pick her up the following morning. “That’s great,” she said. “That’s fabulous.”
The next morning, with the car waiting outside her door, she called and said, “I’m too sick to come in.” I laughed; I thought she must be joking. But she wasn’t. “I’m so sorry, I don’t do this,” she continued. “I’ll stay in bed all day and take care of myself, so that I’ll be in good shape for tomorrow.” What followed was insanity. We had to cobble together other scenes to shoot, on sets that the art department hadn’t finished; for the entire day we were frantically trying to figure out how to shoot without her. I called her twice, just to stay in touch, and then she stopped answering her phone.
At seven, her agent called to say, “She’s not coming in tomorrow. Can you reschedule everything for next week?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “It’s not that kind of movie,” I said. It was a $150,000, half-hour movie for television, and we didn’t have cast insurance. And he said, “Well, she can’t come in tomorrow. There’s nothing I can do.”
I don’t remember how long I let it go—whether we actually thought she’d show up the day after or not. The bottom line: We had to recast. The title role. While we were shooting.
I sat the shocked Todd down and showed him tapes of other actresses. The costume shop was right below us, so if he said, “Oh, maybe she’s okay,” I’d run down and say, “36-28-35!” and they’d say, “Can’t do it,” and I’d run back up to Todd and say, “That actress won’t fit in the costumes, we can’t cast her.”
Boy, did we get lucky. We ended up hiring Julie Halston, a great comic actress, and she was amazing. She literally came in, got fitted, got all her photographs taken to replace the ones of our first actress, and started working the next day. In the midst of this, John Anderson, the critic for Newsday, called to interview me for a story he was writing on whether El Mariachi could really have been made for seven thousand dollars. I told him it was a bad time to talk; he asked why; and, after a few more phone calls back and forth, a big item appeared about the actress and Dottie Gets Spanked on the gossip page of Newsday.
It was not smart of me to fan the flames. But oh, was it satisfying after how we had been jerked around. Her agent thought we were just a stupid little movie; it blew his mind that we actually had the pull to get something in the paper. He called and screamed at me: “HOW COULD YOU DO THAT TO HER? SHE’S AT HOME CRYING!!” And I said, “That’s right, she’s at home crying. She’s not crying here on the set.” He said, “You’ll never work with any of my clients again.” (I have, many times.)
I know that actors get sick. It happens. But if we had been a “real” movie, would the actress have dragged herself out of bed and gone through the motions? Whatever happened to “The show must go on!”?
4. FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES
Productions of mine have trespassed and paid the price. We were shooting in a place where we hadn’t gotten permission to be. Well, we’d gotten permission, but not from the person who it turned out we needed to get it from. You don’t always know. Sometimes tenants are allowed to give you permission to shoot in their building, sometimes they aren’t. If you have to go in front of a co-op board, it’s a whole song-and-dance, and it can take months. Usually, there’s someone who (with good reason!) doesn’t want some horrible film crew in their building. Also, so many movies shoot in New York apartments, that there’s a chance Woody Allen went in and paid somebody ten thousand dollars a day, so if I walk in with maybe 500 they’ll laugh in my face.
Anyway, it was one of those days. We were so close to getting the shot that I said, “Let’s brave this out. We’ll be done in a second.” And as we were wrapping, the police came and took my location manager away. I said, “I’m the one you should be taking away. I’m the boss.” But the location manager played chivalrous and said, “No, Christine, I’ll go.” Of course, I was the one who had to get him out. He was pretty shaken. He kept saying, “Now I’m going to be known as the location manager who got arrested.”
5. THE SHAKES
It was the week of January 17, 1995, and I was in Los Angeles producing Safe, written and directed by Todd Haynes. We were three weeks into the shoot, and I had just taken my one weekend off, spending it in the Chateau Marmont with my girlfriend, Marlene. I got up a little after 4 A.M. to go to the bathroom and on my way back BAM! the floor was buckling and I leapt onto the bed, which started to skitter across the room. “GET IN THE DOORFRAME!” shouted Marlene and I thought, “What a dumb idea.” But up we went and huddled in total darkness under what we hoped was the doorframe.
That day, a Monday, we were supposed to be shooting in Simi Valley, which, it turned out, was right next to the epicenter. I tried to call the apartment I shared with Todd and Lauren Zalaznick (the coproducer) but the lines were all dead. Our call time was supposed to be 11 A.M. Marlene and I finally drove over to the apartment. No streetlights were working. California drivers sat helplessly at the intersections (“After you.” “No, after you.”), too polite to move. It seemed as if every closed or collapsed freeway reported on the radio was one we needed to use to get to our location. How were we going to stay on our already precariously low budget if we had to miss a day of shooting? What if our location had been destroyed? What if the trucks that held all our equipment had fallen over?
Lauren and I tried to reach the cast and crew, but so many phone lines were down that we decided we’d have to go to people’s homes to make sure they weren’t lying under piles of rubble. Later we learned that no one had been hurt, but a few people’s houses were virtually leveled.
“DO NOT LEAVE YOUR HOMES,” blared the radio, but we hopped in the car and set off to inspect the remaining locations for the film. I crossed myself every time we went under an overpass. The dry cleaners we were going to shoot in had lost all its windows. The owner was there, sweeping up glass. He said the last thing he needed at that point was a stupid film crew to mess up what was left of his business, so I called the location manager from the car phone and told him he had to find a new cleaners.
Too bad there wasn’t an earthquake in the movie, since North Hollywood looked like the perfect set for one. There were fissures in the road.
We called the film laboratory to find out if our negative was the one being processed when the quake hit. They told us it was too dark in there to see anything, and to please call back.
The next day, Tuesday, an earthquake relief center was set up across from our house. A water truck was parked right in front, and people were lined up, filling bottles, pots and pans. I asked the man behind the wheel if he could move up a bit so we could get our car out of the driveway. He shook his head: “I park where the government tells me to park.”
We waited on line at the supermarket under a sign that said “ESSENTIALS ONLY!!” and bought batteries, candles and canned tuna. We convinced the cashier that cigarettes and beer were essentials.
We were supposed to look at rushes, and our editor was furious because we hadn’t heard from our dailies syncher. I reminded him gently that Mark lives (or lived!) in Northridge, on top of the epicenter. “We all have our problems,” the editor muttered darkly.
Horror stories from other productions started to trickle down to us. The worst was the one about the movie that had a 6 A.M. call time in Venice Beach so all the trucks were on the freeway on the way to location when the quake hit and the freeway collapsed in two spots and the trucks were trapped in between. All day.
The radio said to sleep with your shoes on in case there were big aftershocks in the middle of the night and you had to run outside before your house collapsed.
We decided we could start production the following day. Then came three strong aftershocks, which sent us under the doorframe again.
On Wednesday, our set looked a bit bruised but workable. Todd, the cinematographer, and I went into a building that we had already shot in, to do our one last scene in it. The insulation was hanging from the ceiling and the floor was cracked. No problem, we said: We’ll just shoot it so we don’t see the ceiling or the floor. One of the big windows was shattered. No problem, we said: We’ll frame it out.
Then in walked a uniformed man who told us we had to leave the premises because he was condemning the building. “What do you mean condemning?” we cried. He said it could collapse at any minute. I said, “You don’t understand! We’ve already established this building!” The three of us tried to negotiate (one actor and one light? two actors and no lights?) until his expression (faintly appalled) shut us up. We went outside, subdued, and decided that the scene could happen on the lawn.
The next day we were finally up and running again. Julianne Moore was cheery. Because of our earthquake-induced schedule change, she didn’t have to attend the Golden Globe Awards that night and receive an ensemble acting prize with the rest of the cast of Short Cuts. She said she didn’t mind a bit. It wasn’t that she belittled the award or her fellow cast members; it was that she was in the middle of portraying an extremely disturbed woman, and didn’t relish the idea of getting all dolled-up for some lavish ceremony.
Our New York-imported hair and makeup artist pulled me aside and said she was too upset, too nervous, and too distraught to continue. She was very sorry, but she had to leave Los Angeles right away. I spoke quickly and smoothly. I said I understood, of course, but surely she didn’t want to leave us in the lurch? The earthquake was already over, things were calming down; why not take the weekend to think it over? Just as color started to come back into her cheeks, just as she said, “Well, maybe I could stick it out a little longer…” there was a violent rumble. The trees shook. The horses in the neighboring fields whinnied and bolted. Later, we learned that it was the most severe aftershock to that point. I watched our hair and makeup artist dash into her trailer and knew we’d lost her.
We lost another person—this time an actress—to post-quake trauma, and sweated through a few more aftershocks. But our sets, cast, and crew survived. And maybe—who knows?—the off-camera jitters contributed to the endangered aura of Safe.
How to Talk Like You’ve Been On a Film Set Before:
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Flying in |
I’m bringing it as quickly as I can |
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I’m ten-one hundred |
I’m in the bathroom |
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Copy that |
I heard you |
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I’m riding the cans |
I am listening to the head-phones |
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We’re on the Martini |
This is the last shot |
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We’re on the Abby Singer |
This is the second-to-last shot |
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What’s your twenty? |
Where are you? |
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She’s (He’s) in the chair |
She (He) is in hair and makeup |
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NDBG |
Nondescript background extras |
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I greeked it |
I changed the label so it is no longer a recognizable brand name |
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Walking |
I am on my way to the set with the actors |
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Hero |
A featured prop |
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Flashing! |
The flash bulb on my Polaroid is about to go off |
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Crossing! |
I am planning to walk past the lens |
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Chicken in the gate |
There was a hair in the camera, we must retake |
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Stand by for room tone |
We must roll 30 seconds of nothing, please do not talk or laugh |
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Lock it up! |
Please prevent passers-by from walking through our shot |
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Fire in the hole! |
A loud explosion is about to take place |
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Walking meal |
When the second meal of the day is eaten while working |
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We’re shooting this MOS |
We will not roll sound on this take |
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Holding area |
The “pen” where actors and extras have to stay until they’re needed |
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We’re going to cover |
It’s raining so let’s shoot inside on the other set we prepared just in case this happened |
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We’re rolling! |
Film is going through the camera, please shut up |