Forty years ago, Livicky said to my father, ‘Darling, I’m in labour.’ After all, it was her fifth time, and she could tell the signs. He looked at his watch and replied, ‘If we leave now, we’ll just make a movie.’ And so it was that Livicky heavy-breathed through the adverts and the feature, a thriller starring Jean-Paul Belmondo. Then they made it down the road to the hospital, where I was born. Fortunately, I’m the kind of girl who never comes early.
When I was a child, my parents considered it appropriate to sneak me into art-house movies, where I failed to appreciate Fellini, and all five of us children used to lie on David’s bed watching Charlie Chaplin projected onto the ceiling. Later, as a rebellious teen, I’d curl up on the cinema chair and get swept away by the lives of the characters on screen, munching popcorn and pitying my peers who were at school getting a mundane education.
As I so loved movies, I inevitably wanted to be involved in making them. I left school to become a movie star – or that’s what I thought at the time. But a movie set is far from bipolar friendly. The hours are lunacy and the chaos unending. Film people are insane most of the time. It’s a crazy industry; a relentless, unforgiving medium.
The role of artists is to move us from feeling here to feeling there. To do this, painters add colour, musicians add melody, writers words. But filmmakers, well, they add the whole bloody catastrophe – lights, camera, action!
The process detaches everyone from the rules that govern life. Fundamental rules, like eating breakfast in the morning and supper in the evening. Like working in the day and sleeping at night. Often films are shot on location so that people are physically removed from their homes and family. A new morality takes hold. Those who back home meditate and do yoga daily, change on set. I guess it’s the only way to make a movie: for the duration of shooting, film-makers are compelled to remain impervious to the norms of society. The chaos is the only constant.
Then along I came – the director’s girlfriend, eventually wife and general hanger-on – into this chaotic world with my lifestyle rituals, my ‘I have to be in bed by ten; I need exercise every second day; no thanks, I can’t drink alcohol; I wake at precisely the same time each day, so could you please not disturb me.’ I used to get homesick and miss my tschatskes, my calendar on the kitchen wall. I missed walking down to the local deli with the dogs and buying organic groceries for two. I missed ordering pizza on a Monday night.
I wouldn’t change it – I wanted to stand by my man – but being on location with a film crew disorientated me. I used to get whacked, physically and emotionally. The intense creativity on set was thrilling, but not sleeping was unsettling. After a string of late nights my body got a bit manic (yeehah, let’s go shopping!) or it got depressed (let’s hide under the pillows and wish we were dead). And when this happened, Jason couldn’t hold my hand – he was making a movie.
Most of the time I wasn’t too sure who I was. Sometimes I’d feel completely detached from my life, from Jason and from everything I held dear. At times I was deeply proud of the film he was making, and at other times alienated by the source of my pride. I’d imagine that I was irritating Jason, that he was running away from me. Then he’d tell me to go back home to Cape Town, and I’d think he was trying to get rid of me. But it was just because he could see the signs of trouble – the shadows under my eyes, the frayed nerves and shaky responses.
Sometimes, just when I thought I’d die of exhaustion and cry in front of the crew, he’d yell ‘Cuuuuuut!’ and turn to say something like, ‘Hey, gorgeous, wanna come home with me?’ Then the sun would come out and I’d blossom.
Every emotion is blown up larger than life and intensified by the eye of the camera lens and the volatile atmosphere of the film set. It’s a theatrical hothouse. But there exists a truth about people working on a film: in order to achieve something authentic on screen, the cast and crew have to be exposed during the filmmaking process. Maybe everyone is vulnerable from exhaustion, but people’s emotions are raw and honest.
Amidst the mayhem I’d find that the creative energy fed me. This creative work – drama transformed into celluloid – was what we’d dreamt of, and we claimed it as our own. Every day we had on set was a gift to be treasured, because we never knew when the next opportunity was going to present itself. It was a bit like being stable; I just had to hold on tight and enjoy it.
Jason used to say he needed me to be by him because I was his safe house. One night, on set, he was standing on top of a bridge rigged up in midair with a loudspeaker in his hand. I called, ‘Bye!’ and he shouted back without hesitation, ‘No, don’t go! I’ll jump!’ Everyone laughed and said how romantic we were. To my sensible friends, this veered close to a dangerously codependent relationship. But for me, our relationship is the greatest achievement of love possible in a lifetime. It’s a life’s work. And, if we’re happy, well, what’s so bad about being codependent? We need one another, we totally depend on one another, and we always have.
One Sunday morning, while Jason was shooting a movie, I drove through the deserted streets of downtown Johannesburg. Everything was grim and dirty. Then, as I approached the set, I saw honey wagons and trucks and trailers and gesticulating crew members shouting orders over walkie-talkies, and suddenly the magic was there. A carnival of colour and life started up. Confetti, drums, singing floats and extras. My goodness, all the extras milling around in turbans and tutus and headdresses and hats. Body-painted, fire-eating, elongated green men walking on stilts, towering above us all, fluid gyrating bodies, undulating pink pelvises, purple tights shimmying – the dusty ground literally throbbed beneath them.
Each one, actor or extra, was an illuminated superstar and had been at it since 4.30 a.m. As the day progressed, they started to look frayed at the edges; they’d pause for breath, lean against trailers, draw long and hard on their cigarettes. They ate copious amounts of the cheap candy being passed around and fell about the set sleepily. Then the assistant director, or AD, hollered into the microphone, which was like an extra appendage, an extension of her body: ‘Fun, fun, fun; remember, you’re all having fun!’ With which all the extras leapt up, swallowed their candy, stomped out their cigarettes and climbed up onto their stilts. They swirled around and smiled, smiled, smiled into … ‘A-a-a-a-a-ction!’
It was a magical collaboration. I think that each time a movie is made, the process takes a piece out of everyone’s psyche, and all the pieces are pooled together to make the movie. It’s a breathtaking carnival, making something epic from nothing. Somewhere a teenager will escape from the drabness of algebra into that carnival.
Making a film is a bit like bipolar disorder – nothing happens in moderation. There are addictive days, days of creative highs, moments of total despair and periods of tension. But in the end, it’s bigger than any one individual, and you just have to surrender to the process.