September 29. 2004:
More reaction shots of the crowd members. I am loving these shots, rich
portraits of all our main characters sitting together. To me, it's a
glimpse of the heart of the movie, and everything the characters say and
do in the story comes to a peak during this Memorial. Each reaction
shot is a mini-banquet, and I so enjoy working with Bruce McGill in
shaping what his Bill Banyon characters says and does. Though the part
in the script is brief but memorable, it was always rich with
opportunity to grow during the filming. We'd promised ourselves to
"play jazz" and let the Banyon character grow. McGill is one of the
finest and most-employed character actors of the last twenty years. He
knows how to enhance scenes, improv, or just do the lines. Often he
waits until the "lead" actors have already done their scenes. Sometimes
the character actor has only one or two takes to get their scenes right.
McGill is one of the all-time best, and working with him is hugely
creative, like we're both in theatre shop. And when I see him strolling
around the set, waiting to film his scenes, the adrenalin always races
inside. He's a writer's delight. And as he says, the waiting doesn't
bother him. "I'm like a great light in the toolbox," he says, "and when
you pull me out, it's my job to shine brightly, whenever I'm needed." I
think he said it better than that, but it's a fairly faithful
appropriation. I love Bruce McGill. Plus, as those on the set whisper
when he passes, "he played D-Day in Animal House."
It's one of the fun aspects of a big character movie. Some characters
sprout wings and fly, and you find yourself adding more and more things
for them to do. Others fade into the background. It's a little like
life in that way, a good party is always a matter of throwing people
together and seeing what happens. Some people leave early, some
surprise you, some embarrass themselves, and some pass out and sleep in
the living room overnight. In large and small ways, all our characters
are creating their lives within the movie. This is the scene that will
shape how they end up in the movie.
September 16, 2004:
The actors for the maybe-we'll-get-to-it scene start to arrive. It's
the return of Bruce McGill, and the mighty Jed Rees, and as McGill says,
"how about this ensemble you've got... " I only hope I can get to the
scene. We still have more stuff to shoot on the big sequence with KD
and OB. But we move through it, and it's good stuff, and I suddenly
find that a mini-coda to the scene, three shots on the leads, are
unnecessary. The dialogue plays better off Mitch. And on the momentum
of that discovery and the completion of the majority of the scene with
Kirsten and Orlando, comes another breakthrough. Ana Maria Quintana, my
trusted script supervisor, convinces me to try and come up with a way to
do the final scene in a single shot. After a minute of total dismissal,
comes daylight. She's right. I go to John Toll and suggest it. He
just about jumps out of his skin with happiness. Within minutes, we've
ordered a crane and we've planned a way to shoot a scene with four
actors and an empty ballroom in one creeping, sweeping shot that ends on
a close-up of Orlando. ("it's like our gap ad," says Orlando, and it's
an apt reminder of how all this started a couple years ago.) What a way
to end the week of shooting. We nail it, and everybody goes home on
schedule. Kirsten wishes us good luck, and wings to England for more
promotion of "Wimbledown." I have a great conversation with Orlando as
the evening ends. It's been a ball-buster of a week, and as he
accurately says, with eyes flashing and an eagerness that we'll need,
"we'll remember this forever." He's right.
Watching dailies with John Toll at the end of the long day, another
revelation arrives along with the shots from yesterday. Mitch has
arrived as a full-bodied, very much alive character. I suspect that
he'll be commanding a lot of the scenes from now to the end of the
movie. Mitch. In an urn.
September 14, 2004:
Today marks the first close-up for another one of our main actors -
Mitch. We shoot the scene where Drew receives his father's ashes in an
urn, and the urn will now serve as a character in the movie. Mitch has
a lot of love on this movie. The urn, which we of course call Mitch,
travels with his own roadie - our prop woman Maureen, who carefully
polishes and arranges the urn - and in his own backpack. He arrives on
set with no small fanfare, and after a take, Maureen sweeps him away for
safe keeping. We worked hard on finding just the right urn for Mitch.
I love the one we chose. It's fun filming Mitch today. He's a good
actor, he looks good on screen, and he works fast. Only one or two
takes, and he's always complex, with a lot of power. We all love Mitch.
September 12, 2004:
Back on the airplane, and so begins a full week of pretty delicate
dialogue and, as Billy Wilder might have said, "the romantic comedy
business." The romantic comedy in this movie is pretty deep-tissue
stuff. Most of the so-called jokes will come from the indiosyncracies
of the characters, and for all that to work, we have to be working on
real specifics like the way they laugh and look away or sigh or just
plain behave. This is the sequence where we'll come to know the
characters. My dream - it's always the dream - is that the characters
become like real people and we all feel like we're a fly on the wall
watching. If we do our jobs right, it will all look invisible. We have
two days to finish out the entire sequence, and it will be tight.
Happily, KD is in full force, and Orlando is ready to rock. We move
through a lot of dialogue, and a lot of shots... this is the extended
meeting of our characters. Everything has to be right. We finish
Kirsten early so she can go to the premiere of "Wimbledon." I really
have to make movies more quickly. When I first auditioned Kirsten, she
hadn't even started this movie. Now it's already just about out, and
we're still filming.
September 10, 2004:
Orlando will fly to Toronto for the film festival premiere of his film,
"Haven." Dunst has her own premiere of "Wimbledown" on Monday night. The
pressures and demands of both actors' previous movies are bearing down
on them, and our own schedule will adapt the way (we hope) their next
movies will later adapt to "E-Town." This is the agreement that movies
all have with each other, that's the price of movies costing so much...
the promotion is part of the job.
I watch dailies from scenes I'd filmed last week, a lot of stuff
featuring Susan Sarandon. Watching it, I'm thrilled. She and Judy Greer
are a great team, funny and deep, and they look so much like mother and
daughter. They bring out greatness in each other. Some scenes go beyond
what they seemed like on the day, some don't. This stuff has magic to
it. I can feel the story of the movie in all their shots. The week that
started late and ended early, ends on a high note. And somehow it feels
like our longest week yet. Every movie has its rhythm. This one feels
very personal, exhausting and surprising, with uncharted territory
popping up to the left and right every day, ever idiosyncratic, like a
family, and especially like the one this movie is about. Good night for
now. We'll crank it up again on Monday, and see where the winds take us.
Oddly, as others are flagging and some are even dropping, I feel
stronger than ever. Coming up is the ballroom sequence, one of the most
delicate in the movie. It's all big sequences, from here on in. But hey
- we STARTED OUT with a big funeral sequence. We'll just do it, and the
adrenalin will be our partner here on the second-half of our "E-Town"
shoot.
More than ever, it feels like a movie about fathers and the powerful
need for guidance and direction. That's the job of the movie director.
You are expected to not just be the creative guide but a steady weather
vane to point the way to everybody else. Being a father figure to my
script and to the cast and crew is sometimes a burden, but always an
honor. Fuck the exhaustion. This is life, this is how it feels. Funny. I
feel like Mitch.
September, 2, 2004:
We've moved to night shooting at the L.A. Convention Center, which will
double as the Portland Airport. It's a tough lighting job. I mean, it's
not easy to duplicate the timeless hermetically sealed world of an
airport. The environment in airports is just as specific as Las Vegas,
it's modeled to be a place apart from everyday life, a comfortable weigh
station for people to pass through. Lighting is very specific in
airports and it takes hours to adapt this cavernous space to look like
what it now is.
Somewhere around two in the morning, we're visited by a legend.
Filmmaker/Cinematographer Haskell Wexler (father of soundman Jeff
Wexler) shows up to shoot a few scenes for a documentary he's making
called "The Long Hours." Wexler has just finished a film with John
Sayles, and his list of credits goes back decades, including documentary
and feature filming as well as directing ("Medium Cool"). His civil
rights documentary making in the early sixties includes much of the
Martin Luther King film that we see today, for example the "I Have A
Dream" speech. Wexler has a glow about him, and nearby his proud son
watches him, admiring "Pop"'s visit to our set. Wexler's documentary
started out being about film crews who work extended hours (as opposed
to foreign crews who work on strict ten to twelve hour schedules), and
then the focus expanded to also become about the American obsession with
overwork. The film is filled with stories about workers who spent too
many long hours, and seen what the effect is. (He's here largely to get
some night shots of trucks moving out) Wexler's theme is similar to
mine, in an odd way. Drew and his father never connected enough because
of their work schedules. Now, in death, he learns what was denied him in
life. Anyway, Haskell has worked with much of our crew over the years,
and at 82, spry and razor sharp, he infuses the set with energy. "You
have the best crew in the business," he tells me. I already know it.
Wexler shoots some footage of operator Scott Sakamoto, and a little bit
of John Toll, and then leans over to me. "I got my shot," he says with a
twinkle, "did you get yours?" I ask him about Dr. King, and tell him of
our visit to the Lorraine. We admirably discuss his son, who Wexler
tells me turned down work to make himself available for this movie. I
already knew it, and told him I've written about Jeff on this website.
Haskell, if you're reading this, it was a pleasure to meet you. And yes,
I got my shot too.
September 1, 2004:
John Wayne Airport, Orange County. Haven't been here since we filmed
Jerry and Dorothy swinging Ray in "Jerry Maguire." It's a good luck
place, and the site for our long airport scene with the Baylor family.
We're shooting nights, and everybody is a little wobbly as we finish
about five in the morning. I like airports, maybe that's why they pop up
in my movies so much. Sometimes I'll sit in an airport when I'm not even
traveling, just to people watch, and imagine the lives going by, most of
them people at some sort of an important juncture in their lives. The
John Wayne airport hasn't allowed filming since 9/11, so it's a big deal
that we're here. It's also only available to us for one day, so we need
to stay on schedule. We do, ending with a crane shot done at five in the
morning.
