One Down

Then there was the actress with the broken foot so we gave her a cane because it goes really well with the character and the network wants some line that explains the cane but it isn't needed because for God's sake she's an abused woman her husband beat her she walks with a cane and then there's the shot I dropped of the main character looking at the lemonade pitcher from her childhood that the executive producer asked for because for God's sake the scene isn't ABOUT that and the executive producer wants me to some how go back and get that and how do I do that on a location I will never ever be going back to on a schedule that is already so jammed it's coming out my ears and then there's the three shots we didn't get and then there's the half hour of overtime I went into and then there's the rushed wild way I covered some of the scenes and then there's the FEAR: WHAT WILL THE NETWORK SAY ABOUT TODAY'S DAILIES TOMORROW!?

And so the first day passes.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

Tomorrow I start shooting. I have been telling myself that it's just another day at work. Yeah just another day at work with a hundred people waiting for me to tell them what to do and time ticking by at thousands of dollars a second and no overtime allowed and a dozen nervous executives in Los Angeles and New York waiting for the dailies that will be streaming on their computers by ten Tuesday morning. This is anxiety making for every director, at some point. But it may be extra heightened moment for me. I think I have already told you about my first movie when I was shooting in New York City, a script I had nourished and cherished and dreamed of making for five years, and I had Cuba Gooding Jr. (fantastic person by the way) in the lead role and the best director of photography imaginable and I totally absolutely screwed up in every way possible. I just had no idea what I was doing and the folks at HBO, for whom I was making the film, were totally and ominously silent the whole first week (to me, anyway; they were on the phone to the producers every second screaming WHAT THE FUCK HE IS DOING!?) and on Friday at end of shooting it was announced to me by the main producer, a dear friend, that they had "serious concerns" and there would be a Meeting the next morning at 10. That Meeting--being called seriously onto the carpet on the top floor of HBO's Manhattan headquarters--was one of the scariest loneliest coldest moments of my life. I was saved from being fired by a hair's breadth, mostly intense campaigning by my friend, and though the movie went on to be successful and received some very good reviews (along with some very bad ones) I went on to get such bad references from HBO that I didn't direct another movie for five years. On my second movie nothing like that happened, I went away with everybody loving me, but I accomplished that partly by playing it very safe on the set--got everything accomplished but didn't go out on any cinematic limbs. This time I want it to be both smooth and good.

Oh but I'm prattling on. Let's get to the heart of the matter. Tomorrow I get to move a camera around wonderful actors saying lines that I wrote and I have a wonderful cameraman to help me to do it. So all I really should say before I go to bed and hope to get some sleep is:

Thank You and Amen.

Dream Come True

Thirty years ago I saw a film about a film being made in which the director of the film, himself playing the director of the film within the film, goes to the actress playing the star of the film within the film and, just before getting a shot, carefully rearranges her hands on the sill of the window she is leaning on. That moment blew me away. To think that you could have a life where what counted was attention to a detail like that. To think that you could be somebody with the eye to know that it was the right thing to do. The director became my hero and the actress has remained--not just for me--an ideal of beauty and sexiness.

I just cast that actress in my movie.

She has had thirty years of being an international star (with ups and downs, of course) since then and has become a kind of friendly empress--but an empress. She's 63 years old now. I'm sure her sense of personal body space is acute. And the moment in that long-ago film was rehearsed and scripted. So what are the chances that I will actually be able to walk up to her before a shot and arrange her hands into a more elegant position? Probably nil. But I'll sure as hell have my eyes open for an opening if it presents itself.

Or maybe I'll just tell her the story over dinner.

On the health front: the heart rhythm went back to normal after about 30 hours leaving me, as usual, with a great sense of elation and relief. If there are any medical personnel out there--maybe one who lives in, say, Alabama--maybe they could share any ideas they might have for long-term approaches to the problem. Lord knows the cardiologists in California have f*** all to say about any thing like that.

Fibrillation

Two or three times a year--more if I'm not exercising or fall prey to the evil ways of caffeine, less if I ride my bike every day and live clean--I have an episode of atrial fibrillation, that is, my heart goes all wonky in the rhythm section. Sometimes this lasts two hours, sometimes three days. Today, five days before I say "Action" on my first shot, with a sixteen hour day ahead of me, I woke up at 4:30 A.M. with my heart pounding wildly (the subonscious getting its timing off and screaming IT'S LATE! THEY'RE ALL ON THE SET WAITING FOR YOU! DISASTER DISASTER DISASTER!) and when the heart had calmed down, sure enough, my pulse sounded like the rhythm stylings of a ten year old who had simultaneously gotten hold of his older brother's drum set and his dad's Jack Daniels. This means that today I will tire easily, I will get short of breath, I will be extra prone to irritability and bouts of pissy righteous indignation. And nobody can know why. Nobody. There may even be insurability issues. Yowee!

Everything on the production seems to be falling into place. Locations, cast, wardrobe, sets. The fewer things there are to angst over the more it all comes back to me: time to deliver.

With a drunken heart.

Envy

As I sit here in Calgary directing an underbudgeted 3.7 million dollar cable movie starring very good actors you may or may not have heard of, one of my best friends is in London producing an 80 million dollar movie starring Vince Vaughn, and another one of my best friends is in Los Angeles executive producing a new series for FX that has every chance of being right up there with The Shield, Rescue Me and Nip/Tuck when it goes on the air next year.

These friends are so close that I normally don't feel jealous of their good fortune when it comes, and they don't feel jealous of mine--we all root for each other, and that's a blessed thing.

But right now, maybe as a bi-product of the general anxiety of prepping a movie, I'm feeling that awful crawling unease that makes the food on your own plate taste bad no matter how good it is because the food on somebody else's plate looks so much better. Which is a luxury I can't afford because I start shooting a week from Monday and my job is to inspire everybody, actors and crew, to their best possible work.

Hopefully this awareness will steer me clear of the shoals.

End of the Week

Ooooh the network is getting a little pissy. I cut a character for length and because I thought she wasn't needed in the story and the network wants her back and I sent them emails and we discussed and I won but the price of winning is that now they are pissy. Partly because of that and partly just because, today I felt the icy cold shot of fear: what will they think of the movie when I turn it in? On my last movie I had somebody from the production office go out and get me all the dark chocolate she could find and when I got the call from the head of movies at the network after he had seen my first cut of my movie I ate chocolate and gritted my teeth at his notes and tried not to throw a tantrum and ended up having to make some changes I hated making.

And guess what happened then?

The head of movies at the network got canned the next day and I put the movie back the way I wanted it.

The point is that now, with urgent tasks of casting, choosing locations, planning shots, hiring an editor and a composer before me, here I am living in a moment that is two full months away. INSANITY!

So it's back to the prayer from last week: Please God let me be HERE.

Prayer o' the Day

Please God help me stop being pissy and indignant at the frustrations that every director faces, many of them with far more grace than me. Help me stop complaining endlessly to anybody who will listen about the inanities and insanities of the executives with whom every director has to deal. Help me remember that all the pissiness and indignation and complaining is all really just a way of covering up how nervous and I am about how good a job I will do come a week from Monday when the cameras role.

Amen, and thank you for putting a movie into my hands.

That's all for now, God. Have a pleasant night, and I'll talk to you in the morning.

Fringe Benefits

I have the good fortune to be in Calgary the week of the Calgary Stampede, the greatest rodeo on earth. Today, as the director of a film in town, I was invited to watch the finals from the super-luxe right-on-top-of-the-action viewing suite rented by one of the big film caterers in town. Promotion, you know. There was sushi and bloody marys and lots of fancy cowboy folk including a guy who did all of John Wayne's horse stunts for years and as the whole thing began I was planning shots in my head and obsessing on whether or not I'm going to get enough rehearsal time and worrying about making the kid versions of the actors match the people they grow up into and what if that little girl won't wear contact lenses so her eyes match my star's eyes and yada yada yada and then it occured to me, no, this is a special thing, I'm doing this wrong, and I offered up a simple prayer to Anybody who might be listening, which went like this: Please God let me be here.

And God said yes.

A minute later the noise in my head went away, I dug into the sushi and watched the bareback riders get tossed around like rag dolls on the bucking broncos and the gals in their sparkly Western bling riding their hearts out in the barrel race and cheered and whooped and chatted and had a great great time.

And now I'm back in my hotel room getting down to work and thinking: that's what I want my prayer to be every day on the set.

Please God let me be here.

And then there was the actress who...

...made it clear in her deal that she wants healthy food on set, and 24 hour access to the gym--and a room with windows that open, because she smokes.

...expressed horror at the terrible treatment of animals in polo and rodeos while ordering eggs and sausage for breakfast.

...expressed outrage at the horrors of capitalism and its mistreatment of the working class and then not six minutes later complained that the airport in Los Angeles is the worst worst worst because there are no priority security lines for first class passengers.

I will say that she's a good person who loves her family and her friends and when an excited fan called out "Oh my God it's [name of actress]!" as we were going into the hotel tonight she handled it with grace and clearly doesn't let that aspect of the whole thing go to her head or factor into her thinking at all. I think the reason I'm snarking on her at all is that we had a good first day of hanging out and getting to know each other but now I'm worrying that I was too democratic, too "what do you think." I haven't quite found the director voice in this relationship yet. Haven't quite found the way to be The Man. Or maybe I'm looking at that the wrong way. Maybe I should just say: this is The Man that I am, just the way I'm being it, and I'll find a way to get what I want on film as the The Man that I am, not The Man I think I should be. Yeah. That's the mantra for today.

While I call room service to make sure I have her eggs and sausages delivered all hot and ready for our 8 A.M. wardrobe meeting tomorrow morning.

Star

The t's on the deal haven't all been crossed but it looks like I have a star for my movie. Here's where I run into the tricky part: so far exactly what the movie is and who it's for has been kept vague; oce I tell you the name of the star I'm blowing my anonymity, because in a little while the movie will be easy to look up, and sometime next year it'll be on TV, and then all of this isn't private anymore. The decision to do that isn't one I'm yet ready to make. so: suffice to say that the actress who is coming on board is fantastically beautiful, relatively untested as an actress, but very good. And also no household name, to be honest--the network's notion that she will bring eyes to the TV screen may be unfounded, and there were better known actresses they nixed in favor of her--stuff over which I had no control. Be all of that as it may--she is aboard!

Now here's what I've learned about myself: for a few weeks all of my anxiety was focused on hiring an actress, all of my annoyance was directed at the network for dragging their feet and making unerealistic offers. Now, without those convenient targets outside myself, I'm stuck with---ME! A me whom I find plunged into gloom particularly focused on a sense that my finale with a mean guy holding a knife to the neck of a vulnerable woman WHOM WE KNOW PERFECTLY WELL IS GOING TO BE FINE is going to come off LUDICROUS.

And once that worry is behind me, what then will I find to gnaw obsessively on?

What The F*** Is Love

Fourteen years ago as I was preparing to shoot my first movie I sat at my desk faced with exactly the same problem I am faced with now, which is that the lovers in my story aren't really and truly, on the evidence of what's on the page, in love. Oh, sure, the plot moves them to all the places they would go if they were in love. But that feeling? That actual real thing which will make the audience root for them to join their lives together, which will leap off the screen as actual love? Not there. Fourteen years ago I brought in two other writers to fill in what wasn't there and neither of them really added anything. Fortunately I had two awesome actors who managed to come close to pulling it off on the force of the chemistry between them. But it still didn't exactly work. So knowing my own history I can't entirely blame the author of the flawed and schematic book I'm adapting for my inability to bring love to the page.

The good news is it's three weeks until I shoot. I can find it. I know that I love my wife and that there are a few scenes I could excerpt from my life that would make any audience go "Yes, absolutely, their being together will add to the sum of light and happiness in the world." But we've been together for over thirty years, since we were just out of high school, and while there was an immediate jolt of connection it took a year before we were actually romantically a couple. The script in my hands gives the lovers a couple of weeks. So I have just a few encounters out of which to build the magic. I know it can be done. I've seen it in other movies. I'm just up against it right now.

Dear readers, if any of you can think of moments in your lives when love blossomed quickly and with great intensity, even quiet intensity, or moments when you suddenly realized you were in love, and what those moments sounded, looked and felt like, I would be infinitely grateful if you would share them with me.

I Was Bad

Yesterday Alicia Silverstone passed on the project. The comment was "Did not respond to the character." A polite way of saying "What, you think there's something there for an actor to actually play?" That's not the worst part about yesterday. The worst part is that I went infantile. I got pissy and told the producer we were wasting time offering it to stars who weren't going to do it and we should just give up and tell the network we want to cast it with good unknowns and how stupid it was to go through the Sarah Michelle Gellar exercise in futility and how if we wait any longer I'll be left with the dregs of the earth for all the other roles (can't cast most of them unti the lead is cast) and generally did all this in a righteously indignant and whiney tone of voice and at the end of it felt so bad I just went back to my hotel and pulled the covers over the head.

The truth, of course, is that who will be in the movie is an unknown, and it might not be good, but it also might be really really good, and since I don't know which one it will be, why bother reacting to it at all? Just keep working, do the very best I can with what's right in front of me, and deal with whatever happens when it happens.

Now why does that wisdom go right out of my head so many times when I need it most?

Day One

Active prep started today.

Here's when I'm happy and positive and having a great time doing this: when somebody--anybody--an assistant, a designer, whatever--says they think my script is wonderful.

Here's when I'm low and asking myself why bother doing anything: when somebody makes no comment on the script at all, or says "I liked a lot of it" (auggghhh!), or says the words that are a sure sign that they thought it was crap: "I enjoyed it.'

How do I get off that roller coaster?