The Best Job In The World

After coming off Wednesday when I went one full hour plus five minutes into double-plus-extra-forbidden overtime due to an inordinate amount of trouble getting a fake bleeding wound on a real dog leg to bleed convincingly on camera I knew that today I had to nail everything within my duly appointed eleven hours or risk slipping into the "you're fucking up" zone. The day started out well enough until it started to rain which would have been fine, it was a funeral scene and what could be better, but because of actress availability we had shot one part of this scene already last week in brilliant shining golden sunlight and there was no way it was going to match but we were able to crank in some astonishingly convincing artificial sunlight for the relevant moment and as we were moving on to the next piece the heavens opened and a storm right out of the Bible came down upon us, hail the size of I kid you not robin's eggs blanketing the entire cemetery in white, and we all sat shivering under little plastic tent shelters for an hour contemplating the majesty of God's awesome power to wreck our shooting day and feeling actually quite calm because really, what the fuck are you going to do? Finally the rain slacked off a bit and we got all the prop guys out with rakes raking up robin's egg sized hail and we got our shot, once we got the strange swarms of pit flies to stop swarming strangely in front of the actors, and then had to scramble up the rest of the schedule to move all our shots inside for the rest of the day and my ace locations department made a deal with a nearby coffee house in about six minutes--normally this takes weeks of negotiatons-- to shoot our big first date scene there instead of the outside cafe the art department had spent the last week creating out of nothing and the actors jumped into scenes they had been intending to shoot next week and the art department magically turned the coffee house into an Italian restaurant seemingly in one magic poof and everybody scrambled and improvised and reconceived every possible part of a carefully worked out plan and I did two more big scenes, scenes of confrontation and love and suspicion and eating burgers and we shot 5 and a half pages of script and finished barely fifteen minutes over schedule. And the best news? This was the day the network executive flew in from L.A. and got to see me being superman (actually relying on an ace producing and assistant directing team) and the whole thing was just absolutely wonderful. Especially sitting cross legged on the floor behind the camera watching actors be intimate, close and real with each other under the glow of my genius cinematographer's illumination.