The Fawn and the Sailors

In one of Aesop's fables, a young deer's eye is pierced by a hunter's arrow. The deer survives but is now blind in one eye. How is she going to know when hunters are coming? How is she going to protect herself? She decides to graze near a cliff by the sea, with her good eye toward the land, which is where she knows the hunters are. Then one day some sailors on a passing ship see a lone fawn grazing on the edge of the cliff and decide to use her for target practice.

Astonishing Actress reported for duty. I can not begin to tell you the reactions I have gotten when I have told people she is in my movie. My hopelessly jealous and competitive sister in law, also a writer and director, was struck dumb. Literally. She just couldn't handle the fact that I was working with this woman. She had to get off the phone. The young actors in the film started shaking at the news: I'm going to be in a scene with HER? People immediately started talking Emmy Nomination. I thought: all I have to do is stay out of the way and magic will ensue.

Then, as I said, she reported for duty.

She's in her 70's. There are memory problems. There is lack of focus. The acting energy goes into struggling to remember the line. Most of all, there is a husband who stands not more than eighteen inches from her at all times, even during private rehearsals with me and the other actors (I have never, ever seen this), subtly and adoringly letting her know that everything, but everything, is okay, even her memory problems and her lack of focus.

It is a line by line process. I sit beside the camera on the floor and as patiently and calmly as I possibly can feed her the lines and then she says them. Sometimes she blows me away with the depth and subtlety of the work. Sometimes it is flat and overwrought at the same time, with long pauses that are about the mind groping for the line, not the character experiencing the moment. She puts in a lot of "I means" and "you knows" that absolutely shouldn't be there. Interestingly, I looked at one of her acclaimed performances from 40 years ago and she did the same thing then. Didn't stop her from getting nominated for two Academy Awards, mind you.

Today we shot a six page scene which was all Astonishing Actress the whole way. I feel like a wrung-out washcloth. Did I get it? I'll tell you after I've spent two days in the cutting room with a pair of scissors and a tweezers picking out the good bits and splicing them together.

Why There Is Suffering In The World

I know why there is starvation and suffering and genocide in east Africa. I know why there is evil and pain and loneliness in the world. It's all because God is too busy making the weather on my set go perfectly right. I keep telling God honestly, we can shoot in any weather, really, we can! East Africa needs you! But nevertheless, God keeps doing things like this:

We already shot the wake after funeral for the cop shot down by two gangbangers. It was snowing hard--perfect for the gloom and sadness we needed. We also already shot the scene immediately following the funeral for the woman who dies happily and peacefully after a long, full life. For that we had a brilliant blue sky. The problem was, we were shooting both funerals on the same day, which meant that one of the after-funeral scenes wouldn't match its funeral. We shot the cop's funeral first. Gloomy grey sky, old tombstones edged in snow, everybody's breath showing, bare snow-dusted branches. Perfect. Then while we were moving to the other location for the happy funeral, the sun came out, and we shot it under perfectly blue skies.

!!!!!

Also that day, I got The Moment in the church described in the previous post. It's not 100% joggle-free but it's close enough. The way it ended up working is that at the beginning of the shot the actress is standing with the arched roof of the church perfectly framing her and then, as the camera zooms in and pulls out, the luminous stained glass windows, at first hidden by her head, grow out from the background and ultimately fill the screen behind her. Could be an amazing moment.

The photo above is us setting up the shot in the church, with the stand-in doing the boring part--standing there while the camera crew sets lights and tests the move--while the actress chills. Actually, she doesn't chill at all--she's prepping to make the magic happen, and make the magic happen she did.

The Moment

Today I shoot the most challenging scene of the movie. A young woman wracked with unacknowledged grief and guilt, full of anger at herself and the world, comes by chance on a weekday afternoon into a church in which the choir is practicing Bach's "Sleepers Awake." It is the turning point of the story--the point at which she begins her difficult uphill climb to peace, acceptance and understanding. And it all happens because a few chords of music strike her heart and her soul in a particular way.

How do you shoot a thing like that? How do you convey what is going on without subtitles?

We're putting her in the center of the aisle with three tall--and very beautiful--stained glass windows behind her, and we are doing a very tricky thing where the camera pulls back from the actress at the same time that it is zooming in on her. This keeps her the same size in the frame but makes the background--the stained glass windows--appear to be getting bigger and closer. This technique was used in The Mask the first time Jim Carrey sees Cameron Diaz, to underscore just how knocked out he is by her. It's hard enough to get dolly-out-zoom-in right on a feature with a 70 day shooting schedule. On a 19 day schedule, with all the work I have to get done today? The actress has to stay EXACTLY the same size in frame or the whole thing looks joggly and the trick is blown. How many tries will it take???

And beyond that--will anybody buy that a few bars of soaring Bach can really have that effect on her? I'm going on the knowledge that a few bars of soaring Bach have had that effect on ME.

And what else do I have to go on?