Last man standing

It’s day 12 and I’m looking at the call sheet. Today, we’re shooting in and around the city centre all day with eight scenes to shoot and four location moves. We’ll be in the thick of all the shoppers again (arrrrgh) and in a shopping centre as well as shooting scenes on the street with Shaun Dunne (Vinny) prancing around in a white polyester John Travolta ‘Saturday Night Fever Suit.’ Great. I’m sure no-one will bat an eyelid at us or bother us for one nano second. I almost expect to turn the page to find that I’ll also be shooting with a horde of three year olds in a china shop and a rabid dog who runs amok in a packed train station. My throat feels dry, my head hurts and I haven’t even got out of bed yet. I wonder can I pull a sickie?

As industries go, the film business is not like the civil service or any government organisation or well, any other job really. People generally come into work if they’re sick, even of they’re really sick. It’s as though we feel we are indispensable and that the shooting day will not be achieved; that the whole thing will go belly up if we are not there and that people may even die because someone like me cannot be there to tell them to say their lines louder or to move an inch to their right. (Now you know what a director really does.) So, it’s not unusual to see a crewmember hobbling around on crutches crunching on horse tablet painkillers as they dress the set or a carpenter wandering around with a big bandage wrapped around his head from where he impaled himself on a nail the previous day. No one ever wants to appear to be the weak one.

I once worked on a job where a stunt man had to gallop a horse upstream against a raging river. The riverbed was completely covered in rocks any one of which could kill you if you even looked at it. Once the horse had accelerated to full throttle, someone then shot the stuntman who had to throw himself into the river. Although he appeared a pretty hardy chap I thought that the whole thing seemed a tad insane if not downright suicidal. After three takes of him crashing onto the rocks it was deemed the shot was got and the poor fella was helped away stunned and bloodied and as far as I could see, in immediate need of the last rites but no, as he was being stretchered away he was adamant (in between bouts of unconsciousness) that he was fine really and was happy to do it all again.

I did once pull a sickie and still wring my hands with remorse when I think about it. It was 1987 and I was a trainee assistant director on a commercial. I was to cycle to the producer and Director’s house for a lift to the studio and woke up late. I nearly puked and ran to the nearest phone box and called and told them that I had been knocked off my bike. They were hugely sympathetic and told me to take the day off. They even paid me for the day. I was totally wracked with guilt and haven’t quite got over it yet and every time I get on my bike, still expect to be punished for my actions by being crushed to a pulp by a bus .

Oh and there was the day I pulled a sickie on a shoot ‘cos I drank  a bottle of tequila the night before.

I didn’t feel very guilty about that one only because I was way too busy trying to die.

All of these thoughts bolster my nerve and I remember that should I feel weak or there be some unforeseen accident, our make up artist has been armed with a tub of Sudocream, a pack of Disprin and a selection of plasters.

The show will go on.

Get a real job

Q: How do you know if a director is famous of not?

A: In photographs a famous director is always seen pointing and if you’re seen pointing in a photograph in a publication such as Screen International you’re really famous and have probably been nominated for an Oscar.

I am not quite up there with those chaps although was once photographed biting my nail which in my calculations means that although I am not famous, a famous person once saw one of my films - Martina Navratilova, Aspen Film Festival circa 2001 – the film was ‘Half Full, Half Empty’ and I know this ‘cos the writer of the said project saw her there.

We are over half way through our 18-day shoot and things have gone swimmingly until now. I have not had one tantrum and no one has as yet to put me up against a wall to throttle the living daylights out of me.

But today could be the day. We are shooting exterior pretty much all day, have four location moves and 16 scenes to shoot. We start at a graveyard out of town and then move several miles to a park and then into the city centre where we have amongst other things a bunch of scenes to shoot in one of the busiest shopping districts (Capel street) and then some night work. It’s the sort of day where you really would much prefer to stay in bed sticking hot needles in your eyes.

The day starts off well enough. We need an angry mob for the graveyard and although it’s very hard to get people to give you their time for nothing, the production office do a fine job in getting a selection of people who between them make up a very nice rabble with a even nicer range of foul expletives that they are happy to holler as they chase our heroes. Given that they have to run at full tilt for about a hundred meters and that one of them is also pushing a woman in a wheelchair I am kind and only make them do it about fifteen times. What a trooper I have turned out to be.

We complete our two scenes at the graveyard and leg it to the park where we have 3 scenes to shoot and about an hour to shot them in. When you are shooting out and about like this you are at the mercy of real people who often take an overly keen interest in what you are doing and won’t leave you alone until they have reaped satisfactory reposes to their gazillion questions – what are you doing? Are youz making a film? (again) Is there any stars in it? Can I be in it? Give us your watch.

There are also the other types who take umbrage to the fact that you have put the camera right on the spot where they want to stand and so you’d better move it now ‘cos they have rights ‘cos THIS IS a public place.

You grit your teeth and move the camera five inches and try to focus on the positive, whatever that may be. We get two scenes done and are already over our allotted time and by now should be in town instead of still standing in this bleeding park waiting for the hoards of schoolchildren who have suddenly appeared to stop waving and jostling with each other to get in shot. We also have no tea or coffee or buns or anything to distract us so moral is descending fast. The third scene here involves a moving car and two actors, one of whom has to drive. Now, if you have ever spent more than ten minutes on a film set with a moving vehicle you will already know that this sort of scenario has all the requirements for disaster  (and occasionally emergency transport of all the cast and some of the crew to the nearest trauma unit) and my common sense tells me to dump it and replace it with something else. So I have a quick huddle with Nuria the DOP and we come up with something much simpler. I change the dialogue and brief the actors and in ten minutes we’re out of the child-infested park and on our way into town. Just in time for rush hour.

In the process of getting into the city we lose half the crew who have either been swallowed up by some insane one-way system or have much more sensibly gone home. I of course arrive on set first ‘cos have no equipment to pack and unpack and begin to pace frantically as the seconds tick away and the enormity of what we still have to shoot overwhelms me. If I thought the park was a challenge, this scenario is a billion times worse. My teeth are clenched as is my bottom, ears and hair. It’s a three lane one-way street and is already choc a block with traffic and crazy cyclists and irritated people stomping along the pavement trying to get home as fast as they can. We set up our camera right in their way. The shot is of Dave’s Ma as she makes her way down the other side of the street into a pawnshop. Simple you’d think except that every time we get her into her start position and the crew are ready to roll, a bus stops right in front of us and instead of us seeing Maria (Dave’s Ma) we get a load of bored people sitting on the bus who spot our camera and proceed to squish their faces up against the glass to make what they think are hilarious faces. We also get a million people pushing past us with such greetings as ‘get the f**k out of my way’ or ‘No, I will not f**king stop, I don’t give two sh*ts what youz are making’ We get the shot (which ends up in the cutting room floor anyway) and move on. Very rattled.

There is a slight reprieve from the madness whilst we shoot a scene in a restaurant and as the actors are so good and funny, I even spot a couple of the crew smiling. I decide to lead by example and laugh out loud but moral has not quite been restored to normal levels and they look at me as though I am nuts.

Before we know it we’re back outside. It’s dark and although the traffic is not so dense it has now been replaced by lots of drunken people. I wonder will this day ever end. Our two actors are meant to be drunk so blend in perfectly with everyone else around them. But we are stoic and battle on in an attempt to be impervious to the puking and staggering and general mayhem that surrounds us. As we do our final shot, two guys walk past the camera. One of them turns around and proceeds to unzip his fly and takes out what those of us who are doctor’s daughters like to refer to as his ‘lad’, which he wiggles around for maximum cinematic effect.

What a perfect end to a perfect day. 

I do

Angela Senior (Script Supervisor) and Lisa Mulcahy (Director)

Fighter pilots have to make 30 decisions every six seconds or is it sixty decisions every three seconds? Well, whatever it is its pretty impressive multitasking but not quite on a par with the amount of things a script supervisor has to remember whilst shooting a movie. Script supervisors are invariably women (in this country anyway) and in the olden days were referred to as continuity girls. If you refer to a script supervisor as a continuity girl these days you’re likely to get a thick lip so don’t.

For the next two days we are shooting in a pub. It is a working pub but from 8 in the morning until 7 in the evening they have given us sole use of the bar. The lounge is open for the regulars, a few of whom seem slightly disgruntled at being pushed off their bar stools and shoved into the lounge where they wouldn’t normally be seen dead. Some traditions (like men not drinking in lounges where ‘wimin’ lurk) will never die out. I hope. 

So, we have a bunch of scenes to shoot with a bunch of actors (well, four) sitting at the bar with a bunch of pints cogitating about life and all it’s quirky and inexplicable ways. Shooting these sorts of scenes can become tedious after a while. A bunch of lads sitting yakking for hours. But these scenes are never boring for the script supervisor because she is too busy trying to keep track of who took a drink of which drink at what point of dialogue from whomever happened to be speaking at the time.

Some actors are good at remembering to slurp from their pint at the exact same point of dialogue during every take and during every different angle that is taken for each scene. Most actors are crap at this and that’s why someone like the script supervisor has to do that job for them. If you left this sort of detail to the whim of the actors you’d end up in the cutting rooms trying to put a scene together using all your different angles and sure every take would be different and nothing would match and there’d be what we call in the trade, bleeding continuity errors all over the shop and even thinking about it is making me exhausted and vowing that I will cut any scenes in future scripts that involve groups of people talking whist also eating or drinking or smoking or God forbid, all three at the same time.

Angela is our script supervisor and I want to marry her. A good script supervisor is worth their weight in gold because if they’re really on the ball they will spot a million potential errors that the director or the DOP or everybody else will miss. These are the sorts of errors that make it impossible for the editor to cut together a scene that makes sense.

In brief whilst we are doing a take these are a few of the things that Angela has to remember; to start her stopwatch to time the scene so that she can tell you afterwards that it is running a minute too short of five minutes too long; she has to listen through earphones to what the actors are saying and make notes on her script when they say a wrong line or even prompt them when they suddenly freeze having forgotten their lines all together; she has to watch and note their every movement to make sure that they do stuff at the same time during each take, like walking or smoking or scratching or coughing or whatever unpredictable things actors tend to do to make each of their performance seem fresh and different. Script supervisors don’t really want fresh and different. They want the exact same thing at the exact same moment every time please. They rarely get it and I am constantly amazed that more of them don’t pull out loaded guns or machetes when actors and directors get all excited with each other because one of them has just had a brilliant idea which they are going to try on the next take which she knows will be completely unusable because it will not match even one of the fifteen takes they have done of this shot already. 

She will patiently point this out to the said actor and director who will invariably ignore her ‘cos their idea is simply too brilliant for rubbishy notions of matching actions or words. All of this comes to a sorry conclusion when the director gets to the cutting room and the editor tells them that their brilliant idea is a load of crap and would never have worked because the actor has used his right hand in one take and his left hand in another and did the director not spot that at the time? The director will go very quiet for a moment, privately consider the disastrous consequences of their actions and then will openly blame the script supervisor for the idiotic mistake.

There is also another subject very close to a script supervisor’s heart that I could talk about here and it’s called ‘crossing the line.’ However, the mere sniff of those words being uttered on set sends my nerve sensors into overload, my eyes rolling deep into their sockets and gives me an instant yearning to get into the foetal position so if you don’t mind, I won’t.

Suffice to say that Angela, if you’re in the market for a wife, you know what my answer is

A load of Pants

It’s Saturday and the last day of our first week of shooting. We’re out in Adamstown on the biggest building site I have ever been on in my life. (I Never did get to spend a lot of time hanging around building sites as my mother was always quite vocal about that sort of thing being unsuitable for a young impressionable girl and anyway the ballet and elocution lessons took up way too much of my youth – to no avail of course. To think how much more fun I could have had.)

This place is massive and goes on for miles and as I gape open mouthed I wonder who is going to live here?

No one now it seems.

There are no real builders here today so we have the place to ourselves. Thank God for sound effects, as we’ll need lots of them for this part of the film. Steven, the writer, his father and what appear to be his 23 brothers are acting as ‘background builders’ and have come suitably equipped with Hi-vis yellow jackets and loads of buildery type attitude. I notice that Steven has managed to procure a clipboard and has nominated himself as their gaffer. There’s lots of instructing and pointing on his part and lots of unrepeatable bad language and resistance to doing any sort of labour on their parts. This fits in well with our actors – Mikey Graham, Joe Doyle and Tim Landers. They are painters and appear in ten scenes in the film and are never seen doing a stroke of work. It is probably safe to say that most Irish people have spent many tedious hours stuck in traffic watching council workers leaning on shovels and peering into deep holes but not ever actually doing anything about them so the actors will have plenty of real life experience to draw on for their demotivation.

However, the main focus of our attention today is the torrid love story between Janice played by Lorna Dempsey and Vinny (Shaun Dunne.) Janice is a plumber – a lone girl in a man’s world but Janice doesn’t care and neither do the lads.

I get together with Clodagh our costume designer for some vital creative business. We’re perusing G-strings - Janice’s underwear of choice. There is a limited budget on this film and I glean that about fifty percent of Clodagh’s entire allocation has gone on these G-strings. She has amassed an impressive collection and from what I can work out each centimetre of fabric cost about fifteen euro but we both agree that as this is high art, it’s worth it. However the garments in question are so minute that the wearing of them might seem pointless to some. Surely a few scraps of wool knitted together would have done the exact same job and been much cheaper? I think perhaps I should be a producer with such ingenious cost cutting solutions but then I remember that if I was a producer I would have to talk to men in badly fitting suits who work in union offices and would refer to me as their ‘brodder’ whilst talking at me but never to me.

I quickly change my mind.

Lorna is totally professional and doesn’t complain once about the inordinate amount of time we spend considering each new g-string that protrudes tantalisingly from the tops of her combats. No one else complains either. We’re all professionals you know.

We finish the day on a high with ice-lollies and a feeling that a good weeks work was done by all and although we’ve hardly started shooting we’re almost half way through.

Tomorrow is Sunday and our day off. It’s also my birthday so no doubt I will spend the day being pampered and fawned over by child and child’s father. I might even get breakfast in bed although the threat that if I GET ONE CRUMB on his side of the bed it’s over between us, is making me wonder whether this is a good idea.

It’s been a hard week so I think I’ll take my chances.

The full Irish

   Tom (Sam Corry) Happiness is....

A film crew marches on its stomach. Actually it first marches on its wages and then once it’s sure they’re in the bank, then it marches on its stomach. It also marches on juicy gossip (especially the sort of stuff where people are sleeping with people they shouldn’t be.) It marches on its experiences of ‘when it was working on “da Bond”’ and it marches on yakking to its fellow crew members about everyone else who works in the film industry who is not standing right beside them right now.

People who work in the film industry are by and large a hardy lot. They need to be – most shoot days take at up least 14 hours of one’s time. A period drama could take at least three hours more and it’s probably safe to say that on something like ‘The Tudors’ members of the make-up, hair and wardrobe departments get about 35 minutes sleep a night (or 15 if you’re a trainee.) So, in that scenario, the only thing that is going to perk you up during your hideously long day of curling curls, replastering eyelashes, taping up hems and ironing mountains of frilly shirts is – grub.

Grub is very important to those of us who work ‘in the game.’

Almost as popular as eating is talking about eating; about what you had for brekkie (a full fry) and what you had for your morning break (tea and loads of biscuits and four of those yummy chocolate marshmallowey things that come in individual wrappers) and what you will have for lunch (steak, chips, onions and gravy) and desert (banoffi with chocolate cake and dollops of cream on the side. Oh and a spoonful of fruit salad to be healthy) and what cheese there is (was there cheese? Shit, I missed the cheese) and what sandwiches are up for the afternoon break and is there a later supper break ‘cos if there is we’d better find out what’s on the menu for that. Before we starve.

Then there’s the catering truck (or ‘chuck wagon’ if you’ve been working in film for longer than two weeks) and which crew member is likely to get to it first when lunch is called. Well, for those of you not in the industry here is the truth about that one. An electrician will always be first in the queue. If he is not it is because some unsuspecting extra has found himself right in the vicinity of the chuck wagon as the hatch is being opened ready for business and is naturally delighted at landing the prime spot up front. This is likely to be his last coherent thought as he is mauled out of the way, possibly tackled to the ground and certainly thrown to the back of the queue where he will definitely miss out on the ‘nice piece of fish’, the sirloin steak, any of the puddings with chocolate and/or custard and will most likely have to put up with the vegetarian option of cheese and broccoli bake.

So, there are quite a lot of chubby people working in the film industry. But we need that extra layer of fat to keep us going especially when we’re on our fourth night-shoot in the middle of Dublin city centre surrounded by drunks and weird people who think they’re interesting by proffering that most popular of questions -  “are youz making a film?” I mean, with all the lights and the cameras and the hairdos and the 20 ft boom poles swinging around wildly and people shouting ‘Action!’ what else could we possibly be doing? I wonder do people ever up to bus drivers and ask them “are you driving a bus?” 

On our film we do not have caterers as it is too expensive and so each day for lunch we go to the nearest restaurant to where we are shooting, This generally works out fine and if there is the odd day where the food is rubbish we can console ourselves that the next day we will be dining elsewhere.

The one drawback is breakfast. No fry, no poached eggs with a couple of rashers on the side and most of all, no sausage sandwich. On day 1 of the shoot, when it becomes apparent that there will be no hot breakfast, there is discontent all around. An unhappy crew is not what you want so a huge effort is made to provide all manner of things like Danish pastries and croissants and apples and cereals and well…lots of cold things.  We mutter to ourselves and get on with it.

And so to day six. It’s two hours into the day and we’re outside for a change. It’s breezy, even a bit chilly but we remember how resilient we are. I find myself immersed with the actors spouting some piece of shite about motivation or intention or some other useless bit of observation but I stop mid-sentence because I get a smell, a smell so tantalising that I must immediately go find it’s source. After several moments wandering around the location I find Alec, our camera car driver. Alec has set himself and his mini grill up in a corner. He has buttered a mound of slices of fresh white bread and like a four-star scout leader is cooking up jumbo sausages.

He hands me a sandwich and then hands one to all of the crew and cast who have downed tools in search of the magical scent. We stand around and munch the fare; warm butter running through our fingers and not a word is spoken.

Apart from those people who were hanging around the Brandenburg gate when the wall toppled I think it’s safe to say that you have never seen a more content lot.

Fiendish or Super Fiendish?

Dave (Diarmuid Noyes) and his Ma (Maria McDermottroe)

For the next two days we will be shooting at Dave’s House with Dave (Diarmuid Noyes) and his Mother (Maria McDermottroe.) We have 23 scenes in total to shoot. “That’s a lot,” I say to myself. “That’s a shit load!” I reply. The house is situated in a quiet working class neighbourhood in a cluster of houses surrounding as I mentioned before, a big circle of green grass. When we arrive in the morning the grass munching pony is gone and has been replaced by a child’s BMX bicycle wheel. There is no sign of the rest of the bicycle – perhaps the child who owned the bike did one daring trick too many pushing the said bike beyond its capabilities and is likely in bed with at least one leg in plaster eating jelly and ice cream in some nearby children’s hospital.

I know that I have to take the wheel. Given that Dave’s world is meant to have lots of circles in it, I take it as some sort of sign that this film needs this wheel. I give it to Peter, the assistant art director and ask him to bring it with him everywhere he goes. Poor Peter. After the fish incident, he must really think I’m bonkers. As it turns out Peter pushes any opinions of me aside and diligently brings the wheel everywhere, proffering it to me at any opportunity where he thinks I might want to use it. It takes a number of weeks for the wheel to slot into a concrete idea in my head but in the end it finds its place in the film. (I still have it in my garden shed unable to let it go. Peter, would you like it?)

Dave’s house has two bedrooms and is the perfect location except that it is quite tiny and I am convinced that at no stage in its planning was the possibility that fifteen film crew and actors would one day be shooting 23 scenes in it’s miniature rooms ever considered. We spend most of the next two days squeezing past each other smiling awkwardly saying “sorry” or “ ‘scuse me” or “quick, get out of my way, I’m going to faint”

Fortunately, the weather is balmy and when the crew aren’t actually doing something like holding the boom or operating the camera, they can hang outside doing Sudoku. God bless the inventor of Sudoku although on a personal note, I had to give it up after a number of months as I had become so obsessed with it, I was neglecting to do the normal things that one does to exist. Feed myself, feed the child, dress myself, dress the child, talk to people including child and child’s father. An ultimatum was given - it was either them or Sudoku.

Spoil sports.

Wild animals can bite

Mr Phillips (Daniel Costello)

There is a famous saying in the film industry that one should never work with children or animals but I have never quite understood this nor indeed for that matter, agreed with it. Firstly animals who act don’t talk back to you so are unlikely to take you aside or as once happened to me, roar at the top of their voices in front of a roomful of other actors that you are a fool and have not the slightest idea of what you are doing. Animals are by and large very non-judgemental about your actions and will basically accept you for what you are. They don’t seem very keen about you trying to take their dinner from under their nose and I would discourage you from doing this especially with lions, wildebeest, crocodiles (although in this case you probably are the dinner) and anteaters that I have been told are much fiercer than they look.  Apart from that, they are in general very easy to please and quite pleasant to have around. Apart from Chickens, skunks and those large, very fast, very hairy, very black house spiders that are so abundant where I live.

Today we will be working with a catfish. As I walk into work and ponder the day ahead I hope that A – the catfish will like me and more importantly, B- that he will respect me. It’s only day 3 of the shoot and although things have gone quite smoothly so far and the crew greet me each day as though I’m still one of ‘them’ (well, sort of) there’s nothing like a sneering fish metaphorically slapping you in the face with a wet fin to change the tide of opinion from admiration to contempt.

I arrive on set. We are shooting in the bowels of a disused office block. The scene is with Dave’s dole officer Mr Philips played by the actor Daniel Costello. Mr Philips is a very strange man, the sort of man that no other person ever wants to be alone with so in this office the staff go everywhere in pairs for fear that they might encounter him alone on some quiet corridor where no-one will hear them scream. In my mind Mr Philips eats babies. Now, of course given that this is a comedy, none of those sorts of details are in the script, just in my head. There is a half hour hiatus with the costume department when I suddenly ask for a child’s garment to be hung up on Mr Philips hat stand. Just as we are about to shoot a fluffy baby blue cardigan is produced and take it’s place amongst the damp and dreary surrounds that is Mr Philips den. Mr Philips may like babies but he doesn’t eat their clothes.

The catfish seems impervious to all the hustle and bustle around him. Peter, the assistant art director is acting as gamekeeper. Tropical fish such as this are very delicate creatures and must be handled accordingly (or not at all preferably.) The catfish arrived at the location the previous evening so that his tank could be placed in position plenty of time in advance to acclimatise to its new surroundings. Thankfully Peter knows a lot about tropical fish cos the rest of us haven’t a clue and I suspect would be feeding it scraps of sausage if left to our own devices. Temperature control is very important so it’s all checked before the catfish is left alone for the night. We don’t want to arrive in the morning to find him floating stone dead at the top of the tank. I am reminded of my two goldfish Frank and Brian who suffered such a fate. Do goldfish ever have happy, long and fruitful lives? It seems not but I don’t think they have brains to speak of so that probably helps.

As the crew go about their business politely assuring me that of course I am not constantly in their way, I scrutinise the fish. It seems to me to be a pretty lonely existence living in a tank with not even one of those whirly wheels that hamsters seem to love for company. When I express this thought to Peter he regards me in a new light, not a good light and mutters something about fish being above all that. I shut up and look into the fish’s bug eyes. He doesn’t bat an eyelid and I realise that it will take much more than a sympathetic smile from me to gain his respect.

We set up the camera with the fish and tank in the foreground. Dave and Mr Philips run the scene. It’s a long dialogue scene and the actors are a mere blur as we have directed our focus onto the fish in the hope that he might do something interesting. The scene goes on and on yet the fish does nothing, nothing whatsoever. I begin to think that his unwillingness to perform is out of spite over my ignorance of his life. Maybe he overheard my earlier comment to Peter and has taken offence at being compared to a hamster. I will him on to do something, to blow a bubble, flick a whisker (yes, he has whiskers) anything. As the scene nears its conclusion it seems that all is lost. But suddenly, he rolls his eye. Right back into its socket and out again. It’s amazing. The scene ends and we cut the shot. I am ecstatic. The actors obviously think it’s over their performance which although was good had nothing of the spontaneity of the fish.

Being upstaged by a fish. Who’d have thought? Respect.

Gripping stuff

Day 2 dawns. Had a day off yesterday. Feel that there should be a day off to recuperate after every days shoot. One day on, one day off.  I might suggest that to the producer although I’m reluctant to give her a reason to laugh with derision in my face so early on. Plenty of time for that in the next 17 days.

The fact is that for the 12 hours of the shoot day the pace is manic. You’re so busy trying to get all the shots and scenes you want in the ever decreasing amount of time allowed, that you routinely forfeit certain things  – going to the toilet, finishing sentences and occasionally, breathing. But you keep going because you’re driven by this crazy energy that refuses to wane until the moment the AD says ‘that’s a wrap.’ Then you feel so overwhelmingly exhausted that you would happily lie down in the middle of a four-lane highway if that were where you happened to be at that final moment.

For the 1st half hour after we finish shooting I am unable to string two words together. Normally that is when some kind person shoves my schoolbag into my arms and the next day’s call sheet into my pocket or my mouth or wherever they can find a gap and gently guides me towards a waiting car where I instantly fall asleep and a tactful driver steers me homewards without complaining once about the steady stream of dribble oozing out of my mouth and onto his lovely cream leather seats.

But that doesn’t happen because in this case I drive myself so at the end of the day I point the car in the direction of home, open all the windows, crank up the air conditioning to full blast and try not to cause a multiple pile up. 

Today we shoot what amounts to be the closest thing to a high-speed heart-stopping death-defying chase through gritty urban streets. Dave, our hero gets a job in a warehouse and loses control of a forklift. There is a buzz of excitement amongst the crew as words such as ‘stunt’ and ‘padding’ and ‘stand by emergency services’ are whispered in hushed tones. Now, the thing I discover early on is that no matter what you do to a fork lift, what buttons or pedals you push, what tactics you use to ‘soup up’ the engine, it will not go faster than 15 miles an hour.  I think a wheelchair or even a very old woman pushing a Zimmer frame might go faster than that. But we battle on regardless and as I watch the stand-in driver meander past us at full tilt for the fifteenth time I vow to speak to the writer at the end of the day about his choice of action vehicle.

I console myself with the fact that if I shoot the sequence from about thirty angles, speed up the resulting footage and talk very nicely to the editor – he might be able to make some sort of not so much nail-biting as nail–buffing sequence out of it.

Still, no- one gets injured and the stand-by emergency crew can slink off home happy that in this instance, no lives were callously cut short just for the sake of art.

Decisions, decisions

It’s 6.30 am, it’s shoot day one and I am totally exhausted. That’s because I have slept for about ten minutes. The nights’ sleep before the first day of a shoot is never a good one. Before I go to bed, I diligently prepare my schoolbag (per se.) I have my script and my plastic Bic retractable pencil. I like to use the same pencil for the entire shoot. This pencil is my only requirement in the stationery department from the production office and I think in this instance, in deference to our tight budget, I supplied my own. (You’d think I’d get hired more often just for that cost saving fact alone.)

I have my call sheet, with my name on it should I drop or lose it (about twenty times a day.) It is neatly placed in its foldable plastic folder, which I will keep in my back right pocket with said pencil. I have my shot list printed and also placed in the plastic folder. I am ready for action and nothing can stop me.

Except, if I lose my pencil.

If an actor drops dead or the location burns down two hours before we’re due to shoot on it, I can handle it. I just need to rethink what I had in mind – shoot the scene in a different way, in a different place (with possibly a different actor.) However, if I lose my pencil, that’s different – that’s catastrophic. No ordinary run-of-the-mill HB jobbie can replace it not to mention, a pen. You may think I am exaggerating but ask any 1st AD who has ever worked with me; they will tell you that it’s true.

So, having fretted and tossed and turned about this and other potential problems all night long I get up. I am already fantasising about going to bed in about twelve hours time. The scenario - I will come back from this first day of shooting which will have gone amazing well. We will have finished 45 minutes early - anything longer than that and you’ve seriously forgotten to do something like maybe shoot several scenes. I will eat a wonderful meal cooked by child’s father, which will be ready as soon as I walk in the door. I will kiss child and child’s father goodnight while he washes up and generally cleans the house (and child.) I will slide the next days meticulously prepared shot list into its plastic folder. Take out today’s completed one. Slip under the freshly laundered sheets and by asleep by 9. Yeah.

But before I get to that fantasy, I have still to get up – get to the location and get through the first shot of the film.

We have ten scenes to shoot today. We are shooting all of them in various different areas at the corporate headquarters of a very well known company. I marvel as to how Brendan, the location manager secured this location. I’m beginning to suspect that he carries a loaded gun and several cans of mace when he does his initial meet-and-greet with location owners.

Today, I’m going to walk to work. Normally, as part of your contract, a director is collected and driven to work and then driven home at the end of the day. This is not so much because we are such important people but more so to make sure that you actually turn up.

I decide to listen to some tunes on the way. There is something wonderful about the simplicity of me meandering down the canals to work early on this Saturday morning on the first day of shooting my first feature film with my ipod stuck in my ears and no one else around. I feel very happy. So, for some inexplicable reason, I choose a song called ‘Rains down trouble by Kevin Doherty – its’ possibly the most melancholic song I know and ordinarily when I listen to it I’m blubbing by the end of the first verse but today I feel invincible.

But paranoia is never far away and as I walk I start to wonder if they’ll turn up – the crew and actors. You get so caught up in the preparations of the film and what you have to do to pull the whole thing together that sometimes you forget that there is a whole team of people there to help you achieve that. I’m fretting madly now. It’s the ten-minute sleep and the suicidal song I insist on listening to that’s making me feel like this.

Being a director is a lonely job. You are Miss ‘Billy-no-mates.” The crew and cast may all love you but there’s always a slight distance. And never is this more apparent than on the dining bus at lunchtime. If the director sits on the dining bus a crew or cast member will never choose to sit beside you. They will first fill all the seats around you downstairs and when they’re full they’ll go upstairs where it’s much smellier and hotter. If upstairs is full they will come back down and make some of their colleagues squeeze up tight so that three of them can fit in the one seat and you the director will still have three empty seats around you. It’s because they think that you are at all times thinking about your work – mulling over the scene you just shot or planning the one you are about to shoot, working, working, always working and they don’t want to disturb you.

You are in fact, mostly likely wondering whether you will have the toffee cheesecake or the bread and butter pudding.

However, we will not have this problem on this film. We don’t have a dining bus.

I get to the location full of trepidation and wander in.

They’re all there – the camera and sound guys are setting up, the actors are in costume and make up and hair, the 2nd Ad is already preparing the next days call sheet, the trainee AD is practicing looking important; it’s all happening in perfect peace and harmony without me. I smile and greet everyone who does the same and then head straight for the breakfast table where everyone leaves me some space to make my first big decision of the day.

Croissant or Danish?

Real life? What's that?

No matter how many months of prep you and the crew have in the lead up to shooting a film it all comes together in the last two weeks. Those millions of questions that you have thrown at people and the millions of questions (rather than answers) that they have thrown back start getting answered. – “No, we definitely will not have a dolly, no we don’t have the money for that, or that, or that.” As Shoot Day 1 gets closer people’s voices become high pitched and shrill, bottoms clench and instead of sucking the tops of their pencils they bite them off and swallow them, shards of wood and all. It’s a bit like preparing for battle except hopefully, without the hideous and terminal consequences that modern warfare presents.

Making a film becomes all consuming. There simply isn’t time for anything else. You stop calling your friends not to mention even thinking of seeing them. You stop calling your family. You stop paying your bills or in fact dealing with anything else that is not directly to do with this Monster you have created (and also become.) You might stop eating (never happens to me) and take fewer showers. You certainly stop brushing your hair, putting on clean clothes every day, opening the curtains, cutting your toenails and you even might, horror or horrors, stop tweeting, emailing and facebooking. It’s that serious.

However, in this case, for me, a semblance of life did persist and after twenty years of working on other people’s films, I realised that if you let it, real life can exist at the same time.

So, in the last two weeks before we start shooting, I find myself falling into a weird real world/film world routine -

Get up. Get 3 year-old child to Montessori without too many rows, tears or bribes.

Go to scout hall and open up for the day. Remember how bleeding freezing scout hall is and return to car, crank up heat and wait for 1st actor to appear.

Rehearse with actors and time flies ‘cos I’m having so much fun.

Actors leave and fall into sloth of despond as I now consider all the problems that have to be solved before we can get one frame of them exposed on whatever stock we can afford to shoot on.

Run out of credit on phone.

Have various meetings in afternoon where we talk costume, props, and decide who will get the afternoon biscuits for the 4pm sugar slump.

At 6ish get child back and try my best to get out of film mode and concentrate on her as she bosses me around for the next two hours.

Delete and write emails when her back is turned

Make some class of dinner for child and child’s father.

At 8 leave child’s father to look after bedtime routine and escape out the door with laptop in hand (wheehee – if you have children you will understand my glee at not having to do this bit. If you don’t have children, believe me, it’s one of the major drawbacks of parenthood)

Arrive with computer in hand to hospital where my Mum is and has been for several months.

And then I slow down and remember that bit about real life.

For the next three hours Mum and I mooch at the simplex crossword, or I fiddle with shot lists in comforting silence as she snoozes or I yak away about how the preparations for the film are going and remind her who is who and who does what and she wonders how Molly’s potty training is going and I say ‘Bad’ and I wonder how much weaker she is today and then the nurses arrive and settle her for the night and I read out her prayers and wait till she sleeps and then, I go home.

It's a tough job

Lisa tries to ingratiate herself with actor Mary Murray (Rachel)

As today is technically a day of rest, I will be brief. Having also just eaten two sausage sandwiches I think I’m going to be sick so I don’t advise hanging around for that.

If you really want to make it in the film industry as a director there are some key things you should remember.

Be very opinionated (even if you have no idea what you are talking about.)

Don’t snigger at actors especially if they have just done 1. A dying scene   2. A sex scene  3. Their make-up for three hours.

Try not to end up in bed with the leading actor, actress or both. If you must, at least wait until the last night of the shoot (it’s usual to strike at the wrap party) so that the next day hopefully, they are winging their way somewhere thousands of miles away and you will never have to see each other again. A tip that might work in your favour – production co-ordinators always book actors on 6am flights the day after the wrap party. I suspect that after years of experience working in the industry they know to get them out of town as fast as possible.

If you truly have no idea what you are doing be loud, very loud; abuse and aggression often seem to garner a lot of respect and finally, if you really want the crew and actors to respect you, don’t wipe your runny nose with a buttered slice of white bread from the craft services table, which is what a famous director once did in front of me.

Admittedly he was under a considerable amount of stress at the time.

Blessed art thou...

All location managers are saints. That is because without a shadow of a doubt, it is THE WORST job you can do in the film industry. I did it once, on a commercial. The brief was to find a traditional spit-on the-floor-pub complete with snug, tobacco-stained walls, shelves lined with bottles of ancient brews and photos galore of endless codgers who had worn holes in their suit trousers as they whiled their years away on bar stools slurping pints of Guinness and smoking 60 a day. Simple enough really. So, off I went and photographed a plethora of what I considered to be exactly what was required and then spent hours lovingly pasting the photos together on large sheets of cardboard to give the director a 360 degree view of each place. I knew the difficulty was going to be which one to choose as each sample fitted the brief perfectly. Turns out I knew nothing. They were all wrong. The reasons were given – a door was in the wrong place or too much daylight or the wood was too bright or the wood was too dark or look, these photos are just shite. And so, it went on and on for days, weeks – I thought it was never going to end. I also thought I was going to kill the director. I’m sweating even thinking of it again and may need to lie down in a darkened room the memory is so disturbing.

So, my attitude to Brendan, the location manager was suitably humble and thankful the first time we met. Thankful that someone (who had done the job before) had actually decided to do our film for a paltry wage not to mention the miniscule budget that he would have to secure 40 locations without any help from anyone. Privately, of course I assumed he was registered as mad because I could not think of one good reason why he would want to do this. Sensibly, I kept my mouth shut.

In a situation such as ours with a budget such as ours, we had to be extremely creative. We knew we would have to pull in as many favours from anyone we knew that had premises that could be commandeered. We needed a pub (eek), a penthouse, a warehouse, a building site, a plush boardroom, a house, another house, a third house, a park, loads of city streets, a posh restaurant, a not-so-posh restaurant, a café, about 8 different interview rooms, a house we could paint, a job centre, a union office, a dole office, an open-plan office floor, a tie shop, a double decker bus, more streets to drive it on, a conference centre, a couple of toilets, a bus stop and a garden shed……

So, where do you start when you have four weeks to find all of these places? Well, if you start thinking of the big picture and how impossibly difficult it all seems, that there’ll never be enough time to even photograph different places, not to mention getting the director and the DOP out to look at them and either approve or disapprove them nor having to then negotiate with the various location owners about the fee which you don’t really have in the first place…well, if you started doing that you’d never get the job done. The overwhelming pressure of it all would crush even the sturdiest of thick-skinned crazies who do this job and by all accounts, love it.

So, we started with Dave’s house. Dave lives with his Ma and they live in a small house in a well-established neighbourhood where everyone knows each other and there is a penchant for pebbledash. Dublin is awash with these sorts of communities so that description itself helped us narrow the potential for finding the perfect house down to about…two hundred thousand.

Brendan duly went and photographed a bunch of suitable houses and they were all good but, in true director form, there was something not quite right about them – I wasn’t excited by what I saw either inside or out. I had explained exactly what I had wanted and Brendan had found exactly what I described yet they were all wrong. I had become that director monster that I had wanted to throttle all those years ago. So, I went off and had a think. We had to find something more distinctive than pebbledash.

Now the corporate world that Dave was trying to get into is full of square buildings, with lots of glass and chrome and people in pressed suits and ironed ties and stripy shirts with sharp skirts. Lines, lines, lines. This was a cold place so Dave should be coming from somewhere totally opposite. Somewhere, that was warm and had curves and circles and lots of roundy bits. So I said this to Brendan and to his credit, he didn’t laugh in my face. Dave’s house was hardly going to be a circular house but his house could be situated in a circular environment, around a patch of circular grass. At some stage in Dublin’s past the town planners developed a taste for these sorts of estates. We whipped out a map and peered at the contents.  The circular ‘greens’ were easy to spot so Brendan duly motored to Crumlin when there seemed a selection of choices and started snapping his camera whilst I pondered the dozens of other places we had to find.

He came back with something promising and we went on our first recce. Nuria, the DOP came with us as there was no point in me choosing a place without her – would it be big enough for us to shoot in? Was there enough natural light? Where would we put her cappuccino machine? (In my experience, all DOPs come with personal coffee percolators)

We arrived at the location, which was perfectly situated around a manicured circle of juicy green grass. In fact, a boy was lolling in the middle of the grass holding a leading rein attached to which was a plump pieballed pony that I assumed was responsible for the manicuring.

We went into the house Brendan had photographed. I couldn’t believe it when I got into the sitting room.  Sometime in the past, someone had decided to open up the two downstairs rooms by knocking down the dividing wall and rather than putting your standard double doors between the rooms they had carved out a circle. No doors at all just a lovely big circle to walk through as the need took you. I don’t know whether Brendan had photographed all the houses until he came across this one but with Dave’s circular world in mind, we could not pass on this place. The vibe was perfect and Nuria was happy. We shook hands with the hapless location owner who had no idea what he was letting himself in for a left, very happy campers.

One down, only 39 to go.

Sex and that sort of thing

Tom (Sam Corry) and Rachel (Mary Murray) think about sex.

I was sent to ballet classes when I was a child. So were my two sisters. My three brothers were sent to scouts. It was deeply unfair, as I wanted to go to scouts, as did at least one of my sisters. The other one wanted to hang outside smoking cigarettes with her friends but even she, at eight years of age, thought that inappropriate (especially in a pink tutu and ballet pumps.) Sadly, none of the boys expressed any interest in ballet so a simple swap wasn't an option. The ballet was a waste of time  - I still receive frequent compliments on my distinct military walk (grandfather's genes.) My sisters faired no better although aren’t so burdened with quite such a pronounced gait. 

So, when I arrived at the Kenilworth square scout hall for my first day's rehearsals for the film, I was understandably intrigued. This is where it all happened. The chanting, the oaths, the knot learning seminars, the sheer boyish spottiness of it all. The first thing that hit me was the cold. It was about 10 degrees warmer outside than in and as I was to discover over the next two weeks, no matter how many heaters we introduced nor extra layers of bainín sweaters, things never got any warmer.

There was a huge room with a built in bench around all sides, which I immediately bagged. Off this room were about 8 tiny little rooms - you could even call them 'cells' they were so small. About five foot square. These too were lined with a bench and some brave youngsters had even dared to graffiti the walls. Mostly drawings of male genitalia. Some things never change although I don’t think we were prone to adorning the ballet studio walls with our creativity.

For the first few days I had individual sessions with the six leads - Diarmuid Noyes (Dave) Shaun Dunne (Vinny) Sam Corry (Tom) Julie O’ Halloran (Lauren) Mary Murray (Rachel) and Lorna Dempsey (Janice.) We chatted about the script and ourselves and I asked them a million personal questions about their lives. When you’re working with actors it very quickly becomes an intimate process where you each have to learn to trust each other. Each actor is of course, very different from the last and works in a different way and as a director you have to quickly learn what’s the best approach to facilitate that actor to give their best performance. For some the less you say to them the better, others want more from you. I’m always learning about this process so spending so much time with a bunch of twenty year olds was great fun and as it’s been a number of years  (think stripy woollen leggings and Abba) since I was anywhere close to their age – totally fascinating.

We then started to work on the different relationships – Dave and Lauren, Vinny and Janice and Tom and Rachel. All had at some stage to kiss or thrash about so I wanted to tackle this at the rehearsal stage. For Diarmuid and Julie (Dave and Lauren) I decided to do nothing and to wait until I was actually shooting the scene. Julie was naturally shy and reserved and it was very important that Dave was in awe of Lauren, that this girl was  ‘the one’ and not just someone he was going grope up against the wall in a nightclub on your average Friday night.

However, Vinny and Janice were totally different. They needed to be able to go for it hammer and tongs. I had just been to a seminar with director Mike Leigh who had dealt with how one approaches sex scenes with actors. He explained his technique, which amounted to getting the actors to go on hands and knees opposite each other and in character, have hand sex (i.e. they could only touch each other's hands.) Sounds odd but I tried it with Lorna and Shaun who play Janice and Vinny and it worked brilliantly. Within a very short amount of time these two strangers had overcome their awkwardness with each other and I knew that things would be fine on the day.  It was really important for me at the rehearsal stage to anticipate and deal with any potential problems. There was no room in our schedule for those dreaded moments when you see an extremely anguished actor approach you and take you aside with the words “Eh Lisa, I have just a little bit of an issue.” The resulting ‘issue’ usually takes at least a half an hour to resolve – longer if there’s tears involved (often mine) and results in the crew standing around scratching their arses, organizing their next jobs or stuffing away more biscuits whilst the minutes tick by.

When it came to the sex stuff with Rachel and Tom (Mary Murray and Sam Corry) I wasn’t so concerned. They’re both seasoned actors, totally focused and although it says in the script that they have sex, I never wanted it to be gratuitous (it’s a comedy for God’ sake!) so we discussed an approach and I explained how I wanted to shoot it and we just left it for the take where they were encouraged to improvise.

You’ll have to watch the film to see who ends up on top.

 

Sit Vac and relax

“Situations Vacant”  Director Lisa Mulcahy’s ruminations.

Welcome to the blog of Lisa Mulcahy - the director of the soon-to-be-released feature film "SITUATIONS VACANT." (December 4th in cinemas all over Ireland.) 

In this tiny spot in the gigantic universe of blogspots I will try to enlighten you as to how  effortlessly easy/horribly hard it is to make a low budget movie. So watch this space  whilst I take each of the 18 shoot days one at a time (a bit like the way I took the valium when shooting - more like 5 at a time) until that last moment on that last day when some responsible person clasped my shoulders in a vice-like grip, shook me out of my now- permanent frenzied state of egomania and said "Lisa, you must stop this madness now! There's no more stock and no more sausages for the mid-morning sambo's."

I knew as soon as they mentioned the sausages that it must be all over.

( Hop over to the red 'links' section on this page to find the Situations Vacant website where  amongst other juicy bits, you will be treated to my ruminations on how the whole thing started)