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.