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.