I’ve decided I dislike spinners.
You like how I just drop you into the middle of my thought process? I’m like a mascot at Disneyland that way. You’re walking along, minding your own business, trying to figure out where the next cool ride is, when all of a sudden I’m in your face, I’m making goofy sounds through the giant freak head, trying to get you to take a picture of us, and all you want to do is punch me in the face.
I didn’t really have anything substantial to say about spinners or the people who put them on their cars. I almost wish I did, just so I could justify my dislike of them. But I can’t. It’s as irrational as a fanatical Islam, but with less beheading and roadside bombings and oppressing of women and gays.
Can you tell what I’ll be looking for in a Presidential candidate in ’08?
We finished shooting “The Canal” over the weekend. This was the long weekend, due to scheduling and some missteps on my part from last week. Though it was long, it was much more organized, and less frustrating from a directoral perspective. Everyone was spot on their lines and performances, and my scheduling was fairly accurate. Every time we dropped behind, the actors made up for it by nailing the scene, and we were able to roll through three scenes by 1:45 on Saturday. By 3:30 we had completed the daylight shooting, and had some time to kill before moving on to the night shoot and arguably the most difficult scenes: the bedroom.
Yes, there’s a sex scene. Not really an R rated sex scene, but it’s steamy. Was always intended to be. And my actors were relatively new at it. Not to put too fine a point on it, but so was I. I’ve never attempted to shoot something like that before, so it was with an equal mixture of trepidation and amusement that I sat down with my actors to discuss boundaries and expectations and intentions.
And then we shot it, and unless I’ve completely missed the mark as a director, I think both scenes are going to pretty much do what they were supposed to do, which is explain the major motivation behind one of the characters’ actions, which in the script wasn’t always entirely clear. The film’s success, in this case, rests almost entirely on the shoulders of the actors.
I have a few pickups to do that I simply didn’t have time for on the weekend, but with those exceptions, I have the film in the can. With luck you’ll see it sometime in the beginning of April.
Sorry for the slack posting this week. Exhaustion has its penalty. But I’ve caught up on sleep, I think. Days tend to look like the view from a bullet train lately, but I’m getting a handle on my workload. I’ll have a Fringecast up by next Tuesday, and I’ll upload some fifty word fiction at some point to give you some easy reading material. All that’s to say that things are on the right track.
See you tomorrow.