Yesterday morning I got up at 6am, got ready and hopped in the car at 6:45, just in time to make the 7am call time. All was silent on the way to set (our office). The large Gulshan intersection was oddly quiet. The streets were deserted. The morning was calm. When we reached the office, I trudged upstairs and tried the door handle: locked.
I called the line producer: no answer. I called the producer: no answer. I called some other people that work at our office: no answer. I called my translator: no answer. I would have called the 1st AD, but we fired him yesterday. There was no one in sight. Did I land in some alternate universe where my crew no longer existed? (Perhaps an episode of “Dr. Who” from the previous evening precipitated that thought.)
After my driver and I made countless phone calls to anyone we could think of, I finally managed to rouse the producer (who wasn’t meant to be on set) and get the office key. Slowly by slowly, after getting in touch with the line producer, our crew started to straggle into the office, between 7:45 and 8:30. Shyama, my translator, AND the gaffer apologized personally to me for being late.
What’s wrong with this picture?
This was, in fact, the first true “Bengali day” in three days of shooting in Bangladesh. Generally, this is the way things work: you set a call time, people straggle in between 1 and 2 hours after call time, and you begin your day in fits and starts about 4 hours after you thought you would. No one apologizes, or really even notices. It’s a true novelty to even hear them apologize! And this was the first of THREE shooting days on which I was the first person to set. The previous two days, impressive in their timeliness, ran long but productive, in spite of a 1st AD who consistently showed up late and did little. Complete with the various hiccups, turf wars, actor dramas and circuit breaker failures that comprise a normal shooting day, our first two days had run remarkably like “set” in America. But today was a regular Bengali day. After the initial delay, we spent 1.5 hours moving from location A to location B, and waited at location B for everything from dramatic make-up failures to a Muslim actor who held us up for 20 minutes while she bowed towards Mecca and said her prayers.
But if that’s all I have to complain about, I’d say we’re doing remarkably well.
Today I’ve been transcoding footage, which requires an awful lot of waiting and very little do-ing. In this meantime, I meant to spice this post up with some photos, but my technical know-how has apparently been spent on the transcoding because I can’t figure out how to make you see the photos I’m trying to upload on here. Thus, I’ll go with the old-fashioned way and link you to my album here:
We just shot a scene from my feature, Transnationals. What happens in the scene? A woman traveling in Korea buys birthday cupcakes for her translator. On the surface, not such an exciting scene. But what is really happening? The girl, who is falling in love with the translator, learns during the scene that the translator is her biological brother. Needless to say, the stakes in the scene are fairly high.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about what draws me into drama, and why it punches me in the gut when it’s done well (in the way all lovers of a good drama are somehow masochistic, which is worthy of a separate psychological appraisal). What draws me in, first of all, is people who are different from me. This is probably a carry-over from my inner cultural anthropologist and philosopher. What makes people tick? What cultural references cause them to tick differently? How can values and core beliefs be so deeply ingrained by culture? And what causes all of us who are so different to be the same? It’s quite interesting that faith (both in the ‘organized religion’ sense and at the deeper spiritual/moral/philosophical level) unites us, even though sometimes theology can be divisive. For me, good drama will bring me into a completely different world or lifestyle but then give me something familiar to hold onto there: something that is a deep, enduring and truly universal need expressed in a specific, culturally relevant way. Perhaps a way I didn’t see, because it wasn’t taught to me by my culture. Maybe that need is even mediated in some way by the culture at large.
Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Once a creepy long-haired alien kid posing as the son of even-weirder John Lithgow in Third Rock From the Sun, I think this perpetual man-child has finally come into his own. I just saw 50/50, which was just another opportunity for him to surprise me with his subtle, natural, slightly awkward way of making “cute white guy who’s down on his luck” actually seem real, believable and poignant. He even did this in the less-stellar Zooey Deschanel vehicle, (500) Days of Summer. I was not a huge fan of that movie, but his performance didn’t disappoint. But let’s talk about his choice of roles in the past, which is infinitely more interesting (see photo). Rian Johnson’s 2005 film Brick is one of my favorite films of the past decade: the script was amazing, the dialogue so pitch-perfect it’s uncanny, and the execution was brilliant. Every detail was just right. It was a little-film-that-could, gone absolutely, concretely, unabashedly right. Go a bit further back in the actor’s history when he played David Collins in a 1990 re-make of one of my all-time-favorite TV shows, Dark Shadows. I loved the original 60s version, which lasted much longer than the 90s remake, but the casting of the 90s version was absolutely spot-on. Gordon-Levitt was great as the bratty misfit, David. All and all, I think he’s THE great actor of my generation. Oh – and then there’s stuff like this out there: 
