Well, today was our bonus shoot of the short film I concepted and wrote last week: way to think on our feet! I can hardly believe it all came together. Unfortunately, my friend, cohort and DP, Dan, ate some bad curry yesterday and spent most of the day with a rotten stomach, sleeping it off and puking. However, he did manage to stay with us during the morning, just long enough to instruct our light guys to hang c-stands sideways from the ceiling with twine (and yes, they had lights on the ends of them) and blow a mountain of créme brulée-smelling canned fog into our small shooting room, causing me a sore throat I kept with me through the rest of the day. But notwithstanding our newly acquired stomach and respiratory illnesses, the shoot went great.
In spite of starting a few hours late due to tardy actors (who knew actors could be primadonnas – that came as a complete shock to me!), we actually finished an hour ahead of schedule (putting us at merely a 13-hour day!), thanks to some creative shot re-planning and a few blessed daylight exterior shots. For the most part, our actors were pretty good, although one was a bit of the classically overzealous Bengali ilk, flailing his arms and contorting his face like a clown. But it was all for the better, as our parable slowly transformed from a simple morality tale to a tongue-in-cheek rendering of a thought-provoking story, complete with a comedic, almost Spaced-like style. When you consider the carefully-conceived melodrama of Bengali movie posters, often with blood and guts, guns and babes, the simplicity and boredom of the movies is somewhat disappointing; but I think we’ll deliver on that same high bar of cheesiness, contributing the added bonus of a good story. More than anything I’ve ever done, I think it will inspire both thought and laughter.
In a bit of a wild week of idea-swapping, I decided to do the first in a series of short “parable” films I’ve been thinking about here at BCM. It’s a project I planned on starting back in the US, but the idea came up to give the stories a bit of an international voice, and perhaps do them in different places in the world. Bangladesh is, of course, a great place to start! Since my boss has always wanted to do this type of film for a national audience, he was on board right away. I wrote a 4-minute script, and before I knew it, we were planning to shoot it within the week. Since we’re already shooting a documentary project on the days before and after the new mini-shoot date (the new shoot is on our “day off”), our equipment is already set, so the next step was casting. Which brings me to my title.
