Day 2 + 3- Beat the Sun

Day 2. We started the day at 5 am. Maria, Meg, Jason and I went to work getting ready. Today was the monster day. Maria wound up going through a staggering ten hours of makeup before the cameras started rolling, the last seven of which had to be standing.



It's hard to talk about the day eloquently. We must have wrapped around 2 am, so for some it was a 21 hour day- constant working. But, like always, the cast, the crew, everyone was completely on board. This is the first film I've done with nudity, and the nudity is pretty no holds barred. It was something the cast and I really worked on together leading up to the day. On the one hand- I didn't want to be held back. I wanted to be able to have everyone completely nude and able to shoot straight through the day- no clever positioning of arms and legs- delicate shooting I wanted to avoid, and instead of focusing on body parts, just focus on the scene. On the other hand, I don't want to be gratuitous, and there's always the risk with any kind of "love" scene of being unnecessary. But at the end of the day, you look at the dreams and the nightmares. What did I dream and why did I dream it? Is it important that it's staged this way versus that way? Long discussion with the cast. We all came to the conclusion it was worth working towards.



I would love to get the cast talking about this day- it was not at all about behind the scenes on this day- all completely about them. Maybe for the book. In any event- shooting graphic nudity and a bit of violence was an experience, to be sure. It turned out to be extremely fun (for us and the cast) and we were lucky that it was. We wrapped the day and the scene with lots of blood, sex, and that feeling that we managed to capture what was on the page, in our minds, extremely faithfully and without compromise. Lucky kids.




Day 3, from the start was a race. Waking, it was clearly our day to play "Beat the Sun." Our day ends when the sun goes down. Always exciting. The catch? A huge makeup change, making an actor go from young to old, and having to cut the scene in half, shoot the second half first, do the makeup as quickly as possible, then do the first half.



Cast, crew, and fellow filmmakers might disagree with me... The extreme cold and loss of light is a directors friend, not your enemy. The colder the better. It'll speed up the day. Suddenly, everyone is operating 4x faster to try to get out of that cold. Sun going down? 4x faster, gotta get those shots. Put the two together? You're suddenly operating at whirlwind speeds. I couldn't help thinking to myself-- why can't it always be 23° during a shoot?

Makeup goes quicker than we thought, and we're on time to do 2 pages of dialogue in about an hour and ten minutes. I've got seven shots lined up. I'm not going to have time to get to all of them, let alone multiple takes in each setup. There's a fantastic David Fincher quote that sums up the situation and the day... "You don't know what directing is until the sun is setting and you've got to get five shots, and you're only going to get two."



Suddenly, we've only got one day left. We've lost the sun, but thankfully have shot out the scene. One day to go. Jenna D'Angelo and Adam Griffith are wrapped, and have had a strong, violent taste of such a fun nightmare. One more day with Maria to shoot out Dream Lover...