I’m sitting here in my Baltimore City apartment, chilling.. relaxing after the film shoot that took place this past weekend–The Waterboard has been shot. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I think I’ve made a good film short, one that will help us achieve the financing for the feature film. I’m full of a sense of confidence as a filmmaker like never before. We got the film in the can, but it didn’t come without having to jump over considerable obstacles.
Saturday, we started work at 7am. Typical of indie film sets, we didn’t get our first shot done until 9:30AM, as it takes time to set up equipment, figure out how we’re going to get the day’s shot list done, and get our actors to the set and ready to do their thing. But once we got that first shot out, the day started to roll out nicely. The waterboard set up looked fantastically disturbing in the classy apartment we shot in, located in the heart of Baltimore’s inner harbor. Hell, we shot right across Oriole Park Camden Yards, and we had to be careful not to get the stadium thru the apartment windows.
Also typical of indie film shoots, our shot list went out the window quickly. I’m one of those directors (like Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorcese) who has the whole film already visualized in his head. It’s perfectly, aesthetically framed in my head. The characters in my movies live inside my head and speak to me. The ideas in my films throb with urgency and drive my passion for filmmaking. But I struggle as an indie filmmaker because getting all those specific shots becomes very difficult on a low-budged film set. I think this time, though, I got the vast majority of my vision on the ‘canvas’ so to speak. The final film will reflect 90% to 92% percent of how I’ve visualized ‘The Waterboard’ all along. We had to restructure our list in order to try and make our day’s quota (4 good minutes of film in a day), and on this first day we got 3 minutes done. On the later half of the day, when we were doing the only dialogue scene in the film, we had hit good momentum, and the day ended in a good note.
And I gotta thank my actors–they were fantastic. Rob Patterson, who plays the lead (the Mystery Tramp), played his part against his usual comedic, histrionic acting style. And it worked! He was cold, stone-faced, chilling. Rob Patterson will be moving to Los Angeles right after completing this film, and you will soon be seeing him make waves in Film and TV productions there. The secondary was played by Ben Cunis, a great young actor from Washington,DC, and I must say–I pride myself in my instincts when picking actors–that this guy was good.. and I mean *Good*. Ben Cunis is going to go places, and he’s currently starring in ‘Host And Guest’ at the Synectic Theater in Washington, DC. Ben gave me his all, and he even was enthusiastic while laying down and taking that punishing water-torture play-acting for long-periods at a time. He was even psyched about it all! In any case, you heard it here first–Ben Cunis is going places.
Because of the good quality of my actors, I truly feel the film will turned out great. We did hit snags on the first day. For starters, never ever rely on Production Assistants to show up when they’re not getting paid: We had two PAs flatout quit during the two days of shooting, and they managed to give the typical lame excuses. Luckily, the few PAs we had were absolute workhorses, guys by the names of Paul Bressler and John Albrecht plus a girl named Jennifer, and they more that made up for the lameness of the two PAs that called out. An amazing guy named Malcolm came on set on the second day, after little to no notice, and kicked ass. So, if you’re serious about your films, pay your crews even down to the PAs. If they’re not your family and friends, those crewmembers aren’t going to show unless they’re dead serious about filmmaking.. and those folks are far and few in between.
I was completely ‘on fire’ during the shoot. Along with my producers, Angie and Mark, I was in control shortly after we got rolling, telling the crew what set-up to start prepping one after another. When I’m in a movie set, I get on this hyper mood that I call ‘film juice’. And on Saturday, even hours after I stopped shooting, I was still full of energy, figuring out the shot list for the next day and mixing up fake blood at 12:30am. I didn’t crash from this mood until after we finished shooting on Sunday. And considering what happened on set on Sunday, my good ‘film juice’ mood was even the more amazing.
On Sunday, we got rolling early and wasted little time. We had finished our dialogue for the most part on Saturday, but managed to squeeze out a couple more takes of dialogue on Sunday morning. My actors were very good, so it didn’t take countless takes to get a performance from them. Most of the shots in Sunday had no sound (the film relies heavily on creative sound design that will be done in Post) so we were doing two takes top of everything. I want The Waterboard to have a very realistic, shaky-cam look to it, similar to that of movies like THE BOURNE SUPREMACY and UNITED 93 (both directed by Paul Grengrass). This shaky look creates a heightened psychological sense of realism and I think it’ll work great on my film. Thanks to the excellent work of my DP, Dave Kratz, I believe we will achieve this look. But the second worst thing that could happen on a set happened on Sunday…
Thru the weekend, we had been standing on a rather nice and expensive granite kitchen island counterboard thru the weekend in order to adjust lights, since the only ladder on the set was too tall to properly setup. We figured the counterboard looked sturdy enough, and I even stood on it a couple of times. We were wrong. On Sunday afternoon, the DP went up on the counterboard to adjust the lights, when all of a sudden the whole counterboard collapsed, crashing to the floor along with the DP and breaking into several pieces. Everyone on the set went quiet for a good, long half-minute, as if a bomb had gone off. Did I forget to mention we had no production insurance?
The DP wasn’t injured (that’s the top worst thing that can go wrong on the set–someone getting injured)… but the whole counterboard was destroyed. I told everyone on set to take a good deep breath and calm down. The shit had hit the fan, but we had to keep working. We are going to finish this film, I told them. I am going to call the apartment owner and tell him what happened, I told them. I am going to take responsibility, I told them (and I will). We managed to start working again and we got back on track(Thankfully, we had gotten done with all films featuring the counter on the shot). The counterboard repair may cost up to a grand, but I will figure it out somehow.
The owner of the apartment, who is a filmmaker of his own right–Frank is his name–took the news in the coolest way I’ve seen a human take bad news. God bless him! Really, the man simply took in-stride (because he’s a filmmaker himself) and told me that we would figure it out, and I would paid for the repair. It happened, and let’s just move on.
I managed to get the vast majority of my shots that day, and we got the film in the can. Despite the mini-disaster, I truly film I’ve a great film in my hands. I went and had a much deserved beer with my DP in Hampden, Baltimore, and I then managed to come down from my ‘film juicy’ mood and realize that this film that i had labored on for over 9 moths was finally shot. I slept deep and soundly last night.
So there you have it folks–The Waterboard has been shot. And I feel like I’m ready for the feature film that will come right after it, because if you can regroup and still make your shoot day after the location falling apart, you can make movies. I certainly can!
