Scrappy Little Nobody(41)

Halfway through the evening, I still hadn’t permanently scarred any coworkers, and as we got more comfortable with the scene, the director leaned in and said, “It felt like you guys were going to kiss in that last take. I think it was a good instinct, maybe we should go with that.”

Okay. We each got a mint, and for a few takes we stumbled through the double awkwardness that is kissing onscreen without an exact cue to do it.

At the end of the night, I went home happy with the work we’d done and relieved that no flesh was harmed. I drove all the way home, pulled into my driveway, and, as I was putting the car in park, suddenly shrieked, “Oh my god, I just made out with Legolas!”

Again, I’m not going to name that actor, as I wish to respect his privacy.





Budget


Into the Woods was one of the biggest-budget films I’ve ever worked on. It made the production glorious. Every single detail in that film was designed with love and passion. The world created by Rob Marshall and his team was so rich, I felt inspired and grateful on a daily basis in a way that is VERY unusual for me. A larger budget enables a fully realized vision, but it inspires overcomplicated solutions to nonproblems. It also has some comical side effects.

There’s a scene in Into the Woods where Cinderella runs down the palace stairs, but Prince Charming has covered them in sticky tar to keep her from getting away. As that scene approached, someone asked me to try on my “magnet shoes.” “My what?” No one had bothered to ask me, but some mystery higher-up had assumed that I wouldn’t be able to “stop in my tracks” unassisted and tasked several departments with fitting both the stairs and my shoes with powerful electromagnets. The idea was to switch them on as I ran full speed down concrete steps.

Now, this was not only a spectacular waste of time and resources, it was kind of a f*cking death trap. Even if it worked, I would surely be sent flying out of the shoes and into some corrective surgery. I had to do a couple of runs to prove to Rob that I could successfully mime being stuck in goo, and I let the special effects guys turn on the magnets when Cinderella struggles to pry her shoes up by hand, so that everyone could feel like Operation Electro-Murder had been a justifiable project.

My second-favorite thing about that scene was that Chris Pine, who played the prince, had to stand there THE WHOLE TIME. Both of us assumed he’d come in for an hour in the morning, they’d shoot some footage, and through movie magic, he would appear frozen in time at the top of the stairs. No such luck. Poor Chris had to stand there and watch me do that number a hundred times. I was running, crawling, falling down, jumping up, and belting my stupid face off for two days straight, and with every “action” he trudged back into position and endured another take.

I’ll admit I found the situation amusing. Every time he complained it just gave me an easy opening to say, “Oh, I’m so sorry that YOU had to work hard today. Can somebody get Chris a medal?”

Here’s the thing: I really felt for him. A long day at work is made abnormally grueling by an absence of productivity or accomplishment. For all the physical and mental energy I was expending (and the bruises I was getting), I left those two days so content and satisfied. He left them needing a burger just to get a little dopamine flowing in his brain before we had to start all over again.

There were also two small fires on set that no one seemed to be that worried about. I do mean small, but still. A scrim and a prop lantern (which was not built for actual flames) caught on fire, and there was no real sense of hustle. This was a big-budget film; there was a department for that. This is how a roomful of adults ends up staring at a rapidly growing fire with their mouths open.

The previous year, I’d been shooting the movie Happy Christmas with a total of six crew members and about four principal actors. If there’d been a fire, all ten of us would have run to a water source. (Unless it was a grease fire; we’re filmmakers, not idiots.I)

When you’re on an independent film, you have to wear more hats. It isn’t stressful, though, because you start to feel capable and relish the responsibility. Happy Christmas was shot in eleven days for eighty thousand dollars (for perspective, that’s 1/262nd the budget of Silver Linings Playbook). There was no script, no paper involved whatsoever. And we didn’t tell anyone we were doing it.

Aspiring filmmakers: Isn’t it great news that you can make a movie for so little, and, more important, that you don’t need to ask permission? It was the happiest and most productive set I’ve ever been on. I’m not saying small-scale movies are always better off on the whole—I don’t want the next Bond film to be improvised and shot handheld. You can’t make a movie about an alien-werewolf invasion with ten people and eighty grand. And I want to see Fur from the Sky by 2018.





Wardrobe


I’ve wanted to work on a period piece for as long as I can remember. A fantasy period piece even more so. I got my wish with Into the Woods, and it was everything I dreamed it could be. And a little less. Turns out, authentically made corsets are quite small. They seemed bearable in my fitting, but any woman who’s ever tried on shoes in a store knows that you can think something is perfectly comfortable only to wind up begging for mercy at the end of your first day in them.

In between scenes, I could ask to have my corset loosened and get some relief (I couldn’t do it myself because of how it was made), but inevitably, it had to get laced up again. This led to an unusual dynamic between Asia, the on-set dresser, and me. I adored Asia. She was funny, hardworking, and sweet. But she was responsible for putting me in a moderate degree of physical distress. If your best friend gave you a charley horse ten times a day, you’d feel weird about her, too. So after a few weeks, whenever I saw Asia (Lovely Asia! Whom I really liked!) it struck fear into my heart. We would eye each other across the set, awaiting the telltale signs of camera readiness. This equally tiny blonde and I would get locked in a stare-down like bull and matador. Eventually, I’d lose focus and Asia would creep up behind me.