We Are the Light(49)

There’s no one else in my life with whom I feel comfortable having these sorts of conversations. Not even Jill or Isaiah. And it wouldn’t be fair to Eli, who has enough of his own psychological baggage to process these days, not to mention the weight of his current creative project, which has quickly outgrown our wildest expectations.

Maybe you know this already, but you don’t film a movie chronologically. You film it according to the schedules of the actors in each scene, making sure everyone is available. And sometimes you film according to weather, meaning you shoot outdoor scenes when mother nature is cooperating with the script and save the indoor scenes for when she has other plans. Eli and Tony ranked every scene in the film according to logistical difficulty and then aimed to film the trickiest ones first, thinking that if anything should go wrong, we could always move to an easier scene and bump the harder to the next day.

I didn’t really understand any of the above until I started asking questions on day one, mostly because I was surprised to be shooting the last scenes of the film first. Eli explained that getting the entire Majestic police force and all of their cruisers involved was the biggest logistical nightmare. Then he pointed to the sky and said, “Weather’s perfect for filming the car chases. We can’t do those in the rain. And we have to get everything done between the morning and evening commuter traffic, because we need to block off the road. Also, we’re grabbing the drone footage today.”

“Drone footage?” I asked.

Which is when Eli explained that Mark and Tony had hired a drone cinematographer to capture the aerial shots. Then later on a rainy day or in the middle of the night they’d set up a green screen, maybe in the YMCA gym, suspend Eli in his monster costume from the ceiling, and film his flight scenes.

“When did we write in flight scenes?” I asked, which was when Eli explained that he and Tony had been tweaking the script while I had taken some time to get my head together, which made me feel like I wanted to step out of my body again, especially since Eli had said I needed to get my head together so matter-of-factly. When I thought back on the previous two or so weeks, I realized that I hadn’t been spending as much time with the boy, but had let all of our new colleagues step up. I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about making movies, truth be told, and I tried to make myself feel better by thinking of it not so much as stepping down, but rather as stepping out of the way. Mark and Tony were great people. The boy was happier than I had ever seen him. So why did I feel so dark inside—and like maybe I was kind of disappearing a little bit?

Luckily, there wasn’t much time to dwell on these bad feelings, because soon we were filming Bobby and all of the other police officers driving around Majestic slightly above the speed limit. Tony and Eli explained that they could speed up the film in postproduction to make it look like the cops were driving faster than they really were because Bobby said they couldn’t break the speed limit if there wasn’t a real emergency, which there wasn’t. It was interesting to see Tony and Eli setting up cameras on the streets and inside the police cruisers and even filming from tree branches and the roofs of stores. We spent all morning shooting flashing cop car lights and wild hairpin turns and recording sirens and police talk. And all of the cops did a great job of acting, especially since Eli, obviously, wasn’t literally up in the air flying around Majestic, so Bobby and his colleagues had to point at clouds and stare up at the blue sky with an intensity one reserves for the supernatural. They did such a good job I started to believe that the feathered monster might really be up there if I only tilted back my head and took a look for myself.

Eli kept giving the actors notes, saying things like, “This isn’t something you see every day. It’s a flying feathered man! You’re terrified, but you’re also intrigued. Like the cops at the end of E.T.”

It was heartening to see how everyone—even passersby in the street—respected the instructions Eli gave. Whenever the sound guys Mark and Tony had hired would get their microphones in position, Eli would say, “Quiet on the set,” and then it was so silent I could hear my own heartbeat.

Next, we filmed my character—the monster’s father figure—running through the woods with Eli in costume.

“Just fly away!” I yell at the monster as we slalom through the trees with cameramen and sound guys following us.

“My power of flight isn’t strong enough to carry us both!” the monster yells back.

“I’m an old man. You have so much ahead of you. And there has to be a place for young men like you. Somewhere in the great big world. There must.”

“I’ll never leave you. Never!”

When we get to the stream, it isn’t exactly the raging river called for in the script, but Eli had assured me they’d touch it up in postproduction to make it look impassable.

With our backs to the trickling brook that will look like a fearsome river in the final movie, the monster and his father figure face all eight members of the Majestic police force, who are pointing very real-looking fake guns at us.

Here Bobby says, “This is the end of the road for you two. The CIA said shoot to kill all human targets. But they’ll want the monster for testing and experimentation. After which, they’ll want to dissect the bird boy to advance science and prevent anyone else from spontaneously growing feathers, God forbid. Bullet holes might destroy important scientific information. Got it, everyone?”