We start shooting tomorrow and I feel surprisingly, happily calm. Yesterday I had time to go to Banana Republic and buy a few button down shirts for the shoot. It’s like the day before going to camp. I like to know what my uniform is going to be and I feel comfortable knowing I have a set of new, clean shirts to wear each day. I met this afternoon with Fonzie, my dear editor, and we caught up on life (briefly) and then I wanted to show him a lot of the films I’ve been talking with Thimios about the last few days. Close study of Pialat—the subtle differences between L’enfance Nue and Loulou, for example—still reveals things to me. And still leads me to new shots and strategies of approaching our film. I need to talk this afternoon with Thimios about the use of the handheld shot, which he resists like the plague. More…

It seems to be a running theme. I’m exhausted. I think it’s the tenth day of 12-14 hour days and, though I’m mostly feeling lucky, today I also feel like I might collapse here in the office. But no time, or interest, in melodrama. Thimios is stuck in Ottawa, awaiting his visa. The locations are sort of finding their way, sort of not.  We get one in the morning (the video porn shop), we lose one in the afternoon (a high end fashion boutique in the Meatpacking District that wanted $3000!—so much for supporting queer cinema). More…

Very tired again. OK location scout this morning, but a couple of the spaces weren’t as good as I thought they were going to be from the pictures. Sometimes, when things go a little off the expected, I feel a spike of anxiety that mostly makes me want to sleep. More…

Spent the morning with Thimios, his first day in the city. It was easier than I expected, from the start. Conversation becomes much easier when there is suddenly a topic between you; it creates the intimacy with its need. More…

The Internet is down all day today. It creates an odd vibe in the office, a slight calm, a slight panic. More…

I feel on the verge of overwhelmed this afternoon. It’s not the amount of work, and the details, it’s the overload of personalities, and the handling of people. I really should go to Al-Anon meetings during this process, but I’m finding it impossible—or I’m just not prioritizing my “recovery” as I should. A crash of thunder outside the window. More…

A good day. I spent four hours with Mauricio (Zacharias) working on a new Danish draft, which we will publish for the crew early this week. Mostly, our intentions were to revise for Thure Lindhardt, who as of last Sunday (seems) to be officially on. More…

It’s interesting/uncomfortable/true how much directing is about power and how that power affects the way you are in the world. It’s a rush and it’s embarrassing, both. I am thinking of the last few days and how my friend Ioannis has been helping me cast the “Russian hustler” and how, in our own way, it’s become a version of a (non-realized) casting couch. Mauricio, Ioannis, young Jason and I exchange emails discussing whether or not someone’s body is good enough, whether they seem “too Chelsea,” whether they could be a prostitute in real life? But even more, can they be a prostitute in the movies? Does their body signify a selling of their bodies? More…

We’ve cast the leads and the other parts are slotting in. It was a bottleneck, the difficulty of finding a great American actor who is comfortable—or whose agent is comfortable—with him taking off all his clothes and being gay in a movie. Thure Lindhardt came to us at the suggestion of our producer Marie-Therese Guirgis’s boyfriend Soren. Thure is an active presence in a role that could have been passive. I seem to write these whiny white men in all my movies, as my D.P. from Forty Shades of Blue has pointed out. Writing real charm, it seems, is one of the more difficult things. Thure seems to have it naturally. I have crushes on both my actors—Thure and Zachary Booth—that seem to grow as I know them. This seems to me a good thing. More…

Hired a costume designer, Liz Vastola, though now I hear at our budget she doesn’t even come on until two weeks out from production. When I made my last very low budget film, The Delta, in 1995, we were paying so little, everyone just started working when they got the job. More…