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.

It feels a little like a calm before the storm. Due to visa issues (after much negotiation we’ve brought on Thimios Bakatakis, a cinematographer from Greece), we have decided today to push a week. Or at least we are in discussions. For me, this feels like the biggest luxury. Nothing would make me happier than to have more time to think and pull this together. But I’m happy today with how the pieces are falling into place.