Tag Archives: Production Diary

Production Diary

Day 79: What The Film Needs by

Zach Booth in front of a Neil Goldberg on set

A wasted day off. It’s hard to rest when you are used to working. It’s hard to rest in general I find. I am one of the many who has fallen, who has stopped knowing how to read a book, who can only read a paper if I’m having a meal by myself. I still hope this changes again, reverts to the years just after college when I could read for hours, days in fact. Though I was also more depressive then. Now I’m healthier, happier, but still not very good at staying still. And with Facebook and now Twitter, and the emails, and the calls….and the dreaded cam sites. It all overwhelms me and makes my day off the opposite of peaceful. Writing helps. Though now this ”production journal” is now on the Internet—the site was launched and looks very good (though how do we get people to go to it?)—and people make comments (not many, given), and I wonder if I’ll regret some things I say. I don’t say everything. More…

Production Diary

Day 75: Extras by

On set at El Faro

Tense day and short turnaround. We stopped shooting at around 11:00 and the crew was probably there for another hour. Now we start again at 9:30 and there’s a good chance for bad vibe. Arrived in the morning at 8:30 at El Faro and the guy who was supposed to open the restaurant at 6:30 hadn’t arrived. Lots of talk of possible other locations—I call Jim Bidgood and he is as funny and charming as ever and open to us coming over if necessary that morning for the re-shoot—but we end up getting in and by 11 or so.we are starting to shoot. It’s a group scene, lots of new actors, lots of extras. I’m not sure I’m on my game—some days you feel like you are shooting but you aren’t necessarily in complete control—but, luckily, the actors are very good and natural, so it works, hopefully. More…

Production Diary

Day 74, Part 2: Shooting Sex by

Actor Chris Lenk on Set

Shooting sex. A difficult thing to write about. There’s a good long essay to write about it, if one had the skills, because there are so many moving parts to the story. The thing I’ve begun to notice with this film, on this set is that as we’ve shot more of it—and there’s been a lot—there is a familiarity about it that I’m guessing is not unlike what begins to happen on porno sets. My deeper hope is that the set of the movie is not unlike the movie itself, meaning that the openness of our approach to shooting these scenes makes these types of moments less foreign to the grips, to the gaffers, to myself as a director. That we are making a movie about openness and bringing sex into the picture (into the light), and so it becomes visible, familiar, easy to talk about. That we are making a movie that keeps the lights on. More…

Production Diary

Day 74: One More Time by

Actor Miguel Del Toro on set at the Blue Store

It’s the first morning I wish I had more time to write, because a lot of days have passed, and a lot of moments that I’d like to get down to remember. But I have to be at set in 25 minutes—El Faro, the old Spanish place in the West Village—to review the “crack” scenes, which were from our second day and, thus, have scratches. Did I mention that the first four days of the shoot we had a faulty camera and there are intermittent scratches on all the footage? Intermittent being the operative word. Lucas and I are trying to figure out whether to do a re-shoot or not on Friday, our day off. A hard rock to push up the hill because, at least for me, my own tiredness craves that day to myself. This is always an issue in directing: when to push, when to lay back. You have to constantly assess. One of the hardest moments on set is “one more time.” More…

Production Diary

Day 70: Too Nice by

D5-9097

I walked past my ex-boyfriend’s first apartment on W. 15th Street on my way to set this morning. Mild musings, but it was a long time ago—14 years—and I feel somewhat like a different person. I do believe people can change, maybe not essential personalities, but the level of pain goes up and down and, with it, the character. I don’t live in the kind of steady pain I used to, and loneliness and isolation. It’s a running theme in the movie, certainly, that from the age of 13, when I first started having sex, in secret, with a lot of shame, I held a certain part of me back from others for the next 26 years. I came out at 40, I might say. I decided, through the Program, to not keep a part of myself back anymore. You get mostly what you pay for. More…