Kodak and NEON recently launched an analog short film contest with the prompt: Tell us your love story. To bring these love stories to life, they provide the camera, shooting equipment, and ten rolls of their super 16mm film, along with processing and scanning of the film footage, to the chosen winners. Out of over 2,000 applicants, 10 filmmakers were chosen. On December 16th, Claudi received the news that he is one of them. On January 31st, the completed short film is due.
Claudi’s film is about a middle-aged woman who lives in a small apartment with her obtuse husband and her ungrateful adult son, both insensitive and selfish men whom she waits on hand and foot. Between those walls, the burden of domestic labor falls squarely on her shoulders. One day, in a moment of overwhelming self-reflection, confronted with the horrors of her daily existence, she accidentally-yet-magically walks right through the wall of her apartment straight through to the other side, and finds herself next door at the neighbor’s, a senile and myopic widower who believes her to be his dead wife. Her family dismisses her when she tries to recreate this magic trick, slamming her body against the same wall over and over again, and even once she has mastered the feat and can walk through walls at will, though the universe has bestowed upon her a strange and extraordinary gift, she feels as stuck as ever.
As far as love stories go, this one is unusual; a bizarre love triangle juxtaposing the woman’s love for her family—unappreciated and unreciprocated— with her own unrealized self-love, and the neighbor’s undying love for his wife.
For the main character, Claudi casts a red-headed woman with a triple chin, a woman who does not have much acting experience and no reel of any kind. She’s only recently signed up for an acting class for the first time. But her face is so expressive that Claudi takes a chance. “If she really can’t act,” he says, “I’ll just have to do close-ups of her face the whole time.” But to our amazement, she is a wonderful actress. She never says a line the same way twice, yet every take of hers is usable. And she doesn’t looks like she’s acting. The words, coming off the page and out of her mouth, become something new, transformed. She internalizes the emotion, never sounding read or rehearsed.
Quickly, the cast and crew are assembled. Officially, I take on the tedious role of Script Supervisor, because I’m well-organized and meticulous and I know the script inside-out. But my real job is to be there for Claudi, his second pair of eyes. “I want you to be right next to me all the time,” he says, “making sure the performances are good. Because when I’m shooting, you know, I’m paying attention to so many things, sometimes I can’t tell until later, when I rewatch the takes, if something works or not.” Music to my ears. I’m happy to be important, happy to be needed, happy to be by his side.
Though it’s been almost three years since I stopped working on set, like a fish in water, I jump right into the rhythm. I surprise myself by how much I enjoy it. When I did it for a living, I was usually trying not to fall asleep standing up. I never got to work on things I enjoyed and rarely with people I liked. But here, with Claudi, among friends, I’m so focused that I’m not thinking about anything else, operating strictly on set-time and movie-logic.
“Picture’s up! Let’s roll sound, roll camera.”
”Sound speed.”
”Camera speed.”
”Scene two delta, take four, marker.”
”Camera set.”
”And…action!”
“What do you got?” asks the 2nd camera assistant.
“This’ll be Charlie,” I tell him. “Still on the 11-165mm?”
”We switched to the 15-120mm.”
”Got it, thanks.”
”Hey, how many takes did we do for scene 4?”
”Seven. And didn’t you take the ND filters off for that last shot?”
”Ah that’s right, let me fix that. It’s nice to work with someone so technical. You do a lot of narrative stuff?”
“Actually I’m a nanny.”
We are shooting in a mid-city apartment that belongs to a smug chain-smoking man who clearly loves being part of a production, it makes him feel important. Each time he walks by he shouts Points! Points! Points! at unnecessary volume, deafly abusing the filmset lingo (“points” being the equivalent of yelling “heads up” to avoid any accidents when you’re moving unwieldy equipment on set) made even funnier by the fact that the man is never wielding anything but a freshly-rolled joint. The reason he keeps passing through our set is to go outside and smoke it.
We are shooting half-blind, hunched over the dark and ultra-grainy images on the monitor, an inaccurate representation of what’s being captured on film. We have no playback and no dailies to review at the end of the day.
“What are we doing here Teeny?”
“We’re making your movie, Claudi.”
“What do you think? Good or garbage?”
“What do you think?”
“No idea.”
We won’t know until the film comes back.
Rolling, rolling.
We are shooting in the kitchen now, and I’m crammed up between a microwave, the kitchen counter, and the camera. The scene’s not quite working. After another rehearsal, I whisper to Claudi across the camera.
“Don’t you think she needs to take a beat after that line? This feels fake.”
Claudi, who has the hearing of a man twice his age, asks me to repeat what I said.
”Don’t. You. Think. She. Needs. To. Take. A. Beat?"
”What? Who?”
”What do you mean who? There’s only one actor in this scene!”
The camera assistant snickers.
”What are you saying, Teeny? I can’t hear you!”
I crawl under the camera to talk to him.
“We need to add a beat or something. Otherwise the whole scene feels off.”
“Tell her.”
I pull aside the actress and talk to her, ask her to try it like this. She stares at me with a blank expression. “Does that make sense?” I ask. Her mouth hangs ever so slightly open, her eyes unmoving. Oh no, I think, I’ve committed a cardinal sin of directing. I’ve gotten in her head and confused her. “But if that doesn’t feel natural to you,” I say, trying to backtrack, “then forget it. Let’s try another one and see how it goes.” On the next take, she does what I described, and the wrinkle in the scene smooths itself out.
Before our second day of shooting, I talk to Claudi in bed.
”I think you need to give the actors more direction on the performance. They all take notes really well, the one who plays the son says ‘thank you’ every time anyone talks to him. They’ll appreciate it, and the scenes will work better.”
“I hate directing the actors,” he tells me. “You do it.”
For the rest of the shoot, while Claudi makes all the executive decisions on the camera movements, the blocking, the framing, and the placement of specific props, I work with the actors, running lines with them and coming up with new ones, suggesting where they can ad-lib or take a beat, and giving them performance notes and praise after each take.
“Do you want to be a director, too?” the 2nd camera assistant asks me.
”Why, cause I’m bossy?”
”No, because you’re good with the actors.”
I did want to be a director once, but that’s an old dream. I have an unfinished short film behind me— one that will never see the light of day. I didn’t finish the project because it didn’t feel honest. But I experienced two important truths making it. The first— after wrapping one night, I took everybody out for dinner, and looking around the table, I realized each person was there because of me, to help me put this idea out into the world. That is the beautiful absurdity of filmmaking, a traveling circus hitching its wagon to the star of some crazed and dogged ringleader. (The opposite of writing, which is both blissfully and woefully solitary.)
The second occurred when we were shooting the final scene of the film. This was the scene I had always seen the most clearly in my mind, the one that stayed constant throughout the many versions of the script. It was a long take, shot hand-held, that started with a close-up and pulled out to a wide shot, with a dozen background actors crossing in front of the camera. Just as we were ready to shoot, the cinematographer told me we should start with the wide-shot and push in to a close-up instead, the exact opposite of the script. I was pissed. I couldn’t believe this sudden betrayal, out of the blue, undermining me in front of all the actors and the crew. “I wrote it like this,” I told him, “This is how it has to be.”
It wasn’t pleasant. I dug my heels in so hard they left a mark on the ground, and though he shot it my way, I could feel him resenting me the whole time. On the seventh take, with him grumbling in protest and his camera assistant complaining about how long the scene was taking —god, it was like pulling teeth— everything clicked. I watched the scene play out on the monitor and it brought tears to my eyes. (Really, I cried!) There was music playing but I couldn’t hear it, I was inside a dream— a dream I dreamt up and now saw before me in real life. I hid my tears and held my breath and finally said “Cut.” The rest of the project was a failure, but that one sublime moment was enough for me— proof that when your vision is strong and pure and clear, you can make it come true. I don’t expect anyone to understand why finishing the project after that didn’t make sense to me. Even now as I type this, Claudi asks me, “When am I going to see this short film of yours?” and I tell him, without an ounce of regret, “Never.”
But this is about Claudi’s shoot, and I keep debating whether to even mention mine. “Maybe I’ll take out the part about my short film,” I tell Claudi in the bathroom, when we’re both brushing our teeth.
“Don’t. It’s important to include your experience.”
“I don’t want anyone to think I gave up on my dream,” I say, spitting into the sink. “Is that what you think I did?”
“Of course,” he spits. “But now your skills can be put to use for my benefit!”
That afternoon, putting my skills to good use, I run lines with the actor playing the widowed next-door neighbor. He’s an 86-year-old man, shuffling his feet as he hunches over a cane. We sit down on the sofa, waiting for a light to be moved, a camera lens to be changed.
“When you grow up and become a director,” he tells me, “I want to work with you.”
I neglect to inform him I’m thirty— if I haven’t grown up by now, maybe I never will.
”Actually I want to be a writer.”
”Good luck. I’ve got four screenplays ready to go, and none of them are getting made. My writing partner is a young Nigerian man who lives in England. We send each other stuff, back and forth. We’ve got a great TV pilot. We just need a showrunner.”
”Really? That’s amazing.”
”Yeah. I was a surgeon for 40 years.”
”What kind of surgeon?”
”Ear, nose, and throat surgery. I worked on a lot of actors, performers.”
”So you just started acting in your old age, when you retired?”
”Oh, I did some acting when I was younger, too. I always liked it. But when I asked myself, which career is going to help me make more money? Between actor and doctor, I chose doctor.”
Consider this man’s life— almost 90 years old and still pushing to make another dream come true. You can put it off for decades, I suppose—go to medical school, move from one city to another, get married, get divorced, get married a second time, have children or not. The dream remains. In the end, the heart wants what the heart wants.
We make plans to go to Mel’s on Sunset for lunch.
“The best deli in Los Angeles. And I know what I’m talking about.”
”I bet you do. New York Jew and all.”
“Now that’s a stereotype. But because you’re cute, I’ll let it slide. And I won’t tell my wife,” he jokes.
”I won’t tell mine,” I say, patting Claudi on the back.
For the duration of the shoot, I’m cramped in one corner or another, a metal bar above my head, ducking so as not to block a light or get in the frame, crouching between c-stands and apple boxes, my laptop and stopwatch balanced on one knee, peering over Claudi’s shoulder to see the monitor. Just as we are ready to go again, the camera battery dies. Then, in the middle of the next take, the film roll runs out. “In a way, I’ve got the most useless job,” says Claudi, “I can’t make anything go faster.”
By day two, our backs are against the wall. We’re behind schedule and we owe two scenes from the day before. We arrive to set with no solution, we’ve got to figure one out on the spot. A quick meeting and a decision is reached; a scene is cut, another is consolidated, a new schedule made. That day, we find our groove and pick up the pace. We make up for the lost time.
By day three, we still owe a scene from the day before but now we have a new problem. We’re quickly running out of film. The producer tells us we have to shoot less takes. “I know you’re playing both sides,” she tells me in private, “And you want to let Claudi shoot as much as he wants. But Kodak will only pay for ten rolls to be developed. Those are the rules.”
Now the stakes are even higher. When you’re doing everything in long takes like we are, shooting entire scenes in one shot, there is no room for error, nothing to cut away to in case there’s a mistake. “You’re not giving yourself any wiggle room for editing this thing,” says the cinematographer, taking off his baseball hat and putting it back on, “But that was your vision from the beginning. You want to shoot it this way and that’s what we’re doing.”
This guy is all in, committed to the vision from start to finish. But in this moment, halfway through the day, when the odds are against us, he can’t hide his misgivings. ”You have to stick to your plan. Don’t change it now,” I tell them.
The three of us stack our hands in the center like ball players, all on the same team, promising to do our very best out there, on the imaginary field of dreams.
“Think it’s going to work?” Claudi asks me.
And I, ever the loyal collaborator, tell him, “It has to.”
All we have to do is rehearse as much as possible before we shoot, without rehearsing so much that the actors get wooden, and try not to waste any film.
“You want to do one more to be safe?” asks the assistant director. “Alright, here we go, one more time, rehearsal’s up!” and then, a minute later, “That’s a cut on rehearsal!”
Claudi and I look at each other, thinking the same thing. “Damn,” he says, shaking his head. “It was perfect.” If only we were rolling.
We do twelve more takes of the same scene to get it right, but it’s never as good as that rehearsal. The producer stands next to me as I time each take with my stopwatch, make my notes. Camera too slow. Can see the boom in the mirror. Door got stuck. Not enough smoke.
“Fucking hell,” says Claudi, “We should have recorded the first one.”
The general atmosphere on a filmset is one of both organized chaos and imperative tedium. But then there are moments of absolute transcendence. “It had to happen like this,” says Claudi, excited now, after a particularly difficult scene that worked out just right. “These actors, this location. It couldn’t have happened any other way.” He looks all around him, at the disarray of the set, the fake wall and the vintage furniture, the gear boxes and cables and tracks laid on the ground, people squeezing by each other, buzzing this way and that, and rubbing his hands together, he smiles at the production of it all. “Wow.” I know that feeling, seeing a scene come to life exactly how you planned it, yet better than you could have imagined. That rare flash of perfection that occurs when the multi-headed monster functions as a well-oiled machine. You bask in your glory for a second. Then, you move on to the next problem.
“I need to get room tone,” says the sound guy after we wrap the next scene.
“Quiet all around! Everybody hold the work!”
We all settle in, quiet and unmoving, while the sound guy records the ambient noise. It feels like a group meditation, a moment of silence for David Lynch, who died the day before we started shooting. I think about Wild At Heart, how the Good Witch appears at the end, floating down in her shimmery pink bubble to bring a beaten-up Sailor a message as he lies down on the ground, defeated. If you are truly wild at heart, you’ll fight for your dreams. That’s what she tells him. Aren’t I wild at heart? I ask myself. Haven’t I always been? Silence.
After thirty seconds of quiet, it’s all noise again, the shuffling of feet and the clinking of metal. “This brings us to the dining room, everybody!”
”Camera moves!”
“Points! Points! Points!”
”Scene twelve is up,” I yell out.
”Copy that,” is the reply.
At lunch, I chat with our wonderful actress.
“You really have a talent,” I tell her. “Are you working on other projects?”
“I am now. It’s only this past year that things have picked up.“
”Do you have another job outside of this?”
”I used to. But I really find I can focus and do much better if I don’t have a job.”
”I know what you mean.”
Now we’re on to the climax of the film, the scene when the woman is confronted with a decision to make about her life. The wise and benevolent neighbor, the woman’s very own Good Witch, kindly tells her, “Maybe you’ve been walking through the wrong walls.”
But the actor can’t get the line right, no matter how many times I feed it to him.
“Maybe you ought to stop walking through the wrong walls.”
”Maybe you should start walking through the right walls.”
”Maybe you can start by not walking through walls.”
”Maybe you could—”
”—Cut, cut, cut.”
Finally, we get the shot. It’s a wrap. Everybody claps and hugs and shakes hands.
”You’re incredible,” says Claudi to his wonderful actress. She beams.
“If this makes me a star,” she says to him, “you’re coming with me.”
While the deadline is fast approaching, the canisters of film are held up by an untimely storm, stuck in a facility in Atlanta. “One delay after another,” says Claudi, “That’s what my career is.” But the film is going to get finished one way or another, because Claudi’s wild at heart.
Meanwhile, I’m back to my day job, cutting up apples into tiny pieces for growing teeth, applying cream to baby butt rashes. The problem isn’t with my heart, which is truly wild and alway has been. The problem, maybe, is I’ve been banging my head against the wrong wall. I’m down on the ground with blood on my face, and here comes that lovely pink bubble. Now come on Sailor, get up. Get up and fight for your dreams.