Three Movies in Three Weeks: Proud Mary Part Three

In which we shoot a movie, and a glorious transformation occurs.

We left New York for wonderful Princeton, N.J. at a noticably early hour of the morning. It's weird, but by the beginning of the shoot, when almost everyone else on the crew is beginning their work on the shoot, the producer's job is sort of done. Preproduction is arguably where a producer makes a movie.

Luckily, I had a lot of other jobs to keep myself occupied on set. At one point, I made a list with Reemes, our sound guy, of all my jobs on "Proud Mary."

Producer
Assistant Director
Location Manager
Key Grip
Grip
Gaffer
Electric
Transportation Coordinator
Head of Craft Services
Production Manager
Production Coordinator
Production Accountant

Just to ruin any tension I may have built up by writing 5,200 words on this so far, I should say our little shoot went really well. We had just the right number of crew members, were ahead of schedule every day, got all our footage, more or less hit our budget, ate good food and were all happy. One thing did light on fire, but it was only a China ball and I wasn't on set at the time.

That said, I should remind you that I had a lot at stake in "Proud Mary." At 19 pages, this was the longest thing I'd ever produced, and some of the challenges I faced (having to shoot in Jersey, having no budget, doing the production work all on my own) made it eerily similar to a short film I'd done before where nobody was happy with me or my work as a producer.

This wasn't an easy shoot, either. Nadine probably got the worst of it since she was running both camera and electric and so never got a break. Nick got sick. So did Clyde, although not until right after the shoot. Our lead, Zoe, who was in every scene, managed to stay healthy by sleeping for almost all the time we weren't working.

Things went wrong, but we had talked about how to do things so many times that we never hit anything we couldn't work around. We had a big advantage on keeping to schedule because Nick knew exactly what he wanted and when, just like a good director should. It's like naval warfare - if you have a battle plan going in, it tilts the battle in your favor - even if you abandon the plan the moment you have contact with the enemy.

At a couple of points we got snowed out. This was very surprising, because the forecast (which we checked relentlessly) never called for snow, and it certainly didn't seem cold enough.

Nevertheless, there it was, unmistakable white flakes right in the middle of our frame. So we went and got our interiors and then came back to get the dolly outdoors. We were fighting the light by the end of the day, but we were fighting the light at the end of every day, and always to get ourselves as ahead of schedule as we could.

We were working smoothly enough that we were even able to turn some surprises to our advantage.

We shot a full day at the sketchiest motel in the Princeton area or maybe ever. When we got our room, we were surprised because it wasn't one of the rooms we'd seen during our scout. Its most prominent feature was a bright red jacuzzi with brown mold growing on the bottom (Reemes checked the taps - no water). Its next most prominent feature was three mirrored walls and a mirrored ceiling.

This room was, as you can imagine, amazing. It was perfect for the character. At first, though, Nadine refused to shoot there. The problem was all those mirrors - at first glance, there was nowhere to put a light, or even the camera, so it wouldn't show up in the frame.

Nick was so excited about the room, though, that he went around finding all sorts of angles and places to hide the camera - shooting the characters in the mirrors, erecting a pyramid of beercans (or "beeramid") to block one camera placement, shooting from really low, etc.

Man, was that room amazing. Nadine and our gaffer had to spend the night there. They were terrified.

So "Mary" was ultimately a triumph. I came back from that shoot much more confident in my abilities and feeling much more capable of living my life and doing the work I wanted to do.