Some Surreal Moments from Production

Filmmaking is an inherently surreal process - for example, I just worked four days on a short film about a woman who falls in love with a clown (the clown was very polite. Offscreen, I mean.)

Each day I work on a production, I try to identify a Surreal Moment of the Day. Here's a few of my most memorably surreal moments of production work.

We are on location at college in the woods in New Jersey. I'm walking to the 15 passenger van to pull it around to the front of set when I see a small woodland creature (possibly a gopher run under the wheels of the van. I don't want to run it over, so I run at the van waving my arms and yelling "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!"

After that, I thought I had my surreal moment of the day for sure, but later I got a call to come to set and replace the art director, who had to leave set. Here's what he told me:

"Ribbles, come sit in this stairwell and make sure you duck behind that door because it's in shot. Now, for every take you're going to have to put a quarter cup of pudding on the shelf just outside the door to set, then you'll have to put a jelly sandwich on the plate next to the kid on set. Inbetween takes, you're going to have to make a stack of jelly sandwiches and a bunch of these quarter-full pudding cups - we're about to run out of pudding, but Jason's coming back with more in a few minutes. Make sure the jelly sandwiches are really full and messy, because they have to drip out of the sandwich and on to a keyboard during each take. Oh, and between takes you're also going to have to clean the jelly out of the keyboards with this bottle of water, these paper towels, these Q-tips and this knife. The knife is to pop out the keys of the keyboards so you can clean inside. I know it's a lot to do but you'll have to work quickly. They're going to yell at you because you have to do it alone and they're doing a lot of takes and the takes are really short and I'm really sorry but I have to leave right now because I have to catch the train back to the city and I really appreciate this and good luck."

Get all that? You can re-read it if you need to.


So for the rest of the afternoon I was sitting in a stairwell making stacks of jelly sandwiches, putting 3/4 of each of these cups of chocolate pudding in styrofoam cups, and cleaning the jelly out of keyboards with bottles of water, paper towels and Q-tips. Which is pretty goddamn surreal.

But if I had to narrow it down to a single moment? After a few hours of this I was exhausted. Another PA, a good kid named Toby, had come over to help. I was covered in chocolate pudding and jelly. We were working in silence because any sound would ruin the take.

I was about to make another stack of jelly sandwiches and I turned the jar sideways and I found that jelly makes a funny noise when you're really tired and it's rolling down the inside of the jar.

Really funny.

Like, irresistibly funny.

Kind of a "squishy-squishy-squishy" sort of noise.

So now, in addition to having to worry about the jelly sandwiches, the pudding and the keyboards, I need to worry about cracking up in the middle of a take. I tried the old improv trick of biting the bottom of my thumb, which succeeded in suppressing the noise but not in making that squishy-squishy-squishy noise any less funny or me any more functional.

Finally Theo (who was getting a little annoyed) suggested I just take a break, which I did. I went outside and laughed my ass off for a minute, and then I came back and asked Theo to take jelly sandwich duty until we wrapped.