It Chooses You - Miranda July [36]
We splurged and ran two cameras all day, knowing we couldn’t expect Joe to repeat things he’d done, so each scene was filmed tight and wider at the same time. Then we’d shoot Hamish’s various reactions, which would hopefully bind the dialogue into the fiction. When I asked Joe to sell Hamish the old hair dryer, he handled it like a seasoned improviser, hilarious and real. Much harder was trying to get him to say specific lines, especially “You’re still in the beginning.” It was blisteringly hot, the room was crowded, and he’d been working for hours and hours (many of them spent waiting for planes to fly by). It was so hard to keep insisting that he say this particular sentence that had long since lost all meaning. He must have tried fifty times, so sweetly, always missing by a mile and then launching into a monologue about his own early married years, which he remembered perfectly. Finally on one take he said, “You’re in the middle of the beginning, right now.” It was a much better and more specific idea – that a beginning could have a beginning, middle, and end.
At the end of his fourteen-hour shoot day, Joe was in good spirits and seemed reluctant to see us all go, especially the pretty women. And two weeks later, he was still very much alive, making repairs on his house. When I was done shooting, I hurried to edit his scenes and record his voice-over lines as the Moon. But Joe continued to not die, and so after a while I relaxed, and as I shaped and reshaped the movie he indulged me with many, many recording sessions. One time I brought my laptop so I could watch the scene before we began the call-and-response process of recording. He seemed disconcerted at the sight of himself on the screen. “Strange to see yourself on there, isn’t it?” I said, turning the screen away from him. “I didn’t realize I was so old,” he said.
At the end of our last recording session, I asked him how he would describe what had happened, what we had done together.
Joe:
Well, about six years ago I bought fifty thousand Christmas cards from a friend of mine when he got a heart attack. So I put the ad in the PennySaver for the cards, and you came up and knocked on the door and told me you were answering the ad. And then later you explained to me what you wanted to do and asked if I’d be willing to do it.
Miranda:
Why’d you do it?
Joe:
Well, I’m kind of adventurous. I thought it would be worth a try and see how I liked it as I went along.
Miranda:
And how was it?
Joe:
You were real good to work with. You want something done and you’ll stop and think about exactly which way you want it and you’ll do it quick. I don’t know if there’d be a future in it for me, you know, making a little bit on the side. But I know I’m not going to be a big movie star.
Miranda:
How was the day when we shot at your house?
Joe:
Well, it was a little hectic, but I’d get up early in the morning to feed the cats at about five thirty or six. These are all the neighbor’s cats, not mine. Mine are all dead now. I went over to a parking lot where most of the help parked, and they served breakfast. Well, I got a couple cups of coffee and a couple of doughnuts and that. Then I came back here. But then it started becoming a little hectic because they had a lot of people standing around not doing anything and I didn’t know what their purpose was. I had to tell them to keep out of the one