The Family Fang - Kevin Wilson [130]
Before filming that first scene, Lucy had recommended that Annie spend as much time with the children as possible. “They’re supposed to love you. So it would help if you could make them love you for real.” Annie shook her head. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.” At the rehearsals, Annie had treated the children as she did all actors, with a polite cautiousness, a respect for their space. But on the final night before shooting, Annie had screwed up her courage, knocked on the door of the children’s room, and then walked in to find them playing a video game on their PlayStation. “What is this game?” she asked the children, who, without looking away from the screen, replied, “Fatal Flying Guillotine III.” Annie smiled. “Is there some kind of half-man, half-bear in this game?” she wondered, already knowing the answer. “Major Ursa,” said Thomas. “Move over,” Annie said, and proceeded to beat the hell out of these four children for nearly an hour. “You are so good at this,” Isabel said to Annie, who nodded. “I am,” Annie said. “I am so good at this.”
The evening after shooting the first scene, Lucy called Annie’s hotel room. “Do you want to come over?” she asked, and Annie, in her pajamas, walked down the hall to Lucy’s room. There was a bank of screens, each showing different angles of the same scene, Annie’s body nearly obscured by the children, all in bone-white sleeping gowns that ran from their necks to the floor. She sat next to Lucy, each of them donning headphones, and watched the camera slowly zoom in on Annie’s face, her eyes shut, the children leaning closer and closer to place their mouths on her. It was more sensual than Annie had expected, though terrifying as well, how Annie shrank and shrank beneath the children’s forms, the creeping, twisting smoke that threatened to swallow all of them. “It’s really great,” Annie told Lucy, whose eyes, unblinking, reflected the final shot of Annie prone on the floor. Over the headphones, they could hear the sound of the children’s laughter, echoing against the high ceilings of the bedroom.
Buster had sent Annie the most recent draft of his new novel, which she read at night. One afternoon, Isabel found the pages in Annie’s bag during a break in filming and said, “What is this?” Annie told her that it was a story. “What’s it about?” she asked. “It’s about a bunch of kids who get kidnapped and have to fight each other in order to earn their keep.” All at once, the children lined up in front of Annie. “We want to hear about that,” Thomas said. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for kids,” she told them. “I hate it when people say that,” Caitlin yelled. “Why do people write stories about kids if they don’t want kids to read them?” They begged her to read some of it, and so she grabbed a random page from somewhere in the middle of the novel and read: “The children grew restless when they weren’t in the pit. They took their frustrations out on their own bodies, pressing lit matches against their skin, rubbing against the sharp edges of the holding pen so that they would not lose the anger that they needed to survive.” Thomas clapped his hands. “You are so going to read this to us,” he said, and so, when they weren’t being tutored, as they waited to walk onto the set and burst into flames, the children listened to Annie tell them about the children in Buster’s story, who would do unspeakable acts in order to please the adults who watched over them.
One time, Lucy walked into the room just as Annie was telling the children about another expedition by the child wranglers, who set nightly traps in the outlying towns to capture the children who were brave enough, and foolish enough, to stray from their houses. One girl, wrapped in an ever-tightening net, ripped at the ropes until the skin rubbed off of her hands, kicking and screaming as the wrangler dragged her over the rocky terrain. The