What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [11]
The Actress wasn’t supposed to ask those questions, and she smirked at herself dismissively, looking out the window. It wasn’t her place to ask. She had a task at hand and nothing more. A silent scene of nervousness just this side of panic. Yes, she thought. That was exactly how she would play it.
It was easy, she knew, and maybe even halfway logical, for an audience to think a film was shot scene by ordered scene. That’s how life worked, after all, one thing happening after another. But this picture was being done piecemeal, a haphazard schedule. She had to think hard about the story. She found it difficult to follow the script sometimes, forgetting where the scene was placed in the story’s arc, what her character did or did not know. But she held her tongue and chided herself: she knew exactly what the Director would tell her. You hold in your hands a script. It tells you everything you need to know. If it’s not there, you don’t need to know it.
She looked up at the October sky over the hills, completely and unsurprisingly blue. Would the weather hold? No rain was expected, not even cloud cover, no worries for tomorrow. Just the technicalities of a short location shoot, away from the city itself and no onlookers: the equipment, the crew, the two actors. All for a scene that wouldn’t take place until well into the movie’s first act. But that was the beauty of editing, the layered splices after so many takes, a story without a seam. Such was her responsibility, to suggest continuity without effort, every scene making its crucial contribution, even though she had little to say. She looked at the script again and pictured how the shooting would go. First, the scene shot with a camera near the driver’s side window. Then the scene shot again with the camera crowding into her by the passenger seat. Then the shots again for line delivery, for lighting, for the position of the actor playing the policeman, for the microphones, for the position of her hands on the steering wheel, for the lighting director to adjust his reflective screens as the sun slowly made its way through morning. Again and again and again.
For such a small role. She wasn’t going to be in the picture after the first third. When the Actress had first read the script, she stopped on the character’s fate, then flipped back to the first page and the cast of characters. She was going to disappear. Violently. She tried to pay no mind to how the Director might have to stage this particular scene, focused only on the end of her character, the bulk of the script’s pages still gripped in the fingers of her right hand.
A supporting role. Nothing more. In the Director’s previous picture, that one actress had appeared playing two roles. She hadn’t done a particularly stellar job, some in the industry had said, but the Actress thought the performance more than adequate. She had sat in the theater with mild envy, the role too rich for words: A distraught wife is trailed silently throughout San Francisco by a police detective, from flower shop to museum to the foot of the glorious Golden Gate Bridge, where she finally tries to hurl herself into the bay. The detective rescues her and later falls in love, only to lose her again to a successful suicide attempt. It played, the Actress thought, like an odd type of silent movie, and she felt maybe she had fooled herself into believing she could have fit perfectly into the part. Was it really requiring much beyond posing, or was there something about silent-movie acting that