What You See in the Dark - Manuel Munoz [64]
Their brief scouting trip, back in October, had failed to bring them even the road shots showing the Actress driving her car: they had to shoot those later on a soundstage and add the voice-overs in the editing. Production began after the October trip, straight weeks of tight, rushed work all through the fall. Some of the sequences that involved no actors—like long shots of the Phoenix skyline, or a rear projection of a police car driving along a stretch of desert highway—were completed by an unsupervised second unit, the Director specifying exactly what needed to show up on film. But not this scene: the desire for order was keener, the Director sitting the Actress down and showing her how the sequence was going to be staged and filmed, a barrage of particular shots, each of them choreographed with a precision the Actress found almost daunting in its exactitude. The Director mapped out each shot on board after board, and she could see for herself how he was planning to get around the problem of her nakedness: the trust that the camera would shoot only the particular part of the body he was asking for and nothing else. Her torso, her thighs, her shoulders, the curve of her bare back.
The Actress had studied the sequence carefully. The Director clarified once again the number of camera setups, the lighting changes, even the position of the crew. Already it occurred to her that it would take an enormous amount of time between setups: a glitch in the opening, once her hair was already wet, would require the hairdresser’s blow-dryer at the very least. She flipped through the storyboards with a measured, silent alarm, moving past the issue of having to disrobe in front of the crew: she was going to have to be in that state continuously, always reaching for cover whenever the camera stopped rolling.
Last week, there’d been difficulties with the initial set design, a plumbing flaw with the drain and a lack of warm water, clearly frustrating the Director, and it was then that she understood just how attuned he was planning to be to the specificity of his mind’s eye, and she thought—of all things—of a painter setting a bowl of fruit on a sunlit windowsill, sketching quickly to catch the shadow of pear against orange, the shallow depth of the bowl, before the sun interrupted the composition.
How fleeting it would all be. She removed her robe and waited for the first of the difficult shots involving water: unwrapping the bar of soap and turning on the showerhead. There she is, finally admitting to her wrongdoing in her own mind, and she’s rinsing all of the bad thoughts away. This was what she was meant to convey, but the Actress stared at the unwrapped bar of soap sitting on the edge of the tub, doubting if she could ascribe that much meaning to such a banal act. It seemed ludicrous to her now, standing in her moleskin covering and bikini bottom, to be acting, almost impossible, given the number of eyes on her. More and more, the Director had told her, mentioning Europe and its realism, the shedding of the American style of artifice, and the ever-closer tilt to the vulgarity of everyday life. Goose pimples broke out on her arms when she thought of the water, praying it would come out warm.
The action started and she stepped into the tub with complete faith, the way she would enter an elevator in a tall building and trust the cables to bring her safely down the heights. The camera was positioned just below where the showerhead would be. She pulled back the curtain and bent down to pick up the soap from the ledge, unwrapping it carefully, trying not to be distracted by the microphone near her hands, off camera, capturing the sound of the paper. All eyes were on the task at hand, but still she felt their intrusion, the many hours she would be standing like this