Sometimes I feel like life is imitating art. Both myself and my main character suddenly find ourselves responsible for the well being of three complex, colourful, sometimes moody, sometimes delightful old timers. Also, they keep challenging me to make the best movie possible. July 9 Tonight we narrowly avoid a small disaster. We were shooting a huge outdoor scene with a full orchestra and it started drizzling.
Water ruins the instruments, so about a third of the orchestra refused to continue.
On our budget there is no way we'll get them back. The other two thirds agree to do one more take, so I'm now forced to collapse about 15 shots into one. We kept two cameras rolling and cheated a little by discreetly reloading one of the cameras during the longest single take in cinematic history. We were shooting a scene on the beach today and Eric asked for one more take. He then proceeded to open his shirt and do a dead-on imitation of Charlton Heston in Planet of the Apes.