Production Diary, Day 1: First Light at Zilker

Day one is in the can, and it started the way the movie starts: with a man asleep in a park while the city wakes up around him.

We were at Zilker before most of Austin had coffee, basecamped at the Polo Fields. First slate of the picture belonged to Dean Stanfield as Owen "Odie" Harper, with our director Nick Barr calling the first action of the shoot. Our DP Lester Platt took the opening image handheld on a 35mm, starting close on a sleeping man and widening until the whole skyline is behind him. Later he switched to a 50 for Odie walking the park with downtown in the distance, and our script supervisor Melisa Balderrama Siles wrote a single word on her continuity sheet: Perfect.

The Zilker and Barton Springs cluster carried most of the day. The wake-up at the overlook. The crosswalk. The swim. The boot-shine down at the shoreline. Then a skeleton crew peeled off for the cardboard sign scenes at South Lamar and Menchaca, and we finished at the 7-Eleven on Menchaca Road, parking lot and dumpster both. Scenes 2 through 11, give or take the ones that shared slates. Eighty-five takes on day one. Nobody flinched.

The machine behind the machine

Our 1st AD Michelle Ragay ran the day with military precision, which in her case is not a figure of speech. She is a U.S. Air Force veteran who also directs her own films, and you can feel both halves working at once: the planner's clock and the director's eye.

Small human detail from basecamp: Nick's Day One letter was waiting for the crew this morning. One line from it has been rattling around my head all day. "A movie doesn't make itself. It's a group of artists trusting the director has a picture of what we're painting."

Then we went out and shot eighty-five takes of exactly that.

Fourteen more days on the board. See you tomorrow.