Production Diary, Day 5: The Board Is a Hypothesis

A shooting schedule is a hypothesis. Today we ran the experiment and got a different answer than the one we wrote down in April.

The original board had us at the Sunrise Homeless Navigation Center today. Instead, Sunrise is now locked for Wednesday the 27th, a date that works better for everyone, most importantly for Sunrise's own operations, which continue serving real people every single day we are in production. So our 1st AD Michelle Ragay and our UPM Georgia Irons did what good ADs and UPMs do: they took the week apart and put it back together overnight, and the downtown apartment cluster moved up from next week to today.

The result did not look like a plan B. Sixty-nine takes, the biggest single-day number since day one. Scenes 43, 44, 45, 46, 47 and 49, the dense mid-film stretch where Odie's day starts compounding on him. Our DP Lester Platt went to a 25mm for Scene 46 and let the space do some of the storytelling. Dean Stanfield, five days into playing a man having the longest day of his life, is starting to wear the day on his body in a way that is genuinely hard to watch and impossible to look away from. That is a compliment. That is the whole job.

Why I am telling you this

A lot of production blogs sand the reshuffles out of the story, as if admitting the schedule moved is admitting weakness. I think the opposite is true. Watching this team absorb a changed week without drama has been the most reassuring thing I have seen on this shoot. The premortem exercise Nick ran before production, where the team wrote out imaginary disaster scenarios in advance, apparently included a version of exactly this. When the real thing showed up, it had already been rehearsed.

Rolls A010 and A011 went to our DIT Danny Keinarth tonight. Week one is done: five days, six locations, and one rebuilt schedule that nobody in the audience will ever be able to detect. Which is the point.

We take a breath, and then we go downtown.