Production Diary, Day 6: Memorial Day, Downtown, and a Blue Wig

Shooting downtown Austin on Memorial Day is a cheat code. The streets belong to you in a way they never do on a Tuesday.

We based out of the Trinity block on East 7th, the church campus that has hosted more Austin film crews than probably any other address downtown, and spent the morning on the exterior work: Scenes 34, 35, 36 and 42, plus pieces of 45, 50 and 51. Then came the day's big logistical set piece, a full company move across town to Mueller Lake Park for the back half. Company moves are where shoots go to die, and this one went off clean. Sixty-seven takes total on the day, split across two very different corners of the city.

Enter Blu

Today also gave us Syd Goin's first day as Blu, and I want to be careful here because I could write a thousand words. Blu is one of the most visually distinctive characters in this picture. The blue wig arrives in your field of vision about a half second before Syd does, and then the performance takes over and you forget the wig entirely. Watching Dean Stanfield's Odie share frame with Blu is watching two completely different frequencies of survival find each other. I suspect you will be seeing a lot of Blu when this film starts putting faces on posters. You heard it here first.

The downtown material is where ODIE's world gets biggest. Background players, real streets, the actual visual noise of a city that mostly walks past a man like Odie without seeing him. Our DP Lester Platt kept the camera close to Dean through all of it, so the city stays a blur and the man stays sharp. When you see the finished film, notice how rarely downtown gets to be pretty. That is a choice.

Holiday shooting means a crew giving up a long weekend, and nobody said a word about it except to ask what time call was. Our script supervisor Melisa Balderrama Siles filled more continuity pages today than any day since day one.

Rolls A012 and A013 are in. Tomorrow gets smaller and stranger: buses.