Day 5:
Call time: 10:00 am
Burbank. Undisclosed hotel location. The fact that we were
able to shoot in a working hotel in the manner we did was such a coup I can’t
even begin to explain. This was another massive day: 10 pages / 5 scenes.
Looking back on it now, this really should have been split up into two days but
operating with the budget available to us, there was no way to build our own
location on a stage and, unfortunately, it would have been a little risky to do
two days at the hotel.
We had a lot of different scenes with a lot of cast,
effects, a few small stunts and a tight confined location (which didn’t help
with the lighting).
We started the day with a flashback scene that comes in the
middle of the third bridge. As Labyrinth is talking to Charles Murtha he thinks
back to this scene. Labyrinth, essentially, was a Jason Bourne type of assassin
for MI:6 in Britain, having come up through the SAS. One of his first missions
was to assassinate this man named Lisandro, who was a revolutionary leader in
Santiago, Chile (invented, of course). This was the one scene completely
invented separate from the book and Travis and I wrote it to explain the moment
when Labyrinth began his journey towards where he is now. Lisandro challenges
him in a profound way that alters his vision of what he’s doing and why.
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| Photo by Alex Minkin |
We’re filming this scene in a practical bathroom with
mirrors everywhere so it took a little working out. For the gun shot, Bruce,
our prop master, brought in a guacamole gun, which is essentially an air
powered device that can shoot blood, guts, etc. to mimic a gunshot. It’s pretty
awesome but, of course, it’s messy. All I can say is that Hal looked badass in
his black gear with the silenced Browning .22.
I actually learned something really fascinating on this
shoot. Initially, in the scene, I had Labyrinth using a silence .45. Bruce, who
was a former member of Delta Force and did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan back
in the 90s, told me that the only gun that can actually be silenced is a .22. Anything
larger and you still hear the gun shot. In fact, if you were to fire a silenced
.22 all you would hear is the click of the hammer. Crazy! Wanting to maintain as much authenticity as we
could, we switched it to the .22 and it plays really well. We never fired the
weapon as the shot happens off screen. It took us quite a while to wrap this
scene up, after which we moved immediately into what will be cyber-bridge 5.
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| Photo by Alex Minkin |
In this bridge, Labyrinth has kidnapped Shane Corbett and
brought him up to a hotel room where the three of the many women he raped
(remember the scene we shot yesterday?) are given the chance to get their
revenge.
There’s a lot of movement in the scene, from Labyrinth
dragging in Shane, sitting him down, getting in his face, turn to stop a girl
from attacking too early, going back to Shane, tying him up, standing back,
pulling out a phone, kneeling down to film as the girls approach Shane and cut
him. Paul and I decided to shoot this whole scene hand held and in order to
capture a certain amount of energy from both the actors AND the camera
operator, we decided to try the angle looking towards Shane in one long shot,
as opposed to breaking it down. The idea was to then turn it around and shoot
the angle looking towards Labyrinth and the girls in one take, using two
cameras (as most of this shoot did). We did several takes of it and the energy
of both Hal, the girls, Shane and Nate (camera op) was fantastic. And I could
see the bits and pieces I know I’d end up using in the edit, which were usually
parts of a shot or angle that would be tough to explain to an operator to get
or that happened accidently because of how everyone was moving through the
scene. (Hence, my reason, as explained in yesterdays post, for shooting long
takes.
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| Photo by Alex Minkin |
At this point we had gotten really behind on our schedule.
Coming up were two scenes that took place in a hotel room both involving the
same actors and technically the same location but I was being told that we
couldn’t continue shooting in the hotel until 3am. Beyond the fact that it
would have been nearly five hours over our day we also had guests staying on
the same floor. So, I was informed that I needed to cut a scene. Without a
doubt, I knew which scene I had to cut. While both were important, only one was
crux to your understanding of the story in the book. I felt terrible about it,
especially because I had asked a friend, Bella Dayne, to come out for it and
that she and Alain would be speaking in English, French and German. I was
heartbroken when I had to tell her but I knew in the back of my head that I’d
find a way to shoot the scene, since I wasn’t cutting it because it wasn’t
important, it was because I had to choose one.
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| Photo by Alex Minkin |
The scene we did shoot that night was probably our most
traditional. Lending itself to the nature of the scene and to do something
different, we shot the back and forth interview (it wasn’t suppose to be a
taped TV interview however) in lock offs with your more traditional
master/medium/cu format, albeit, with a little tweak in the framing to satisfy
my desire to not do something traditional. It was nice to just let the camera
run as these two battled it out and the two actors, Thomas Mikusz playing Alain
Pantin and Christopher Frontiero playing Johnny Knack, really killed it.
Lastly, we had to get the beginning portion of the scene
with Lisandro, where he’s standing by the window on the phone saying goodnight
to his wife. The scene plays via Labyrinth’s POV view through a closet as
Lisandro dismisses his bodyguards and retires to the bathroom. We shot the
scene quickly. Jesus Diaz, who played Lisandro, did an amazing job bringing
humanity and strength to the character.
And with that, principal photography on Dark Revelations was over. The next day, Saturday, Paul, Hal and I
went down to Angels Flight in LA to shoot a quick scene of Labyrinth
overlooking the location where the bomb goes off. We totally stole the shot and
got what we needed but not before having to kick a homeless man off a bench.
At the end of the day, we shot a 53-minute film in five
days, capturing an enormous amount of varied content that, having seen it in
its final form on a big screen, feels really epic, really big, very cinematic
and incredibly satisfying. I know Zuiker loved it. And I hope you like it as
well.
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