The script is quite possibly done. I mean, I still need to go back and re-read in a couple of days, I’m sure there’s some details here and there that’ll change, and of course, it needs to be translated. But it feels done to me. I read through it today, after putting some finishing touches on it yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like a decent movie to me.

Of course, I need other people’s opinions. So I sent it off today to a select few (well, 5 people) whose opinions I trust, in different ways, and who also have quite varying tastes. And they’re not afraid to tell me that my stuff is crap, if it is. So now we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m going to start the treatment for my next mexploitation movie. Or, well, mexi-dyxploitation. The one with the lesbian schoolgirl assassin. I’m already having fun just thinking about it.

I ran into Alex, the director of Bolas Chinas, at a cafe today. Apparently, he’d just finished the first cut a few days ago, and it clocked in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is of course ridiculous for a script that’s less than 60 pages. But I kind of expected it, Alex is so in love with all the takes that it would be hard for him to cut anything, at least for the first cut. Now, he just needs to cut, well, an hour or so. He promised us that we could see the final cut in a week, but I doubt it’ll be that fast. Still, he insisted it looked great, and other people told me the same thing, so it’s going to be interesting.

As for my script, it’s almost done. It needs an action scene in the second half of the second act, and while I know who it should involve and what the outcome should be, I’m having some problems maneuvering the characters into the right situation without changing earlier scenes that should ideally be left alone for purposes of characterization. But I’m sure I’ll figure it out within a few days. After that, it’s just polish and dialogue work, and then translation. I have to say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

My writer’s block suddenly just… stopped on Thursday. I finished the long treatment, solving the problems with the end that I had, and then wrote 18 pages of screenplay, all in about 5 hours on Thursday night. Yesterday, I wrote 14 pages more, and also sent what I had off to Øyvind, to get a second opinion.

He basically said, it’s pretty good, and he liked it, but it had some problems. Which was basically what I expected. I’m going to write this more or less straight through to the end now, and then go back and revise. However, a very rough first draft should be done this coming week.

This is a semi-spec mexploitation direct to video script, semi-spec meaning that I’m not paid to write it, but the production people specifically asked me to write something, because they were interested in what I could do. So I have hopes. If nothing else, Øyvind and I agree that it’s a lot better than the script for Bolas Chinas.

Wish me luck, I’m going back to writing.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to an audition. A week or so later, I got a call to come back and see the director, which I did. However, since we’re now past the date production was supposed to start, I guess I didn’t get it, since they didn’t call me.

Which kind of sucks, since it was a real movie, namely The Air I Breathe, an American independent movie with stars like Kevin Bacon, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Diego Luna and Ken Watanabe. I can’t imagine the amount of blogger cred I would have gotten from being in a movie with Buffy. I auditioned for a speaking role, that of a gangster/bodyguard (what, me typecast?), in the “Pleasure” chapter of the movie. The director, Jieho Lee, was nice, although he was mostly concerned about whether or not I could grow a beard. When I told him I didn’t have much facial hair, he seemed disappointed. In retrospect, that might have been why I didn’t get the role.

Oh well, on Monday I’m going to be an unpaid extra in a Mexican independent movie. At least I get a credit, and some food.

I just auditioned today. I think it went fairly well, although who knows. They’re supposed to call me next week. I won’t say anything about what movie it is yet, since if I get the role, I might be unable to say much at all. But suffice to say it’s not in the mexploitation genre, it’s a real movie, to be shown in theaters, and it’s an international production. If I get the role (a small one, but with lines, and several scenes), it’ll be by far the biggest thing I’ve done in cinema. Not that that’s saying much. Cross your fingers for me.

I’m back, and I’ve slept a lot. We had a wrap party on Sunday, and Leo took some photos, presented here for your pleasure. As usual, the complete set is on his account on flickr.

Even though we wrapped on Saturday, we’re actually filming today. There’s a hip hop concert at a club, and we’re shooting a few scenes there, parts of the chase sequence, I think. As I understand it, several of the bands at the concert are going to be contributing to the soundtrack of the movie, so it’s a sort of required tie-in.

I’m not quite sure what the scenes are exactly, there was a big fight with parts of the audience in the original script, but I’m uncertain if that’s been dropped or not.

Either way, this is definitely the last acting I’m doing on this movie. Alex is going on vacation in a week or so, and will start editing when he gets back, which means the final cut will probably be done some time in February. There might be a photo session at some point to take pictures for the DVD cover, which I’ve volunteered to design. I’m not getting paid for it, I think it’ll just be fun to do some cheesy 80s video box art. Besides, it’s at most a few hours of work.

I’m back to writing now, focusing on getting my screenplay done. People who have read the initial outlines and treatment are very positive, so I’m charging ahead with it. It’s not particularly complex structurally, or very original in plot, I’ve mostly focused on a compelling story and believable and somewhat complex characters. I think it works, at least so far.

Now that I’m rested and back in the game after finishing work on Bolas Chinas (actually, we are supposed to do a single scene on Wednesday, I think, but filming has officially wrapped), I’ve been thinking about what it is I like about being on set.

Even in small, low-budget, and not terribly organized productions like Bolas Chinas, there’s a strong sense of common purpose within the cast and crew. Everyone’s trying to get the damn thing done. It’s on the level of the best software development teams I’ve been on, and that’s part of what makes it so fun, I think. There’s also that smooth feeling of people doing their thing, efficiently and without fuss (of course, that’s not always, or even often, true, but it very often feels that way). And you develop a certain camraderie with everyone in the cast and crew. No matter what you think of their work as such (which can certainly vary), you have the same purpose, and you sympathize with each other. You eat, chat, sleep, and wait for hours together, and it’s pretty much impossible not to feel a little bit like a family.

Now that I think about it, that feeling of family has always been something I’ve looked for in the jobs I’ve had. I loved working at Helix Code/Ximian in the beginning, for instance, since we were just 30 people, and everyone talked and knew each other. Later, when the company got bigger and more corporate, it wasn’t that much fun any more.

I think management consultants and their ilk could learn a lot from looking at movie productions. But on the other hand, I think movie productions could also be modernized quite a bit. There’s a bunch of stuff that’s basically hold-overs from the old days, and is particularly obsolete on small, guerrilla productions.

Øyvind and I spent a lot of our waiting time talking about uses for computers in movie production. There could be a huge amount of stuff done there, for screenwriters, directors, DPs, production people, continuity/script assistants, and whatnot. What’s available today is pretty pathetic in terms of integration and user interface, and I say that as a registered Final Draft user. If free software wanted to completely take over a relatively small, but high profile niche market, that would be it. Open formats, free software, and heavy integration would be perfect for this stuff.

A good place to start would be a screenplay editor. It’s basically just a glorified text editor with some formatting macros, and could be written in a short time by a couple of decent programmers. It also has the advantage of beign very well-defined. Current screenwriting software is developing so little that there was no useful new features in Final Draft 7 as opposed to 6. So duplicate FD’s functionality, with a slightly better UI, an open XML-based file format, and a Final Draft import/export filter, and you’d be on your way. Add stuff like integration with a revision control server, version diffing, collaborative editing, and a few other things, and you’d own that market.

Update: I’ve written more detailed about screenwriting software requirements in a new post.

Yesterday was long and hard. We did scenes in the upstairs lounge of La Pata Negra, a neighbourhood bar, which we used as Leo’s office. There were various torture scenes, including one of me lifting Marco by the balls (he was actually suspended under the armpits out of frame). I actually got a decent hold of his balls, and his screaming got more enthusiastic when I squeezed a little. I think that’s what they call Method acting.

Afterwards, we went to a restaurant, where we filmed a long scene around a large table. Leo talks to “business associates”, a girl dances on the table, etc. The girl was Alexa, one of the zorras from Comando Zorras. It was very nice to see her again, and she looked quite stunning in costume. By far the most fun was when Marco stuck me in the eye with a fondue fork. There was blood everywhere, I got to rave around making Frankenstein’s monster type noises with a fork sticking out of my eye, and I think I even hobble when we walk out.

Cheap movie blood is made with corn syrup and color, by the way. It looks pretty good, and even dries realistically dark, but it’s sticky as all hell. Having your eye glues shut with corn syrup is not the most pleasant thing in the world.

Today, we filmed in a uniform store on Insurgentes, which has a collection of weird, old mannequins. We walk around looking for Marco, Øyvind falls in love with a mannequin and touches its breasts, then we run out of the store again. I swear I’m not making this up. I guess a mannequin is marginally better than a dish washing machine, though.

After that, we went with minimal crew to shoot in the metro, without a permit. Lalo, the DP, was placed in a wheelchair, with the camera in his lap, covered by a jacket, so we could shoot clandestinely. Most pretense of discretion went out the window when they actually started shooting persecution scenes, though, since that involved Lalo in the wheelchair with the camera, and Alex pushing it at top speed through the corridors of the metro station, closely following Marco, who was running for his life. People did stare a bit, but the footage looked really cool.

After that, we got on the train and started shooting inside. Since we were on a line that’s not too busy, and it wasn’t rush hour, it worked out well, the shots actually looked very good. We mostly went in out one door and in another all the time, to simulate getting on and off the train.

I spent a couple of hours in the production offices looking at rushes with the director and a few other people. A lot of the footage looks surprisingly good, and there’s none that looks particularly bad. With good editing, this could turn out to be very decent indeed.

Tomorrow, we rest. Øyvind, Leo, and I have our last shooting day on Saturday, and the whole thing wraps on Sunday. I think there’s supposed to be a party, but I’m uncertain of how tired people are going to be.

Photos are as usual courtesy of Leo, who’s updated his Flickr photo set from the movie.

I’m currently resting a little. On Friday, we did exteriors, driving around in a ’74 Chevy Caprice Classic, which was quite the appropriate pimp car. Also, Leo’s shirt has a Betty Page pinup on it. After that, we did a couple of takes of us carrying a guy outside and trying to kill him, but failing, since we’re basically idiots, and start arguing about who gets to kill him, and he runs off. We also did a quick take on the roof of a tall building by Avenida Revolución. It was simple, but not so much for me, since I’m deathly afraid of heights.

Saturday was my day off, I spent most of it sleeping, and the rest with my girlfriend.

On Sunday, we went to a junkyard near Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl, a rather bad part of town, and did most of the third act of the movie. I got to fight a bit with Tomas Goros, which was great fun. I worked with him on Comando Zorras too, and he’s a total professional, and a great guy. He does over-the-top bad guys wonderfully, complete with evil laugh. The junkyard was like some kind of horror movie set, including an old guy with no teeth who lived in a little hut in the back, and fed the “guard dog” slivers of unidentifiable, foul-smelling meat. The place was full of cute cats, though, although they were a bit too shy to dare get too close.

And today, we went to Metro Garibaldi to do an exterior shot, which was fairly easy, although it was hot as hell to stand around in a black leather trenchcoat in the sun. I couldn’t take it off, since I was carrying a prop gun in a holster, and there was a bunch of people and traffic. Tomorrow, I’m doing a single exterior scene in the morning, and then it’s all day interiors on Wednesday, some stuff on Thursday, and then I’m supposed to be done.

Photos in this post are courtesy of Leo, and are under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license. You can see more photos from the production over on his Flickr account.

Second day of shooting, interiors, and a lot less physically demanding, but long. I left home at 6:45 this morning, and arrived back home at midnight. Luckily, tomorrow we can go directly to location, and we don’t have to be there until 10.

Dialog stuff today, and lots of “walk there, stand still, wait until the director yells cut”. Leo did a lot of scenes with Brenda, who we also worked with on Comando Zorras. She’s always fun to work with, and was very patient despite having gotten very little sleep the night before, and having to wait many hours. Oh, and her screams and moans of ecstasy were quite convincing.

Speaking of that, today I did the infamous sex scene, of course. It was with Keyla, whom I already knew, and who was an absolute lady and a professional, which helped a lot. But despite that, I can safely say that it was the most difficult movie-related thing I’ve ever done. I had expected it to be uncomfortable, but it’s awkward, and it’s hard work. Sex is also hard work, of course, but there’s a payoff. Simulated sex is all the sweat and physical activity with none of the fun. I think the scene turned out pretty well, though, after the first couple of takes, it got easier. All in all, much worse than I expected, and I’m glad to get it over with.

Before the actual sex scene, we did a shot of me dropping my pants, cut at right above the knee, and since Alex wanted the movements from that angle, I was basically dry humping a dish washing machine for 5 minutes while making grunting noises. It was less awkward than the sex scene itself, but a lot weirder. And the edge of the dishwasher chafed my testicles.

Later on, we basically got paid to play Mortal Kombat 3, which was a pretty good ending to the day. The script called for a scene where Øyvind and I are distracted by video games while our young thief escapes, so I brought my Xbox to the set and loaded up an emulator. Lots of people played while they were waiting, and the scene turned out well too.

Sleep now. I hurt all over.