Amity

The first scene we shot takes place near the end of the film where Greg has assembled an excitable group of party girls into the limo for late night existential conversation. Lighting the inside of a packed limo at night is one kind of task. Handholding a camera for a 64 minute continuous take is yet another. I survived both. Party girls, driver and passenger alike, I heard several of the actors describe acting in the limo scene as quite a vivid psychological experience. For me, the process of doing something strenuous in a confined space for a long period of time without coming up for air can result in an enjoyable mini-trauma. There’s an etching in my memory, not from the pain of backaches or trying to move in slow motion (have you tried that lately?), but the pain of separation loss when it’s all over and the limo empties. Something powerful happened in there and we all shared it. At a certain point I think we all forgot where we were, then remembered, and then wanted to forget again. Sometimes when I’m on an airplane and everyone around me is motionless or sleeping, often this sensation suddenly comes over me: “Wait a minute, this all seems very civilized on the surface, but I’m actually in a tin can hurdling through space! This is crazy and dangerous!” I want to shake the person next to me and implore them to think about the physics of what is happening. And then I just forget about it a moment later and go back to reading Skymall. The shooting of a scene like this is similar; at first I’m engaged for a while trying to “do a good job”, and then later I become conscious that THIS IS STILL GOING ON, and then still later I forget even what it is that’s going on, not even hearing voices properly, as I descend into an underwater wash of the experience of imagery. It was hallucinatory, and left its mark on me. But, the wound is only 64 minutes small; luckily they don’t make MiniDV tapes longer than that. What’s that? They do? Don’t tell Alejandro.
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