the sourcerer: the six day work week

Showing posts with label the six day work week. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 10, 2014

There's an eye in the sky...

I've spent the past week working on a film featuring Helen Mirren. I was employed to add a final layer onto her character's bedroom. It's something I really like doing - that final layer. It's what makes a film habitat believable.

An early start in town means rush hour traffic - something I will do anything to avoid, so I decided to take the coastal road. One pays a toll, but you rarely see other cars and the views are spectacular. There's a rocky overhang with a rush of water droplets that never fails to delight me when they spatter onto my windscreen. One evening there was an old man flying ahead of me on a bicycle, wavy grey hair streaming as he pedalled furiously down the hill.

The rising sun over the city was torridly red. The sunsets apricotine. And the harvest moon, the moon, the moon...

I'm bound contractually not to publish photographs of the film sets I work on, so behold: our gooseberry bushes are full of fruit! And Fancy has a new haircut:

We had a young runner on the job and one day, watching me, she asked me how I knew where to put stuff. I told her that I'd learnt by watching others, and by moving things again and again
until they feel right.
But how do you know when it feels right?
But that is not a question I can answer, because I just know.
I feel it in my bones.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Red Eyes.

A long time ago, someone, somewhere, decided that it was okay to work these kind of hours, with these kind of people, no questions asked. For instance, when you have to wait for the important director on a Saturday, from 14h00 to 23h00. And then have him go off to dinner, with no meeting or apology. And by that time being too tired to be pissed off.

The things that make it worthwhile:

props people walking around with armsfull of plastic crayfish, trailing strings of paper dolls. Dashing to the car in the rain to get the globe and someone singing softly as I walk by: She's got the whole world, in her hands.....

Starting the day with a slice of toast and German Hagebutte spread. Rose hips. The Dolce de Leche of fruit, there's something of the guava there and a hint of the tartness of cooked tomato.
(One wonders where the petals go)

And every morning, those cat paw prints on my windshield.

You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes.
- Sean Michaels. Accompaniment to the song "Immune" by LOW. Said the Gramophone

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is non-existent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it's where you take them to."
Jim Jarmusch (1953- )

You got very hungry when you did not eat enough in Paris because all the bakery shops had such good things in the windows and people ate outside at tables on the sidewalk so that you saw and smelled the food. When you had given up journalism and were writing nothing that anyone in America would buy, explaining at home that you were lunching out with someone, the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you smelled and saw nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cézanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought that Cézanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - from A Moveable Feast.