Summer in Uganda - The Beginning

That's our apartment on the right.

Mortimer

I’ve been in Uganda for three days now. It doesn’t really feel like it though. We arrived very late on Tuesday, after 23 hours of traveling. Our driver, Alfred, was waiting for us at the airport with a sign. He gave us lots of tips during our hour-long drive from Entebbe to Kampala: everyone is nice, ask for help; don’t ride the boda bodas without a helmet; Kampala is safe, but don’t be stupid. We made it to our apartment a little after midnight. The apartment is nice. It’s down a little dirt road with some goats tied up at the end. Lindsay named one of them Mortimer. There are a lot of places nearby, so we’ve been walking ten or fifteen minutes to get to shops and food and internet. We’re about a fifteen minute drive from Makerere University, where we went for the first time yesterday. I’m definitely curious to see how our work there is going to pan out. It will certainly be interesting.

Today we finally found coffee. First time in three days, which I think might be the longest I’ve ever gone without coffee. And it wasn’t instant coffee. French pressed, in fact. When we were walking down a dirt road trying to find the Pop-Up Cafe, we spotted an adorable old man walking towards us. As we passed, he called out, “What’s your country?” We told him Canada and the US and he excitedly recounted stories of visiting a student of his in Ottawa and working in New York, Baltimore, and DC. Apparently he used to be an economic advisor for Uganda. “I was at the United Nations,” he told us. He also taught economics at Makerere for eighteen years before he retired. He is 83 years and four months old and only leaves the house on Fridays. Glad we happened to be walking down that particular street at the right time.

(There would be a picture of Lindsay and the old man here, but when she asked to take a picture with him, he said, "Not now, I'm still talking!" And then we never got to it.)

Have Faith

(*note: Whenever I write blog entries I imagine them being read in the voice of the narrator from movies like "The Sandlot" or "Stand by Me". It will help if you do that too.)

Now seems like the best time to do this. While I still remember everything. Although maybe it would be more advisable to wait until my mind has had time to filter through the events of the last months and hold onto only those things that are poignant or helpful. I guess I'm not that patient.


You always think you'll have more time to prepare. That you'll know what you're getting yourself into. There were two days on set, night shoots, where we were outside on the coldest days of the year. Seventeen degrees in Florida. Before we left my parents' house where the entire crew of ten was staying I heard everyone talking about how many layers they had on. Jay turned to me at the kitchen sink, "I'm wearing two pairs of pants." I went to my room to get similarly layered before leaving. Tights, leggings, three pairs of socks, pants, three shirts, two sweatshirts. I had the distinct impression that I was suiting up for battle.


It's a little like that, making movies. At least at our budget level. It's not the glitter and sparkle that I think people refer to as "movie magic". Somehow it always ends up being more of the unglamorous crawling through the dirt in a two foot gap under a trailer or cleaning a house that's been abandoned for ten years so it can be shot in the next day or running at full speed on rocks for eight takes in a row. These things that seem the most like work, that demand the most resolve, these are the things you talk about later. Or maybe that's just me. I've been told that I thrive on the adrenaline that comes from everything falling apart around me. Maybe that's a bad thing. I read somewhere (it was probably a Harry Potter book) that the truest friendships are those forged through shared crisis. There's a deeper sense of camaraderie involved. I feel like a similar thing can be said about making a movie. If it were easy, if there weren't some sense of everyone coming together to overcome obstacles to accomplish something, it would be far less meaningful.


I don't mean to say that the moments that are fun and exciting aren't memorable. Of course when I think about the movie I'll think about skateboarding and riding trains and Matt and Waylan shooting each other with Roman candles in the woods. I'll think about that first day on the train when it was just me and Brett and Jay standing on the engine car and just as the train started to pick up speed Brett turned to me and smiled. I was almost giddy. And he said "you love making movies." He's right.


If there's anything I've learned about making movies it's that the things you expect to be the biggest problems usually aren't. Not that they don't end up being problems, but something else will invariably trump them. And it's those things you don't expect that make it interesting. You don't expect that every car involved in the production will break and you never plan on how many times you'll have to call triple A. It doesn't occur to you that you'll get phone calls where people say things like, "I don't think he'll call the cops, but maybe you should come down here" or that you'll have to talk yourself out of getting arrested before going to set. Things like locations falling through and crew backing out never make sense at the time, but I have to believe that there are reasons for these things.


On the day Brett left I asked him if he believed in fate. "It's funny," he said, "I was just having this conversation with Matt." I asked him what Matt thought. "Definitely. How else could we all have ended up here together and doing this?" That works for me. I have much faith.

two of the longest days of my life...

So it's 5:00 on Saturday morning and I'm standing shoulder-deep in a lake in Michigan underneath an inflatable trampoline and I turn to Adele and say, "How did I get here?" It was the end of a very long day. A very very long day. This was the fourth day of the third week of American Sleepover, the movie I'm production coordinating outside of Detroit. The day started normally enough. I woke up at 2pm and spent a few hours working before Adele, James and I left for set at six. We arrived at a beautiful lakehouse in Waterford, Michigan whose owners are some of the nicest people to ever let their home be overtaken by a film crew. Before we could shoot anything that day we had to wait for the sun to set and before that happened Adele and I had to brave the lake to reposition boats and move the giant floating trampoline that belonged to the neighbor. Not as easy as it sounds. Its impossibly heavy anchor made it necessary for us to go underneath and tie an extra length of rope to it and then move it blindly through the lake. In and of it self, not so bad.

Our first shot was a wide shot from the water of two characters swimming to a floating platform in the lake. The camera was on a pontoon boat secured in a splashbag to protect it from the water. During the rehearsal of the scene it became obvious that the platform was inclined to gradually rotate so we decided that someone would have to be in the water holding it in place. At 9:47 the sun set and we were ready for our first shot. And I was underneath a spider-infested floating platform in a lake in Michigan.

That only lasted about 45 minutes and the night continued with the frenzied momentum of a hugely ambitious, tightly scheduled independent film set. Our next obstacle came around midnight in the form of a pontoon boat full of drunken woman who decided to "park" in front of our set and sing along to the music they were blaring. We continued shooting as much as we could in their quiet moments and decided to break early for lunch in hopes that they would get bored and leave if we turned off our lights and went away.

And it worked. Kind of. We came back from lunch at about 1:45 and they came back from who knows where at around 2:00. It looked like we were going to have to take some kind of aversive action. My first thought was to simply go to the end of the dock and ask them to leave. As I walked the length of the dock though I realized that they were further away than I had originally thought. Yelling wasn't really an option due to the agreement we'd made with the neighbors to be as quiet as possible on threat of not being able to return to shoot the next day. I walked back to the expectant crew trying to formulate a new plan. Adele and I spent what felt like several minutes looking out at the boat and then looking back at our options on shore. It came down to choosing between a rowboat and a paddle boat.

Halfway between our crew on the shore and the drunken party on the pontoon boat I think it occurred to both of us that what we were doing was absolutely ridiculous. How on earth were we going to approach a boat full of drunk women and ask them to move their party further down the lake. It was absurd at best. And then we looked up from our laughter and saw that the boat was moving. Adele and I turned to each other with disbelief. "Are they running away from us?" she asked me. "I think so. Should we stop?" We looked at the boat slowly moving away from us. "No". And then we chased those women away. On a paddle boat. On a lake. In Michigan.

We couldn't come back right away because they started shooting as soon as the boat was out of the shot. So we sat there in that paddle boat and we both thought about what would happen if we just paddled away and let the set run itself. The thoughts were fleeting and we paddled back to shore and pressed on through the day.

Sometime around 3:30 I was standing near the water when Amy walked up to me and said under her breath, "Bad things are happening." I looked up towards the house and saw Adele standing with her hand on her mouth and the camera team huddled on the deck. I stood next to Adele trying to assess the situation. It seemed like the camera had gotten wet. Confusing since it was housed in a waterproof splashbag. Somehow though something like two cups of water ended up inside of the waterproof housing. RED cameras, as it turn out, don't like water. After a stressful debate about what our next move should be we decided to call it a day and hope that the camera wasn't broken. We had to let it dry out for a few hours before we could safely check, though.

So at 5:00 am I was back in the water almost hoping that I'd have be there again the next day.

And I was. When we tested the camera hours later it was working fine and we proceeded with the shoot on schedule. Saturday night was less eventful but longer and no less stressful. We were dealing with twenty extras, scattered downpours, and a scene involving choreographed dancing with an actress who threw her back out while prepping for the first shot. Not to mention mosquitoes. Endless mosquitoes.

Near the end of that day I was exhausted. All but two of our extras had bailed and we needed to shoot a scene where one of the actors swims in the water with an unspecified number of friends. I asked the director how many we needed. "Six," he said. "I can get you four." So Adele and I waded in the cold, pre-sunrise water, backs to the camera, and dreaded moving that trampoline.

After the scene was over we trudged out to the floating monolith. "Do you feel kind of like you're walking to your death?" I nodded and took the short plunge to get to the inside cavern of the trampoline. Alone for a minute I thought about the frequent absurdity of what it is that I'm doing with my life right now. Adele came up from the water and we started moving the trampoline. "You know," I said, "it occurs to me that this isn't really a two person job...but I'm glad we're doing this together."

This is not nearly as informative as it should be.

(all photos in this post courtesy of Anthony Levi Kho, our production photographer)

I considered apologizing for my absenteeism from this blog but decided it was justified as I've been enormously busy. The film is finished now and I have some time on my hands before I leave in ten days. My list of things to do before I leave is not diminishing as quickly as I'd like. I still have yet to ride the elephants at the zoo, visit Malaysia, go to the bird park or go back to Chinatown now that Chinese New Year decorations are up. Chinatown is scheduled for Wednesday. Alan, the sound guy from the film, promised to take Kaini and I. Although he doesn't know about our plan to buy cheongsams (traditional Chinese dresses). Kaini says she can get away with wearing one if I wear one too. I can already picture the look on Alan's face right before he abandons us in Chinatown. It's very similar to the look he makes when refrigerators come on in the middle of takes when we're shooting in restaurants or when drunk aunties at hawker centers start yelling loudly to each other. The list of people Kaini asked to be quiet during our shoot boggles my mind. Aside from all the hawker center workers she shushed repeatedly she managed to convince construction workers to stop drilling, forestry workers to come back later to cut down a tree, airport officials to wait an hour to print their tickets. I stand by the fact that movies are magic. Maybe not in the way that people typically perceive, but magic all the same. In what other situation could a girl walk up to a construction foreman and say, "I'm sorry could you please move your 5 storey crane, it's in my way".

This film has been an amazing experience. Exhausting and at times brutal, but I'm getting to a point where I realize that things are almost never worth doing if there isn't some suffering involved. I've definitely learned a lot of valuable things in my time here. Like, I can now say "vegetarian food, no eggs, no milk" in Chinese. Seriously though, an amazing teacher I had once that told me that while I am very creative I could save myself a lot of stress by working on my organizational skills. Turns out she might have been right. It's really too bad I didn't take that advice when she gave it to me at thirteen. It is decidedly something I'm working on now, though. If and when I come back here in a year to work on Michael's next film maybe I won't have to send a production assistant out everyday to pick up things that I forgot. But I honestly think that lack of sleep and lack of an art director were huge factors in my diminished mental clarity. Lesson number two: don't ever production design a feature film without an art director. Fortunately our two PA's were amazing ladies and not only ran errands for me, but also helped me hang Christmas decorations, labeled everything I could eat as "vegan safe", and tried to teach me Chinese.

I'm convinced that the best possible way to experience a place is to shoot a film there. I like that I can look at the guide books Matt bought and know that I didn't just eat at Newton Hawker Center, I cooked in a stall there. And while I didn't exactly go shopping on Orchard Road, I did install a snow machine outside of a mall. I spent the night in the airport, I slept in an executive suite on the 59th floor of the Swissotel (only for three hours, but it still counts), I changed the sheets in a sketchy hotel in Chinatown, I wandered into a half finished house looking for power and found construction workers sleeping there, I hung Christmas decorations in yet another hotel, I spent at least 4 hours in the security checkpoint of Robinson's department store. Actually, I might have passed on that last one, given the chance. But I am infinitely grateful to have been given the opportunity to see this place in this way. And to have met the people that I've been working with. I think I'll definitely come back. Hopefully for the local premier in October. I'm signing up for a beginner's conversational Mandarin class at the Chinese Cultural Center when I get back to San Francisco. It would be kind of a waste to learn Chinese and not come back. We'll see. I think for now I'll walk to the kopi tiam down the street and have some tao hui and kopi-o.

So...I'm still in singapore.

(this was written yesterday - Tuesday - but not posted until today.)

Today I went "shopping" for three and a half hours. Both of our stylists are out of the country (keep in mind that the country is half the size of LA, so not an unusual occurrence really) and it's fallen on me to dress the cast. Shopping is bad enough when it's for myself. Wardrobe shopping can be a nightmare. First of all, I may be the most indecisive person I've ever met. If I were alone I could spend hours walking around looking at things without picking up the first shirt. Thankfully (for me, but not so much for them) I was accompanied by Sarah, my art director, and Kaini, our producer who had the unfortunate job of coordinating with the department store that's sponsoring us. That department store is another whole issue. It was enormous. All of the malls here are huge. And there are so many of them. For such a small country a huge percentage of the land mass must be covered in malls. I commented on this to Sarah to which she replied, "Shopping. It's the national past time. There's nothing else to do." I'm still not sure to what extent she was joking. So after navigating through six storeys of department store I managed to pull together a passable selection for the two actors I'm dressing tomorrow. And then Kaini used some kind of magic and they let us walk out of the store with literally thousands of dollars of unpurchased apparel. I am constantly in awe at the way movies work.
Right now I'm drinking some pretty awful coffee to pass the next hour until our tech scout ("tech recce" here) to look at six of our locations. I think tonight I will be exhausted.
I think I will take the bus home from the train station instead of walking. I took the bus for the first time last weekend and was amazed to discover that Singaporean buses have TVs in them. I was even more amazed when Matt pointed out to me that what was on the TV was the Asian version of "Deal or No Deal" whose host is none other than our leading actor. I can't begin to explain how much this amuses me.

This weekend was also amusing. I went with Kaini and Matt to try durians, a local fruit, for the first (and last) time. Imagine a banana filled with garlic mashed potatoes and a horrible aftertaste. Also you can smell durians from at least a block away. The smell is so powerful that they are banned on public transportation. I've met lots of people that like them, though. Kaini ate most of the one we bought. The first two or three bites weren't so bad, but the more I ate, the worse it was. I did try though. We got the durians in Geylang which, as my guidebook delicately points out is, "coincidentally Singapore's red-light district". Did you know that prostitution is legal in Singapore. It's a weird place. Prostitution is legal, but chewing gum is not.

Anyway, on Saturday night we went to see one of our actresses perform in Urinetown the musical. She is a student at La Salle (which, by the way, might be one of the most beautiful schools I've ever seen). It was a student production in a small round theatre and it was absolutely incredible. Had it not been the last night I might have bought myself another ticket to go and see it again.

I think that was my last weekend off until we wrap, though. I have so much to do still. Yesterday I stayed home and, with the exception of a few distractions from on-line chess, worked all day. Tomorrow I have a fitting and Thursday more shopping and Friday another fitting. And honestly I don't ever want to see the inside of a department store again.

Monkeys!

The pants are gone. I've just looked over and realized that what's missing from my kitchen window is the lump of seersucker that's been living there (see previous post). I hope they made it back to where they belong. I just finished a cup of tea, but I think this might be a double cup morning. I've been inexplicably tired for days. Probably it has something to do with lack of proper sustenance...I digress.
Today I have a meeting with the stylist for the film. As it turns out I don't have to do wardrobe in addition to production design. One of Michael's good friends is actually a fashion stylist who does choreography and styling for runway shows and other fashion events. He's kind of a big deal I think. Most of what I know about him I read on our website, which is up by the way. He's a nice guy, though. Today should be okay.

Saturday was the best day I've had since I got here. In the end, I did not take myself on a date to see a movie. Nor did I manage to find a vegetarian restaurant. Instead, Michael took Matthew and I to a water reservoir to do a 10K walk through the jungle. It was pretty, but I was there for the promise of wild monkeys. And I was not disappointed. Less than 1K into the walk Matthew said to me, deadpan, "there's a monkey". It was right above my head and I hadn't even seen it. Further in we ran into a whole family of monkeys. Four of them were babies. Because the path is often used by runners the monkeys are very accustomed to people. To the point where they would just lay in the path and people approaching would have to step around them. Amazing. When I finally get my camera fixed I will definitely be going back there. For now I have a few of the hundreds of pictures that Matthew took (unless otherwise noted, all of the pictures on my blog are taken by Matthew).
It's raining now. That will probably make my walk to the train station slightly less than enjoyable. I did find an umbrella in our apartment though. It's floral printed and also smells like mothballs. The rain is better than the heat, though. I think it is a whole ten degrees cooler than normal right now.
In the time between the start of this paragraph and the end of the previous one Matthew woke up, got dressed and left for the office. I've been awake for 4 hours and he woke up five minutes ago. Maybe it's time that I started accomplishing things. Maybe first I'll go get coffee...

Singapore is one of three city-states in the world, did you know?

So, I'm sitting in my kitchen in Singapore having the first cup of coffee I've made myself since arriving that isn't horrible. As it turns out it wasn't the coffee or my lack of proficiency with a French press (my first purchase after arriving) that was the problem. It was the soy milk. All of the local brands of soy milk I've tried are more like soy syrup. When I finally found a carton of Silk yesterday I was more than happy to pay $5.50(SING) for one quart. Worth it.
There's a breeze coming in my kitchen window. The weather is uncommonly nice today. It's only 84 degrees. That probably just means it will rain later. It usually does. Through the kitchen window I can see a woman in the opposite apartment building checking on the clothes she has hanging out the window. It doesn't appear that the wind has taken any of them. All of the apartments in my neighborhood have slots under the windows to insert bamboo poles into so that you can hang your clothes to dry outside. I'm kind of afraid to do that because last week a pair of pants fell from a few floors up and have been hanging precariously from my open window. I have no idea how to return them to their owner. So all of my clothes are currently hanging on bamboo poles inside. I washed them last night in the tiny washing machine in our kitchen. That was quite a debacle but not really worth going into. Suffice it to say that in the end my clothes appeared clean even if I didn't use the most orthodox methods with that washer and the water I got all over the floor dried within a few hours.
The apartment I share with Matthew (a friend from school and the cinematographer of the film we're working on) is on the seventh floor of a fifteen story apartment building surrounded by other buildings the same height or taller. Seventy percent of the housing in Singapore is government housing. So most people live in these huge apartment buildings. Ours is not bad. It's a little older I think. The elevator only stops every five floors. So we get off on the sixth floor, walk past about five apartments, dozens of potted plants and a little old man who sits in front of his door everyday taking things apart with a screwdriver, up one flight of stairs and into our scantily furnished apartment which smells strongly of mothballs.
Most days we go to our office in the business district. It is actually the conference room in Michael's father's office so it's in a very nice building. I'm not sure that the security guards downstairs are really sure what we're doing there when we show up, jeans and t-shirts and backpacks surrounded by suits and briefcases. I smile at them and they look somewhat quizzically back at me. I never get very much done at the office. There's a lot of talking that goes on between Michael and our producers, Kaini and Charmaine, two very capable Singaporean girls who have been working on the film for months now. It can be very distracting, so for the most part I've decided to just work outside of the office. However, spending time with Kaini and Charmaine and Michael together I've been improving my knowledge of Singlish, a creole language spoken by most Singaporeans. It's interesting if not completely impossible to understand.
Yesterday I didn't go to the office at all having gotten very little done the day before as we spent the majority of the day at a press conference. It was small, just a few local papers, a magazine and some of our sponsors. Michael and three out of of four of our lead actors sat on a panel and answered a handful of questions and then it was over. I tried to read a translation of the article written by a Chinese newspaper online, but it made absolutely no sense. It was really just about one of the actresses more than it was about the film. One of our two leading ladies was Miss Malaysia 2004, so that helps with getting press I suppose. The actor who didn't make it to the press conference is one of Singapore's biggest local film stars and couldn't come because he's under contract with Media Corps and isn't allowed to do anything for anybody else while he's working for them. The film industry in Singapore still takes a very 1940's Hollywood studio system approach, apparently.
Our first day of production is in sixteen days. I still have so much work to do and it's really difficult when I'm still not sure how to get places or where to find things. I'm sure I'll manage. I usually do. For now though, I'm taking the day off. I think I'll take myself to a movie and then see if I can find anywhere in this less than vegan-friendly country that doesn't respond to the question, "does it have meat in it?" with "no, just fish".