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The rest of us couldn’t agree fast enough. I ended up feeling closer to that cast
than most others. If I ever direct something I’m going to hire one crazy person so that
everyone else gets along.
Film sets are unpredictable; it’s like trying to put together a wedding every day,
in the middle of an uncharted forest. (Sometimes literally. More on that later.) There’s
an expression about how you can account for everything, dot your i’s and cross your
t’s, be totally prepared... then an elephant escapes from the zoo and runs through your
set. I was shooting a movie in a tiny town in Indiana. I mean tiny, like “stables in the
Walmart parking lot for the Amish residents” tiny. It should have been ideal for
shooting, because there would be no interruptions. Once we started filming, though,
we noticed something. Trains came through the neighboring town about every ten
minutes. No one had heard the sound before, because in the whole time they were
scouting locations they’d never stood perfectly still and quiet in a room for ten minutes.
Unfortunately, that’s all you do on a film set. The flat landscape and paucity of
residents ensured that the sound carried perfectly. About two thirds of everything we
shot was unusable.
Making movies is a fool’s errand. It’s madness. And there’s never a guarantee
that it will work. And yet, people keep coming back. Businesspeople who are smart
enough to know better keep investing in movies. Kids keep going to film school. M.
Night Shyamalan can’t be stopped. And for some reason, neither can I.
Nudity
Nudity really isn’t for me. Why? Eh… I’ve tried explaining it to people, but it
seems you either immediately understand, or you don’t see what the big deal is. I don’t
mind a sex scene. A character can be having a sex scene, but my physical parts always
feel like mine. ’Cause… they are. See, it’s hard to put into words. I don’t object at all
to the use of nudity in film; it can add realism and intimacy. And by the way, more
power to the actors who are comfortable with it, but for the time being, it’s not for me.
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I did once get to choose my own butt double (for a scene where so little of “my
butt” showed that I doubt anyone really noticed that it happened). Having never done
it before, I was relieved to find out the selection process is not done in person. Instead,
I was handed a black binder to look through. Inside was a small collection of Polaroids.
Naked girls against a white wall, shot from the neck down. It looked like something
out of The Silence of the Lambs.
First of all, I didn’t know why they’d been photographed from the front at all;
I was only looking for a butt double, and the frontal pics just made me feel like an even
bigger creep. (I still looked, though.) And second, as I perused my butt options, I
realized I didn’t know what my own butt looked like. It’s behind me all the time, and
even when I’ve looked at it in a mirror I’m usually twisting my body around to see if
that tender spot is a pimple or if I sat on a thumbtack.
I inspected the selection of anonymous bottoms, and just as I was about to say,
“I think this girl looks like me?” the (female) producer casually pointed to my
impending choice and said, “Well, this one’s butt is a little square. I think we can rule
her out.” What? Is that a thing? I didn’t know a butt could be square. Do I have a square
butt? You know what? Don’t tell me.
Kissing
I do not find kissing scenes fun at all. I had assumed that was the lie actors had
to stick to because admitting it was awesome would make them seem creepy or piss
off their spouses. There’s always talk of how “people are standing around” and “it’s
awkward” and “you’re doing it over and over,” but that didn’t seem like enough to
negate the awesome to me.
I always thought that if I got to do kissing scenes I’d toe the party line but deep
down I’d be thinking, We basically get to cheat here without getting in trouble, so…
it’s kind of great. And I’ve heard that some people do think it’s great! So bully for them
— I’m envious! — but I find it totally clinical. It’s not about the people standing
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around, it’s about the fact that the other person doesn’t want to be kissing you. They
are obligated to do it. They might not be horrified, but it wasn’t their decision.
I could try saying, “Hey, um, is there any chance that you’re, like, secretly into
me? Because if you were it would make this work assignment we’re about to do way
more fun for me.” But that doesn’t seem super professional. Most of the time I don’t
even remember anything about it.
I have been excited about kissing a costar precisely one time. One time! And it
wasn’t even until after the fact! I won’t name names since I don’t want to embarrass
him, but let me recount this tale quickly.
A couple of years ago I did a small role in an improvised film as a favor to a
friend. I had a short scene with a handsome movie star. Our movie backstory was that
we’d had a fling in the past, we were friendly now, and it was all a little flirtatious, but
we weren’t serious about each other. There was no plan to kiss, just some light chat.
As for my reallife backstory, I’d had a crush on this actor as a teenager, so maybe I
should have been nervous and excited to work with him, BUT my character had to give
him stitches. On his face. On his handsome movie-star face. I needed to concentrate on
not drawing blood at any point. The only thing that stood between his face and the very
sharp, very real needle in my hand was a layer of latex prosthetic, as thin as fresh
prosciutto. I also knew that he was the kind of committed actor who wouldn’t stop a
scene to say, “Ow. That’s my actual face you’re ripping into, so hey, maybe we should
cut.”
Halfway through the evening, I still hadn’t permanently scarred any coworkers,
and as we got more comfortable with the scene, the director leaned in and said, “It felt
like you guys were going to kiss in that last take. I think it was a good instinct, maybe
we should go with that.”
Okay. We each got a mint, and for a few takes we stumbled through the double
awkwardness that is kissing onscreen without an exact cue to do it.
At the end of the night, I went home happy with the work we’d done and
relieved that no flesh was harmed. I drove all the way home, pulled into my driveway,
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and, as I was putting the car in park, suddenly shrieked, “Oh my god, I just made out
with Legolas!”
Again, I’m not going to name that actor, as I wish to respect his privacy.
Budget
Into the Woods was one of the biggest-budget films I’ve ever worked on. It
made the production glorious. Every single detail in that film was designed with love
and passion. The world created by Rob Marshall and his team was so rich, I felt inspired
and grateful on a daily basis in a way that is VERY unusual for me. A larger budget
enables a fully realized vision, but it inspires overcomplicated solutions to
nonproblems. It also has some comical side effects.
There’s a scene in Into the Woods where Cinderella runs down the palace stairs,
but Prince Charming has covered them in sticky tar to keep her from getting away. As
that scene approached, someone asked me to try on my “magnet shoes.” “My what?”
No one had bothered to ask me, but some mystery higher-up had assumed that I
wouldn’t be able to “stop in my tracks” unassisted and tasked several departments with
fitting both the stairs and my shoes with powerful electromagnets. The idea was to
switch them on as I ran full speed down concrete steps.
Now, this was not only a spectacular waste of time and resources, it was kind
of a fucking death trap. Even if it worked, I would surely be sent flying out of the shoes
and into some corrective surgery. I had to do a couple of runs to prove to Rob that I
could successfully mime being stuck in goo, and I let the special effects guys turn on
the magnets when Cinderella struggles to pry her shoes up by hand, so that everyone
could feel like Operation Electro-Murder had been a justifiable project.
My second-favorite thing about that scene was that Chris Pine, who played the
prince, had to stand there THE WHOLE TIME. Both of us assumed he’d come in for
an hour in the morning, they’d shoot some footage, and through movie magic, he would
appear frozen in time at the top of the stairs. No such luck. Poor Chris had to stand
there and watch me do that number a hundred times. I was running, crawling, falling
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down, jumping up, and belting my stupid face off for two days straight, and with every
“action” he trudged back into position and endured another take.
I’ll admit I found the situation amusing. Every time he complained it just gave
me an easy opening to say, “Oh, I’m so sorry that YOU had to work hard today. Can
somebody get Chris a medal?”
Here’s the thing: I really felt for him. A long day at work is made abnormally
grueling by an absence of productivity or accomplishment. For all the physical and
mental energy I was expending (and the bruises I was getting), I left those two days so
content and satisfied. He left them needing a burger just to get a little dopamine flowing
in his brain before we had to start all over again.
There were also two small fires on set that no one seemed to be that worried
about. I do mean small, but still. A scrim and a prop lantern (which was not built for
actual flames) caught on fire, and there was no real sense of hustle. This was a big-
budget film; there was a department for that. This is how a roomful of adults ends up
staring at a rapidly growing fire with their mouths open.
The previous year, I’d been shooting the movie Happy Christmas with a total
of six crew members and about four principal actors. If there’d been a fire, all ten of us
would have run to a water source. (Unless it was a grease fire; we’re filmmakers, not
idiots.
1
)
When you’re on an independent film, you have to wear more hats. It isn’t
stressful, though, because you start to feel capable and relish the responsibility. Happy
Christmas was shot in eleven days for eighty thousand dollars (for perspective, that’s
1/262nd the budget of Silver Linings Playbook). There was no script, no paper involved
whatsoever. And we didn’t tell anyone we were doing it.
Aspiring filmmakers: Isn’t it great news that you can make a movie for so little,
and, more important, that you don’t need to ask permission? It was the happiest and
most productive set I’ve ever been on. I’m not saying small-scale movies are always
1
Debatable.
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better off on the whole — I don’t want the next Bond film to be improvised and shot
handheld. You can’t make a movie about an alien-werewolf invasion with ten people
and eighty grand. And I want to see Fur from the Sky by 2018.
Wardrobe
I’ve wanted to work on a period piece for as long as I can remember. A fantasy
period piece even more so. I got my wish with Into the Woods, and it was everything I
dreamed it could be. And a little less. Turns out, authentically made corsets are quite
small. They seemed bearable in my fitting, but any woman who’s ever tried on shoes
in a store knows that you can think something is perfectly comfortable only to wind up
begging for mercy at the end of your first day in them.
In between scenes, I could ask to have my corset loosened and get some relief
(I couldn’t do it myself because of how it was made), but inevitably, it had to get laced
up again. This led to an unusual dynamic between Asia, the on-set dresser, and me. I
adored Asia. She was funny, hardworking, and sweet. But she was responsible for
putting me in a moderate degree of physical distress. If your best friend gave you a
charley horse ten times a day, you’d feel weird about her, too. So after a few weeks,
whenever I saw Asia (Lovely Asia! Whom I really liked!) it struck fear into my heart.
We would eye each other across the set, awaiting the telltale signs of camera readiness.
This equally tiny blonde and I would get locked in a stare-down like bull and matador.
Eventually, I’d lose focus and Asia would creep up behind me.
“Oh, hi, Asia, are we sure they’re ready? I thought we were waiting on the
animal wrangler to bring the cow?” I said, stalling. “Nope” — tug, tug, tug — “the
cow’s already set.” Tug, tug, tug. “Dion’s just swinging a lens and then picture’s up.”
I’d get desperate. “Oh” — tug, tug, tug — “I feel like the cow always runs away
a couple times before we actually shoot, though, so maybe just a few more minutes —
”
But she was the matador, and she skewered me every time.
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Our legendary costume designer, Colleen Atwood, had every piece that we
wore custom-made, and she handpicked the perfect fabrics, laces, and buttons. Even
the shoes were made by hand. The skirt on Cinderella’s “rags” was a dusty-blue linen.
It was humble but lovely — the perfect choice for Cinders — but linen is a fabric that
wrinkles like Jack Nicholson’s balls without Botox.
So I’m working in a corset and heels for sixteen-hour days, but every single
time I sit — just sit down and have a little rest in between takes — someone has to
steam my skirt, because it now has some minor wrinkles in it. I’m Cinderella, by the
way. My body, my hair, every part of my costume has been painstakingly covered in
soot and grime and grass. God forbid my skirt isn’t freshly pressed.
The most annoying part was that Colleen was right; it really did look better
smooth. Dirty and disheveled added to the aesthetic, but wrinkled was distracting. It
was this major production, Disney’s Christmas tentpole, and I couldn’t even sit down.
So in between takes I’d walk over to a chair or a bench and just look at it. Longingly.
Sometimes I’d lean on it. Or circle it like a cat. People on that set probably thought I
had hemorrhoids.
My wardrobe on Up in the Air was perfectly curated for my character. But it
felt so unnatural to me, as did the rest of my look — the hair and the makeup — that I
started to feel claustrophobic in it as the weeks went on. I bought some glittery nail
polish in an alarming shade of blue and painted my toes so that I could be in control of
one small corner of my body. Natalie would never wear something so juvenile, but I
liked knowing that under my perfectly tailored skirt suit, I was still messy and strange.
My tiny act of rebellion was discovered on the day we shot a scene at airport
security. I had counted on Natalie always wearing closed-toed shoes, but even in
movie-land, the TSA is unflinchingly scrupulous. I pulled at the toes of my nude
stockings until enough material gathered to obscure my sparkling nails. Our costume
designer, Danny Glicker, as acerbic as he is brilliant, looked me up and down and raised
his eyebrow. Your secret’s safe with me, but that’s an unfortunate look. No one else on
set seemed to notice. That scene was cut anyway. Perhaps test audiences were thrown
by how guilty Natalie looked during a simple airport security check.
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Keeping Up Appearances
When you start a new film, you come to work looking nice for the first week.
Then, inevitably, you remember that you are in your personal clothes for thirty minutes
each morning and your costume for the next fifteen hours. All right! Same pair of
sweatpants every day for a month, here I come! By week three, if an actor is still
coming to work in a full outfit at four a.m., you can be sure that they’re banging
someone on set.
The same is true for your appearance from the neck up. You show up looking
like hell on toast and, lucky for you, some poor sap has to put your face and hair into
some recognizably human arrangement before the first shot.
I’ve been told I have “working-girl hair.” I like this expression because it
sounds like my hair is a swarthy, streetwise prostitute in 1930s New York. It’s actually
a reference to the damage your hair goes through when you are on a film set. The more
movies you make, the worse the damage from blow-drying, curling, coloring, etc. In
this sense the term is supposed to be worn as a badge of honor, a testament to your
work ethic— like calling your dark under-eye bags “success circles” or “ambition
sacs.” What it actually means is that your hair is wiry and brittle with thin ends, and
will need even more blow-drying, curling, and coloring to be made camera-ready.
I had very curly hair when I was growing up, but I WILLED IT AWAY and
now my hair dries naturally into gentle waves. (I heat-style my hair every single day
so I don’t look like Dale Dickey in Winter’s Bone.) I used Frizz Ease for years until
my first on-set hairstylist pointed out that the frizzy “before” picture was just a straight-
haired model who’d been photographed with “messy” hair through some contrivance.
I’m sure the look was achieved with a crimping iron and some back-combing, but I felt
so betrayed that I liked to imagine the model had run afoul of a rabid squirrel.
In the hair and makeup trailer on my second film, rumors started to swirl about
miracle flatirons from Japan. Previous generations of flatirons made your hair less
curly yet somehow bigger and angrier, but not these. They were smaller, they were
hotter, they’d transform you into the Amanda Bynes silk-nymph you’d always wanted
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to be (think What a Girl Wants, not mug shot). The cost of becoming this new woman?
Almost two hundred dollars. (Straight-haired women, don’t you judge me! Cheap
curling irons are completely fine, but flatirons don’t work like that!) The hair
department bought one, and I used it on the days I had the energy for the Sisyphean
task of straightening my hair, one inch at a time, knowing the process would begin
anew upon the next wash. I had to get one for myself. I had no money, but you bet your
ass I put that bad boy on a credit card. I couldn’t go back to being Book Hermione
when I’d had a taste of being Movie Hermione. If that reference went over your head:
In the books, Hermione is supposed to be ugly. In the movies, she’s Emma Watson.
Also, in the book she fixes herself with magic. So nothing is fair.
You don’t normally have your nails done on a film set. It’s fine by me; I’m
heavy-handed and I don’t like sitting still, but I was recently talked into having
biweekly manicures for a film. People will tell you that “gel manicures” won’t ruin
your nails as long as you change them out every two weeks, but if you ask me they are
filthy liars. Maybe by the time this book comes out the gel manicure will be a thing of
the past, like electrolysis or those Anna Nicole Smith diet pills I definitely never took.
Just in case, please let me share my painful experience. I wore gel nails for three months
on this movie, and when they finally came off, my boyfriend wouldn’t let me touch
him. My nails were so thin that they sliced and diced anything I came near. I was a
human paper-cut factory.
I gain weight on every movie. Never ever have I left a set without putting on at
least five pounds. You’re not sleeping enough, you give up on exercise, and there is
food EVERYWHERE. But the curse of the lady actor is to reach deep down, past the
gurgling stomach acid, and find some willpower. When I’m trying to keep my ass in
check, you’d think that fellow ladies would help me stay motivated. Instead, we end
up torturing each other and ourselves. A group of hungry actresses (a.k.a. actresses)
will talk about food with the kind of fervor and specificity normally found in Star Trek
fan fiction. Some deep, hardcore stoner shit. Discussing food with girls on diets can
feel eerily like porn dialogue.