This acting thing is so funny. A guy spends months working on a script. A director and a production team spend months planning and prepping. They hire an actor. The actor braves the freeways and comes to the set. He sits in a makeup chair for an hour and a half while teams are lighting and dressing the location and doing test shoots. The actor warms up, reviews what he’s doing with the director. Then he gets in front of the camera, and all those months and weeks and days and hours of work are all there thrumming underneath, but they’ve dropped out of sight because for just these very few minutes, it’s time for the actor to do their thing.
And for those very few minutes, this is what I got to be:
And then I go away – to wash off the makeup and go find something to eat. And they upload the footage. And they process and cut it together with the rest of the footage and color grade it and put music and sonic atmosphere behind it. Months and weeks and days and hours of work; and if it all goes well, people will be like “DAMN, look what that actor did!”
How long was I actually in front of the camera? Maybe 10 minutes.
When you look at it that way; it can feel like all I have to do is show up and let all that great storytelling and preparation and technical work do its thing. It was already good before I arrived, so just don’t botch it. I guess one way to think of great actors is that they can take a moment like that and blast it further into the atmosphere than you could ever imagine. I’m not there, but I think I’m getting better at not botching it. And this is a great damned part to find myself in.
This film is called The Revelator, and it’s about a man who sees ghosts. I’m one of the ghosts he sees. Only the difference with me is – I see him back. And boy, am I happy to have someone who can see me. Just look how happy I am in that picture.
Yesterday was my first day on set, and basically my big day in terms of the material I was shooting. I’ll do three more days over the next two weeks, but this is really the climactic bit for me. And because of the director’s vision for the scenes, there weren’t a lot of angles to cover or dialogue to go back and forth with. They framed up, they rolled, I did all my business, then we cut and the director (J. Van Auken – also the writer, star, and many other jobs) gave me a giant hug:
I can’t tell you how exciting it was for me, as a longtime horror fan, to actually be in my first horror film; and in the Monster role, to boot. The first time the director looked at me on the monitor he went “F*ck!” If he’s trying to put a nightmare of his onto the screen, it sounds like I did my part to make it happen. And it’s a funny thing, because I’m very aware how much of the credit goes to everyone else; but I also know that not just anybody could have done that in 10 minutes. Whether it’s good enough for the movie? You put yourself in their hands and hope so. But man, they all seemed happy. And so was I – again, just look at that smile.