Thursday, March 6th 2008

“I’m afraid to touch him too much, what if he has a disease or something?”

So ended filming for me on The Lair last Friday night. On the whole… I really enjoyed the experience. It was a far cry from what I expected. I envisioned three cameras on rollers that captured enough footage at a time to allow a lot of free movement around the set. Much to my chagrin there was one camera and most of the time we were strongly encouraged to stay on our mark.

The most impressive thing to me was the amount of people running around. There were grips, electrical people, assistants of every variety, wardrobe, make-up, art dept and the ever lovely craft services which was run by a cool hippie chick named Yvette. Yvette would show up at the perfect time with trays of cantaloupe, pineapple, Tofurkey roll ups with cream cheese and scallions or a tray of coffee and green tea from Trader Joe’s. Love that!

The night she showed up passing coffee and tea we spent the majority of the shoot outdoors out in Little Tujunga Canyon. There was a rainstorm that seemed to come at us from every side and did not let up for the entire shoot. I left at 1:30 AM and later learned that the crew didn’t leave until 5:30! The amount of hours the crew put in was beyond impressive, that’s what the day rate is all about!

It was surprising to find that the guy who played Ian, the Werewolf, never made into a wolf suit or for that matter had one hair glued to him. Instead they had a special guy come in and play the wolf. The costume was very large, hairy and heavy. I can’t imagine what it felt like in there for him. I also could not imagine why he was here wearing the wolf suit and not Ian. Later that night I asked the director why they hired an extra guy and he said that there are guys who study animal movement and do this sort of thing as a job and that was why he was here. At least I felt a little better about not playing Ian.

Earlier I mentioned that I was bummed about losing out on the part, but after looking at the guy playing Ian it was clear that he was a better choice and I am much happier and better at playing Tim. I feel that the level of acting was more intense and I was much more clothed. Ian was naked a lot during the filming and after everything was said and done I was really glad it wasn’t me. I think that being who I am everybody will expect me to be the naked guy, but the porn star gets a chance to keep his clothes on this time and a chance to showcase another side.

Memorizing my lines was a new and intimidating experience for me. It’s not that I’d never done it before, there was just SO MUCH. At times I felt overwhelmed flipping through pages looking at what was ahead. I learned all my lines the day before between scenes. Being a smaller production every scene had to be taken down, moved, set back up and re-lit so there was plenty of time to learn lines. I quickly learned that it was a very good idea to learn the other parts, too. Knowing the last word he said before my line started was initially how I did it, but it soon became clear that knowing the entire scene allowed me to really immerse myself in the moment and maybe provide that extra something something. The other benefit was that I was less likely to overlap or cut someone off. My ability to memorize so quickly was fairly impressive considering that my twenties were spent less than sober.

The highlight of my experience was working with Colton Ford who plays Sheriff Trout. We had a very casual and flirty relationship on and off screen through out the shoot.

Would I do it again? Hell yeah.

This entry was posted by Johnny on Thursday, March 6th, 2008 at 1:26 AM and is filed under Photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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