For the next few entries, I am going to break down production week by week. This is the first entry, detailing week 1 (our first six days of shooting.)
Week 1 of production was basically a dream. Our very first day, we started with Beth and Amy driving to the recovery house. We hopped through several scenes on our first day, from the car, to Amy’s old room at her mother’s house, and then Rich’s Mom’s kitchen. We were able to use one location as home base; the walls in the kitchen and bedroom were distinct enough to look like different houses, so we consolidated several locations in the screenplay into one for our first day.
For a long time, we were planning to have Beth pick Amy up from the hospital. In our final weeks of preproduction, we changed this to be Amy waking up back in her childhood bedroom. We were more interested in showing Amy’s fully furnished room, which could differentiate from the bare rooms at the halfway house. How does a space lived in over years feel different from transitional housing, where you may be moved any day for logistical reasons even if you stay clean?
This also gave us an extra day after New Year’s to prep our halfway house location. This was a big task: we rented a nice home in Pflugerville, and our art department did a decent amount of dressing down, especially in the kitchen. I lived in two recovery houses in Baltimore, and both of them were large, older houses that used every square inch available for bedroom or storage space. There were several things that broke and went long stretches without getting fixed - the porch in one of the other houses caught on fire once from a burning ashtray, and there was just a blackened hole on one side for a few weeks. We wanted to preserve this sense in the art direction of the main halfway house space.
We had a full day at the halfway house before Amy and Hal joined us, filming Rich’s introductory scenes and the initial piss test before they arrive at the house.
Daylight became precious quickly in the house. Our usable daylight ended between 5:15 and 5:30 PM, and with our daily call at 7 AM and shooting beginning at 8 AM, that did not leave us a lot of time. Most of the scenes at the recovery house take place at daytime - the nighttime scenes happen more after they’ve relapsed, and they leave the house fairly quickly at that point. Our nightly meetings became a question of which scenes we absolutely needed real daylight for, whether we could move around some of our nighttime scenes so we ended with those each day, and which scenes/locations we might be able to fake daylight for.
There was one scene in the first week where faking daylight turned out to bring an incredible beauty. The scene takes place after the Act 1 climax, when Amy has seen some of the chaos of the house but chosen to stay thanks to encouraging words from Hal. She sets her stuff up in her room, but is interrupted by Marcia, her roommate who has to get dressed for court. The scene in question was just Amy leaving her room, passing into another room where Todd is packings his things after being kicked out, and then overhearing Rich on the phone with his sponsor before going outside.
When planning the scene, I almost wondered how it had made it through so many drafts of the screenplay - not much is happening here. It was also scheduled at the end of our day, and while we could shoot it in an hour with real sunlight, it would take at least that long to set up fake daylight for a tracking shot through so many hallways and a staircase.
We chose to push ahead with the scene and fake daylight, since there was no time to be found in the next day’s schedule. The lighting was absolutely beautiful. Faking daylight created an emotional, closed in feeling that was delicate, vulnerable, and a bit sad while still truly feeling like early afternoon. This brought a whole new meaning to the scene: it was Amy experiencing the house and its residents in a quiet moment, which was absolutely crucial sandwiched between two high-chaos ensemble scenes.
Shooting that scene was one of many joyful surprises on set. Week 1 we didn’t go more than 10 minutes over on any day. I felt a shift in the crew becoming more invested in the material and more in sync with each other by Day 3. We were filming a lighter part of the movie - one that had always felt like exposition in readings. I know now that the tone of the screenplay was always opaque to a reader - but the tone of the movie was clear to me, the designers, the actors, and the cinematographer, so the tone of this part of the movie is anything but opaque. It was an exciting start to a huge process.
Next week I’ll talk about week 2 of shooting - which includes the big tonal shift of the movie, and new locations!
