This is part of a series where I break down shooting week-by-week.
Once we were out of the house, we started rolling through our other locations. Our shoot was meticulously scheduled by our producer, Lowell Blank. Lowell is able to see groups of locations that will make sense together, so even if we are shooting multiple locations within a day, we are able to have a home base for production, equipment, design, and cast.
From the house, we went to the convenience store. We arranged with a store near the UT campus to shoot in their space during the day while they were open, and we only had full control of the space from 10 PM-midnight. This actually went far more smoothly than I anticipated. The store owners were very supportive of our work and excited to have their store on film. They gave us great control over the space, including moving and rearranging shelves.
Customers were pretty manageable. There were definitely a few who took pictures of the shoot and half-jokingly asked to be extras. But they had no problem waiting until a take completed.
I was the most stressed about shooting the armed robbery while the store was open. We had a large crew, a camera, and film lighting, but people still make assumptions. We did not shoot anything with the gun until after the store was closed, but we were still doing takes with the full heightened language and fear of an armed robbery. Everything went fine, with no concerned citizens stepping in or calling police.
From the house, we moved to the church location to shoot the 12-step meetings, and a few other scenes in cars, including a scene of dropping Amy off at the emergency room. The meeting scenes were fantastic. My sponsor agreed to be our extras coordinator, and almost all of our meeting attendees and speakers were people who are actually in recovery in Austin, including several of my sponsee sisters and their husbands. We had 20 extras with over 250 years of sobriety. They tapped right into the community energy of 12-step meetings, and the joy and fun that people often have together there.
We went from the church to Tony’s garage, which was at the home of our Hair & Makeup Designer, Laura Gonzalez. We spent three days shooting intense scenes at the garage, and this was where most of our special effects (vomit and makeup) came in. It also meant a whole lot of night exteriors with limited lighting equipment, but our camera and G&E teams worked wonders.
We ended the shoot at McKinney Falls State Park. There were two major scenes to be shot: one around the mid-point of the film, when it’s still Amy’s first day at the house; and one in the last 20 minutes of the film. It was nice having these two very different tonal scenes for our final day.
JD (the cinematographer) and I had previously scouted McKinney Falls, and chosen spots on the shore to film both scenes. When we arrived on the shooting day, there had been a big rain the day before, and it was very difficult to cross the actual falls to get to the shore. Normally, it is a tiny stream of water; this day, it was more like a river. Even though individuals could and did cross this space, we did not feel good about requiring people to cross, transporting equipment across this stretch, and our need to go back and forth countless time over the course of the day for things like food and restroom.
There was no option left to us at the space, because the end-of-movie scene included a jogger, and there was nowhere to jog on the accessible side of the falls. JD and I went to investigate a different part of the park, which we knew had far less spectacular views than the one we had chosen. As we drove there, we realized we could just switch the jogger to a hiker and use our original space, just a different section of it. Thank goodness we had that realization - the jogger vs. hiker issue was a far lower priority than the beautiful views, which give Amy a sense that she can take a breath and be okay in the moment.
All in all, the shoot was a dream. We had a few late nights, but mostly ran on schedule and kept spirits high. I’ll post next week about key takeaways and lessons learned from set.
Lane
