We’re through callbacks now, and I am really excited about a lot of the actors we saw.
Callbacks were a little bit of a manic process - we staggered calls, but since I was most interested in seeing people in different combinations, I had to think on my feet to respond intuitively to which actors might work best together. It kept my brain going a few steps ahead, and I dreamt I was scheduling callbacks after each night.
(This happens to me on set, too - I haven’t directed a film yet where I didn’t have set dreams the night before and after. I wonder if that will change over the 18-day shoot for Hal.)
Creating different groups makes me think a lot about the makeup of my halfway houses. Mine were all co-ed, though obviously there are sober houses that are separated by gender. My trans brain wouldn’t have liked one of those, but the co-ed arrangement definitely didn’t keep me out of trouble, either. I think I would have found trouble regardless.
Rehab and halfway houses both had a wide age range, but most of the other alcoholics were quite a bit older than me. I think alcohol takes a little longer to destroy your health/life than hard drugs do. And I think heroin addicts rarely keep using after 35 or so - they get clean or die. So most of the people I hung out with in the halfway house were my age and were heroin addicts, and the other alcoholics were generally quite a bit older.
In the Big Book, Bill says that people in AA make more money than the average person. That book was written in 1939, and it shows. My sponsor and I were just talking about how that was probably a self-selecting group. Bill was reaching out to alcoholics in hospitals as they went through withdrawal, and those hospitals often had to be paid for personally. So the AA’s Bill knew were those who could afford to dry out in a hospital instead of a jail cell, at home, on the street, etc.
A halfway house is the opposite. It’s often people who don’t have anywhere else to go. Of course that means different things for different people. I felt like I had no good options - I could stay with family, but there would be alcohol in the house; I could go back to the empty house where I found my fiance dead, but that didn’t sound fun. My options were bad, but they still existed. There were definitely people whose only other options were prison or the street.
The roles have been written to reflect the different experiences of people living in a halfway house, and our callbacks process was a matter of finding people who form a cohesive but diverse group at a glance. I think we’ll tailor some of the roles a bit for the folks we found - but first, we have to get those offers out!
Casting, fundraising, locations. Repeat. :)
Lane
