It’s an early start tomorrow to piece together a tape for a nice job. They’re slightly putting me through my paces and I’m slightly fullheaded for a meeting so it’s a relief that I can send it rather than walk into a room in Soho prepared tomorrow. It means I can let it all back up, as I have done, and tomorrow morning early I’ll set up a camera and learn it live in front of the camera until it’s clean. Then I’ll do it all again different. Then I’ll try and forget about it.
Tapes tapes tapes. Man I’ve made some works of art over the years. There was a commercial tape where I was the devil and Tristan and I deliberately put in the Wilhelm scream, and loads of other little film-maker Easter eggs. No recall for that one. It is genuinely tempting to believe that half the tapes we make never get watched by the client. But still we make the tapes. I had a commercial tape the other day. The instructions asked for plain background. I did one scene in my car. It’s possible that the assistant to the casting director watched it with a checklist in front of them and just swiped left because “no plain background”. If I knew for certain how these things were parsed I would conform to it, but it’s impossible to tell. I’ve watched friends of mine casting things go all gooey eyed over a mediocre actor because of how they are positioned in the marketplace. We are all to a lesser or greater extent suckers when it comes to people selling us stuff. Actors are a commodity.
My agent has some position in the market. She’s not just a producer trying to make a second string tick over. She gets me and knows how to sell me, and as a result there are some casting directors who have started to know who I am and what I do easily and how I can improve the story. So I’ll take the time tomorrow morning and I’ll be grateful that I CAN take the time. Sometimes I just learn it and bust it out, sometimes I haven’t time to learn it so it’s about time and short term memory. I’ll send the first take I do where I remember it right. I might… might take a leaf out of a dear friend of mine’s book and use an autocue on iPad. Probably won’t though. Learning tech takes almost as long as learning lines. And the fear with autocue is that you get a recall and you haven’t learnt it. Might as well do the work, even if it’s condensed into a few hours starting at 6am on a Friday.
AlBarclay 