The Wasting Movie
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The Wasting Movie

News and other stuff

the two faces of tom

12/24/2015

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I love my crew. I keep saying it, and everybody wants to know why. So I’ll tell you, one blog at a time.
 
TOM PRATT, 1ST AD

​Tom’s Greatest Challenge: Being mean. This was his first crack at being a 1st and he did an admirable job with logistics and organizing and making sure the cast was happy and the director was never caught carrying stuff. 

But being a 1st also means that sometimes you have to be mean like that drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket  to make sure the set runs smoothly. And Tom is nice. Oh, how hard he tried to be mean. Sometimes he scowled. But he’s not a mean guy.


Look below, for a time Tom was mean. He gives us what-for at 19 seconds.
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Pensive, yes. Mean, no.
The Thing That Made Tom Mean: A series of unfortunate events, on a day that pushed nearly everyone to the brink.
  • Our lead actress ran out a gate that was supposed to slam behind her, and it did. But then it got stuck, and she was trapped on the other side. In the rain. With no umbrella. Tom always took the actors’ safety and comfort very seriously. We got the gate open in about 30 seconds, but it was probably the longest 30 seconds of Tom’s life, and it set him up for Unfortunate Event #2.
  • ​That time we got Lauren to rattle the gate. This time, Tom wasn't worried about the actress, he was worried about the gate. It was old. And the more she rattled it, the more worried he got. Until he snapped. Or got very very stern. There would be no more gate rattling. But it's ok. We got the shot.​
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Tom’s Biggest Regret: That he didn’t get to go in the camera boat on the last day. He really wanted to, and he deserved to, but it wasn’t big enough and the water was choppy. Sorry, Tom. My next film will have water in it too. You can go in the boat then.
An Important Thing An Anonymous Crew Member Said About Tom: That it’s good he wasn’t like that drill sergeant. That his pleasant personality helped us. The crew worked hard, and this was not a big budget film. If somebody was yelling at them all the time, they might not have stayed. But they did stay, because Tom helped to make it a nice set to be on. I love it when niceness wins.
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make me up, make me down

12/11/2015

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I love my crew. I keep saying it, and everybody wants to know why. So I’ll tell you, one blog at a time. 
Today, it’s all about makeup. Which ought to be called make-down, because that was the challenge for department head Sian Leigh – to transform the very healthy-looking, rosy-cheeked, porcelain-skinned dropdead beauty that is Lauren McQueen into a young woman devastated by anorexia. Yikes! Taming Donald Trump’s hair (and mouth) would be easier.
                                    What challenge would you rather face?
                     Make her ugly                                               Make him pretty
Here’s why I love Sian. The first time we spoke, with just a few days to prepare for that initial conversation, she’d clearly stayed up nights thinking about the challenges, and she had a plan. It was multi-faceted, but part of it involved ordering some kind of makeup called a death palette. Oy.

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​Sian was fully committed. She cared so much about the film and so much about how the actors appeared. I think she felt actual physical pain if Lauren didn’t look perfectly ravaged in the monitor.  
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Sian with Lauren McQueen and Shelagh McLeod
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The anorexia in the story progressed, but we shot scenes out of order, so Sian had to know at all times exactly how destroyed Lauren should appear. She had to be ready to wipe off or punch up makeup at any moment.  And because we shot in a lot of rain, she had to keep her face from melting.


And there was more. This is, after all, a ghost story. There was special effects makeup. There was hair – especially harnessing the unruly curls of Brendan and Sean.  There was catching Brendan and pinning him down to do his hair​.
Luckily, Sian had Alice Harman assisting her, and Alice was talented and unflappable. We had a full-speed-ahead schedule – for football fans, the equivalent of a hurry-up offence. There was no time for panic and less time for mistakes. Alice was a calming force for all of us, coolly getting the job done while tornadoes raged around her. Movie sets need more Alices.
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Sian and Alice did a phenomenal job in demanding circumstances. Equally important, they were just nice people, fun to have around, easy to love. And we do.
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when dolls kill

12/10/2015

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She came in like a cockroach, bold as hell, icky as a wad of somebody else’s gum on your theatre seat, unapologetic about trying to co-opt our movie and turn it into her movie.  And, like a roach, she was nearly impossible to kill. They called her…​
Bambolina!
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A seemingly harmless porcelain doll that surely brought some little girl great joy back in the blessed pre-Barbie world.  Rescued from a bin of her mates in a provincial French charity shop. Chosen, like so many women, for her blonde hair and innocent blue eyes. She was meant to be a companion and a comfort to Lauren McQueen’s Sophie. Alas, Bambolina had other plans. 
Creepy doll plans.  In the two years that Bambolina lived with us, waiting for the cameras to roll, she got creepier and creepier. Her hair dreadlocked itself, like some tiny, freaky Rastagirl. Her hand broke off, leaving a sharp porcelain stump. She took to hiding in places where we’d least expect her. I’ll never forget the scream from the basement when someone opened a storage box of hats and mittens and found Bambolina lying on top, staring up with her cold dead eyes.
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Another bad hair day
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Lurking in a smelly coat
She started to stink. Her other hand broke. Then her feet came off. But she still managed to get around.  When Sean accidentally kneeled on her head and broke it off, we thought it was over for Bambolina. The crew sent up a cheer. We all rejoiced. We shouldn’t have, but God help us, we did. And Bambolina came back to life. 

​Still, I had high hopes for her once we started filming. I thought the work would settle her down. I thought being in Lauren’s calm presence would inspire her to be a kind, gentle doll, like my Sleepy Baby when I was six. I was wrong. She got worse. She lurked in dark places, lying in wait to terrify the crew. 
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Footless, yet ready to pounce on Jack
PictureNot happy about that doll

She did the rest of the film with her head balanced revoltingly on her broken neck, attached only by a few threads of her disgusting hair, staring accusingly – unforgiving - at all of us. Lauren didn’t say it, because she’s a trooper, but I know she cringed every time she had to hug that smelly creepfest close. 

At least it was for a purpose. The Wasting isn’t a creepy doll movie, as much as Bambolina tried to make it one. But her role is important. Best Supporting Actress important. Not going to say more, because I want you to watch the movie.


On November 14 we wrapped, and Bambolina’s reign of terror ended.  We threw her in the river Severn. We thought she’d float away. Or drown. Something. Anything. She didn’t.  She turned up at our wrap party that night, a sodden mess, her blue dress still dripping, river weeds entangled in her hair. Emboldened by beer, we attacked. We broke off her head for good, with plans to dispose of her body far away, so they could never be reunited to wreak further havoc. 
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Look ma, no head!
We threw the body in a sack and left it in a field. Our gaffer, Bryan “McGyver” Gavigan, took her head as a trophy. Fool!
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Bryan shows Anna his rash plan
The next day, everybody went home. I went to the crew house to see them off. Bryan had hung Bambolina’s head from his rearview mirror like a pair of fuzzy dice, or a pine tree air freshener. (She smelled as rank as those air fresheners.) We all questioned the wisdom of tempting doom this way, but Bryan laughed it off. Just like they do in scary movies right before the doll/clown/amusement park ride kills them. As he drove away, we noticed it, sitting in the boot of his car: Bambolina’s headless body. Waiting.
 
Nobody has seen Bryan since. If you find him, please let us know. But don’t touch the doll. 

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the misogynist ghost of captain bound

12/6/2015

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There’s this 17th century bad seed and his name is Captain Bound. He has nothing to do with our film. Except that we shot The Wasting in Upton-upon-Severn, and in Upton, Captain Bound is the local ghost. Everybody has something to say about him in this town of deep history, where the innkeepers talk as much about who haunts them as what’s on tap. 
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Pubs and ghosts - an unbeatable combo
Everywhere we went in Upton, people wanted to know if we were making a movie about the notorious Captain. Or if we’d seen any sign of him. We heard his name so much I feel like he’s one of us, and so it behooves me to write about him.  I’ll try to find something good to say, but really, Captain Thomas Bound sounds like he was most unpleasant.
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Bound's boss, Cromwell. Also unpleasant.
Born in 1615, he was a Puritan (See? Unpleasant!) with Cromwell’s forces when they won the critical Battle of Upton in the English Civil War. He probably enjoyed the war, because rumour has it that Captain Bound liked to kill. Specifically, he liked to kill his wives. He had four of them, three named Mary, in that sadly unimaginative era. Two of them were murdered, but the authorities could never pin it on the captain. I’m not sure they even tried.
 In time, Captain Bound committed suicide, drowning himself. Maybe guilt caught up with him, but death didn’t let him off that easy, as he’s still seen galloping around Upton, possibly looking for another Mary. If he was looking for a Jenny, he could stop galloping, as every second person I met in Upton was called Jenny. No Marys though. Maybe Upton's parents caught on - don't call your daughter Mary. 
We were hoping that, what with all that bounding about, we’d have seen him. We shot on Rectory Road, where he lived, and where his ghost is often spotted. We shot on The Ham, the riverside meadow that’s another of his haunts.  Didn’t see him, but we did see a lot of really nice Labradors. 
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No galloping ghosts here, just the marginally spectral Gray O'Brien
And then - on Friday the 13th - we shot in Old Hall, on Rectory Road, in a flat that one of the poor murdered Marys is said to haunt.  Our makeup artist Sian and I were minding our own business, sitting near the window where her ghost is sometimes seen standing, when something suddenly moved behind us. (Sidenote to Gray O’Brien: It was not a cat!) I thought Sian did it and she thought I did it, and when we compared notes, we realized neither of us did it.  But it definitely moved, and made a noise, and freaked us out. 
Did they just see Mary's ghost?
Old Hall in the monitor
And that was it. It was good enough. Really, I’m not that keen to see a ghost, especially a misogynistic one, despite my many years of writing about them. And we did have other brushes with Upton’s ghostly mythology, but I’ll save those for another post. 
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playback says stuff about us

12/1/2015

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We're in Playback, the Canadian version of Variety, for lack of a better layman's description. A few little errors in there...Equity UK is an actor's union, not a camera-procuring union...but overall, a nice story. Thanks to Jordan Pinto and Playback.
​Here's what we look like, all written up...
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the location whisperers

12/1/2015

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In the immortal words of the saddest man in the world, Chris Isaak: “Things Go Wrong.” They especially go wrong on film sets, or in pre-production, usually in the last week before you go to camera, when you’re past the point of no return and all you can do is shut your eyes, put your head down, and bull forward. It happens on every film, in some form or other. As in life, we all have our issues to deal with, our challenges to overcome, our fires to walk through.  If you’re really fortunate, blessed, and have thought to save the right people’s phone numbers, when things go wrong, a guardian angel steps in to turn it all around.  If you’re the lucky recipient of a miracle that day, the catastrophe becomes a gift, and your film turns out to be even better than it would have been.

That’s what happened to The Wasting. We got two angels, both called Webb. 
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With the Webbs, laughing in the face of danger
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When a medical issue led to the loss of our main location right before our start day, we didn’t have time to panic. We had to fix it, pronto. I summoned the rolodex in my brain, flipping through everyone I’d met on my early summer recces in Upton-upon-Severn. I came up with Peter Webb, who was the mayor when I met him at some sort of strawberry social in the town hall. Now he’s the ex-mayor, which meant he had lots of time to meet me down at the Anchor for a pint and a strategy session.
Peter and his wife, Rosemary, for whom the word unstoppable was invented, didn’t bat an eye when I rattled off the daunting list of places we needed – bedrooms, livingrooms, an impressive exterior, woods, a pond and more.  They went into a huddle, and before I was halfway through my pint, they’d come up with a plan. 
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Rosemary with producer Jeanne Stromberg
 And oh, what a plan! It’s hard to fathom now, because our original location was so amazing it seemed irreplaceable. But Peter and Rosemary replaced it, in grand style. They called on everyone they knew (aka everyone in Upton) and before you can say “Roll camera” we had access to houses, buildings, woods and spooky cellars that put the original to shame. They were BETTER than what we'd lost, logistically, creatively and visually. Our production value went from zero to sixty in four seconds. And that was only the beginning. 
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Awesome location. One of many.
Peter and Rosemary’s flat became our unofficial production office. Our DOP Michal Wisniowski and I parked ourselves there for a week and worked, while our new best friends made calls and rounded up anything our hearts desired, usually within minutes of asking. Need a guitar to bring into the woods? Got one, ten minutes later. Need an ambulance? Here ya go. How about a boat? (That from the audacious Michal – and yes, we got a boat.)
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U & T = Upton & Toronto
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Peter and Michal plot boat-procurement
And so on. And so on. Etc. Etc. They never got tired of us knocking on their door or ringing their phone.  End result: When things went wrong, our shoot went right. 
 
Thank you, Peter and Rosemary. 
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    I'm the writer-director and more or less the mother of this film.

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