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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.
The Thing That Made Tom Mean: A series of unfortunate events, on a day that pushed nearly everyone to the brink.
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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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.
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.  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. 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!  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.
 Not 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.
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!  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.
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.
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.  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. 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.
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...    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.  With the Webbs, laughing in the face of danger
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.  Awesome location. One of many.
 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.  |
AuthorI'm the writer-director and more or less the mother of this film. Archives
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