I was accosted by protesters yesterday on my way t…
I was accosted by protesters yesterday on my way to lunch. I had heard them from my room already; periodically they would get together and shout “No war! No war! Peace! Yeah!” They had a bedsheet on which they were asking people to sign their names in the square downstairs, and as I walked past they swept down on “the foreigner” like vultures. Three of them surrounded me and started demanding that I sign the bedsheet to support “World Peace”, which due to their accents sounded more like “War Peace”. I asked them how they wanted to bring about War Peace, but they didn’t seem to have a plan. No steps, no real goal, nothing. “We’re not against the war,” they said at one point, “but we want everyone to show their love to everyone else.” At one point they even called over an obvious “Foreigner Expert”, i.e. someone who claimed they knew how to deal with foreigners. She spoke exclusively in English, even as the others were talking with me in Chinese.
“Just sign it, ok? Just sign it!” the Foreigner Expert wheedled. When I asked her for a concrete reason why I should, or any reason at all, she hit me with even more blinding logic in the form of: “Look, Japanese are taking photos! They think it is important!”
“First of all,” I said, “Japanese people take photos of everything. It doesn’t mean they think it’s important. Second of all, those are not Japanese people.”
I would have loved to keep talking with them…well, no, it was getting real old real fast, and I was late for lunch. I wished them luck in their search for a motive behind their actions and left.
We’re shooting the restaurant scene tonight at 8 or 9, even though one of our actors has cancelled at the last minute due to an intercrew love-spat or something. We can’t cancel, though, as Dean’s already shaved his beard and is itching (itching, get it?) to grow it back ASAP. Final Cut Pro 4 is out, which would mean more to me if I had a Mac, but if Mindcrime can get it on his machine we might be able to work out some sort of editing arrangement.
