Another
Dean left for Canada a couple of days ago. He’ll be there for about a month, going to weddings and tending to family affairs. I’m so jealous of him, always going off somewhere while I’m stuck here, that I might just take advantage of our not being able to film and make a trip somewhere myself. Nothing huge, just a long weekend (I have to feed his cat, after all) in China or Japan perhaps.
Theoretically, there is one scene we could film without Dean, but it requires a location we don’t have yet: an office or study type room, preferably without too many windows. Maurice has a tip about an elementary school principal’s office that might do; we’ll see if that works out. We also need a torture room (lots of tiles would be nice; you’d think that at least would be easy to find here, but no) and, of course, the rather improbable zeppelin interior. Not to mention an airplane, but at least we can hope to film on the high-speed rail system when it opens in October.
A while ago I had some ideas to change the third act a bit, to make it more emotionally resonant as well as tie various elements of the movie together at the end. Dean seemed to like the idea, though it would mean adding some flashbacks earlier in the film as well as another actor to find. Hopefully that will work out.
In the meantime, I was recently interviewed by Kate Thomas, a reporter from ACT, a film magazine based in Shanghai. Kate heard about me through Prince Roy and thought our little indie project might interest their readers.
We arranged to meet at the Haggendaz shop at the corner of Roosevelt and Hoping Roads, but when I got there the place hadn’t opened yet. We ended up meeting at the coffee shop next door. Kate is from Shanghai, and we talked about the (I think) curious phenomenon of Beijing being the current film capital of China, despite Shanghai’s history, relative proximity to Hong Kong, a climate better suited to filming year round, as well as its more international image. I’ve never been to either city (I really should go take a look), so I’m not really qualified to say. I lived in Qingdao for about half a year, and when talking with Kate, who is from the mainland, I’m afraid my accent got a bit confused, as I didn’t know whether I should speak normally or try to recall the Qingdao accent for better communication. It turns out that she had no trouble understanding me, though, so I shouldn’t have worried.
Apart from that, the interview went well. Kate asked questions that made me think more about objectively about filmmaking. I look forward to seeing the article. I wish she’d been able to come to one of the shoots, but the timing just didn’t work out since Dean just left. He gets back in late September. I’d hoped to get principle photography done before year’s end…I still do, in fact, but it’s not going to be easy.
