Nor’easter Blog

Father Michael works here

As a unit we tried our best to take things easily for our last three days on the island – March 1-3. After our brutal Monday, and with Veronica’s car still in a ditch on North Haven Road, we were treated to the three least demanding days of the shoot.

On Tuesday, we shot scene 46, which takes place at Richard’s office, the only location we began production without having locked. Though my father had seen the property in the summer of 2009, I hadn’t followed up on it after seeing his photos, and we had never planned to shoot there. But when the first-choice location fell through, I sifted through my old location photos and was surprised to find that the photos were a lot more promising than I’d remembered. Given the nature of the island in winter, we had a lot of difficulty locating the property’s owner. By the time we did, we were already in the middle of the second week of the shoot and things were getting tight. We were eventually able to find the (very kind) artist who owns the construction and design space that appears in the film, and were able to shoot there with relatively little hassle.

My fondest memory of this location was when we went to scout it a few days before shooting, and Kit found a banjo, and then revealed that he could play banjo. As Veronica said, “I needed that.”

After walking into the location, Gareth, our trusty gaffer, started running his lighting ideas past Ian, our DP, and I remember Ian just telling him to forget putting any lights outside. Let’s take it easy today, he said. A good call given how brutal Monday had been. Soon, and for the first time, the camera was crashing because of the warmth of the location rather than the cold. That was a welcome change.

The next day saw not one, not two, but three gifts for the film’s photography. We shot a number of scenes that take place at Peggy’s house, and though we had to shoot them all in a row, they were written to take place on different script days. The weather shifted dramatically for each of the scenes, as if on cue, and blessed us with the snow-bound shot that appears near the beginning of the film. I couldn’t have been happier with how each one turned out. During the shifts of the weather, we ran outside and back in (twice) to grab a few exterior shots of David in the snow. Each one made it into the final cut.

Our last day was a short one, with two new actors making their one-day appearances felt. Camilla Gray and Bill Vaughan came out to the island to put in a day of work each and left a memorable impression on the production to say the least. We’re also very grateful for the house pictured above, whose owner was friendly to the point of allowing us not only to come inside, but to turn her china cabinet completely inside out. Even though everything was returned to its right place and nothing was broken, the fact that she was still smiling while the art department re-assembled her house at sundown was a good reminder of how impressively kind and generous the entire island was while helping us make this film.

Photo by my brother

By week three I was feeling a lot more confident in the production, and the fears of not finishing our days or letting the logistics of shooting on a frozen island get the better of us had subsided. As a production unit, we were certainly tired, but Sunday of that week was the last day inside the Greene family home, which told us we had completed the bulk of the heavy lifting on the island. We had a number of stunts (and two hell days) in front of us, but the first two days of the week were relatively calm.

On Sunday we shot a number of assorted things with Abby in and around her bedroom, and a scene (the content of which I won’t reveal) that has become one of my favorites in the film. For this scene it was clear from the first take that we would be able to execute the scene as I’d planned, in a single shot, without compromising the clarity of what happened in the moments off screen. In the scene, Abby’s brother opens the door to his bedroom and reveals what he’s done to his room after being left alone for only a few minutes. Ian took advantage of an interior skylight in the bedroom and shined a murky light down onto the two actors. Along with a few dangled branches just off camera to heighten the effect, he created a ghostly effect that I think will stick with people. Liam’s face is captivating in the scene, drawing the viewer in as I’d hoped it would.

We also shot the ending of the film on Sunday, and I was grateful for the amount of time the crew devoted to it. It takes place outside, and up until that day we had had a lot of trouble shooting in the area where we’d planned to end the film. The two previous scenes there had been cut short after only a few takes (though, having seen them, I don’t think the material suffers) because the weather had been so brutal. We caught a break on Sunday and were given a perfectly overcast sky with little wind, which made the 12 or so takes bearable. Richard and David were on point from the start, and our work became more about finding the right pace and tenor rather than the tone.

Monday was a peach. It was snowing when we woke up. Chapin lost control of Veronica’s car on the way to set and lodged it in a ditch. We put together a stunt that none of us was entirely sure the actors would live through, but after having navigated a car crash, the odds somehow seemed better for Richard. He’d been riding shotgun during the wreck but the stunt turned out to be a lot worse than that. I think he liked attacking David but who can say. Perks of being an actor, really. Then we shot five pages after lunch. Before that, Ian dropped the camera on the rocks outside David’s cabin. The whole thing did a barrel roll; the matte box went flying; it was a real sight.  Ian’s knee was destroyed but the bleeding stopped by the time it started really raining. We were soaking wet. Lunch was good. We had to shoot five pages after lunch. The most important five pages. Veronica’s car stayed in the ditch for about a day and a half, at like a sixty degree angle. We were already the talk of the town, but if there weren’t a film production going on this would have made us the talk of the town, because it really was there for a day and a half. Tow truck was off island. It took three days for her transmission to give out, though. If memory serves we wrapped almost on time.

My brother was around for the Saturday at the end of week 2 and was with me while we shot much of scenes 84-87. Here are some of his pictures.

Photo by my brother

Week 2 ended with scenes 86 and 87, inside the “vacation house.” Nor’easter’s midpoint is marked by these scenes, which feature the three children in the script – a brother, a sister, and her boyfriend – breaking into a house that’s been left under wraps for the winter. We shot the scene day for night, which is to say we blacked out the windows to simulate night while shooting in normal daylight hours.

Scene 87 is the longest in the script, and I was glad that we had a full day to shoot it. Our vacation house was actually a vacation house’s guest quarters, a single room that our production designer, Lisa, had expertly set up for us the day prior with a lot of opaque plastic and some big, fat lights that the owners had lying around. Ian, the photographer, flipped when he saw the enormous, warm sources that she’d found, and incorporated them into the scene, putting them directly in the frame a lot of the time, giving the scene a unique look. Coupled with the hanging plastic, these lights added a lot of gorgeous haze to the scene.

The weather was clear and relatively warm that day so I was amazed to find myself shivering as we started shooting. Blacking out the windows quickly turned the location back into a meat locker, so despite the break in the weather, we weren’t able to loosen up. The day went smoothly, but we had to make the most of our twelve hours. At the end of the day, we shot a couple of night exteriors showing the brother and sister’s approach to the vacation house, which gave us an opportunity to show off our fog machine and a few of our bigger lights. Ending the night in the snow-covered, moonlit woods, yelling back and forth to each other, was a memorable capper. I stared up at the trees while people found their places and celebrated the fact that we had shot out the primary locations on the island already and hadn’t left anything on the table.

Inside the cave

All I’m doing this week is watching dailies, so a brief aside before I go nuts from watching the fruits of your labors for another hour:

Carey and I went to the Arclight with another couple last weekend to see Werner Herzog’s latest documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It’s a 3-D production about the Chauvet caves of southern France, where the oldest paintings known to man were found. Since its discovery, the cave’s importance has been universally recognized and the age of the paintings repeatedly confirmed through scientific testing. It seemed like a good idea for a movie so I went into it expecting something of a travelogue and Discovery channel featurette rolled into one.

What I got was instead one of the most profound experiences I have ever had in a theater. The paintings, done by some of the earliest homo sapiens, are remarkably beautiful and technically strong. They’re insightful, playful, animated, expressive, layered. And seeing them preserved so flawlessly (by a fortunately-timed rockslide that sealed off the cave from the environment) is breathtaking.

What elevates the material even further is Herzog’s utter reverence for the artistic process. He interviews scientists and artists, historians and perfumers, all with an attention to the interviewee’s inner life. What struck me most remarkably was the idea (causally brought up by one historian) of the inner landscape. Our inner lives are overlooked by most today, and success is equated with ownership almost exclusively in western culture. The value that Herzog gives to feelings and dreams wasn’t quite revelatory to me, but it was a wake-up call that I needed. Editing is sometimes a balancing act of clarity and expressiveness, and when focusing on continuity and cause and effect it can be easy to overlook the value of novelty or the amusement that unexpected elements bring. The unexpected aside can create  a broader sense of drama without feeling tacked on.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams forces the viewer to face truly incomprehensible passages of time while simultaneously communicating the desires of people tens of thousands of years dead. They seemed at times identical to my own. It made me believe in reconstitution and a collective unconscious, even though, I don’t think, that was ever considered the subject of the film.

The Greene House Interior; photo by Ian Bloom

After splitting our first day between the mainland and island, we bunkered down at the Tidewater Motel on main street in Vinalhaven for what would be a two-week stay. The island was very cold and the motel is situated directly over the water, so many of the rooms needed additional heat in order for us to get through the night. It took a few days for us to work out the kinks, but thanks to the hard work and helpful attitude of Phil, its owner, we were able to get each member of the cast and crew situated. Phil normally keeps the motel closed for January and February because of just how few people come and go from the island in those months, but he opened it up for us for two weeks and for that we’re very grateful – we wouldn’t have had a central place to lodge the cast and crew otherwise, and it was valuable to gather for meals and what little leisure time we had. (Hello, Oscar broadcast.)

The week was spent on a single estate on the north side of the island that served for multiple script locations. The property is incredibly beautiful, but it’s located right on the waterfront, and the front yard of the estate is essentially a big ramp from the ocean to the buildings that housed the production. We had scouted the place several times in 2009 and 2010, including the December and January leading up to the shoot. The property had seemed cold then, but manageable, so we decided to move forward with a February shoot in large part because we thought we would be able to manage the elements at the estate (where we would spend 9 of the 21 days of principal photography). Well, February was much colder, windier, and snowier than the preceding months, and we found ourselves in weather-related binds most days at the estate.

Our first day there was especially grueling. David was the only cast member on set, and we had a number of scenes to shoot in the priest’s house, which is an uninsulated, one-room house on the waterfront. We were underprepared for the cold (zero degrees) and wind (thirty miles an hour), and I found myself getting through the day by setting hourly goals and focusing on the compositions one at a time. It was difficult but David and the crew kept a good attitude and we wrapped on time.

Week 2 also gave us our first day inside the Greene family home, where a lot of Nor’easter’s drama takes place. It was a location my father had scouted for me nearly two years before, and I had been looking forward to photographing it for nearly as long as I’d been writing the script. Shooting scenes 12, 13, 14, and 15 inside the house, when our priest meets the father of the missing boy for the first time, was deeply satisfying. Seeing the way the living room was designed by Lisa and lit by Ian was a relief, and knowing that we were doing justice to the home and the environment as well as the drama let me sleep well at night. Add to that the gorgeous snowstorm we received that morning for David’s approach to the house, and I spent most of the day feeling like I was opening a gift.

View from the ferry at dawn; picture by Michael Brotzman

Week two began with an odd day – we had spent our rainy day off on the mainland, which meant part of our next day of production would take place on the island ferry. In Nor’easter, our priest travels back and forth from the island several times, so those scenes were shot together, in an hour-and-a-half window while we rode the ferry to Vinalhaven. Veronica and I had originally planned this part of the production for a full round trip plus a one-way trip, but we decided to knock it out in just a single one-way trip when we finalized the schedule, and that turned out to be enough for what we were after.

Ian, our DP, did especially great work on the boat, and the production was able to operate smoothly, in large part because we happened to be nearly alone. With so few people traveling back and forth from Vinalhaven in February, we were able to manage the many silent, lonely rides in the boat’s cabin with the kind of isolation we were seeking.

We arrived on the island, grabbed a few good shots of the priest coming and going near the ferry terminal, and then headed off to what became one of the greatest surprises of the entire production. Scene 16 directly follows our priest’s first big failure in the script, and I had written it to happen immediately after that failure. The scene takes place at a stone quarry that has been filled with water and frozen over, and I hoped that the sense of peace there would contrast the fight that the priest had just gone through. As written, it ought to have been shot at around 10 in the morning.

After our morning on the ferry, though, we realized that the complexity of the shots we’d planned was going to keep us from shooting until around 3pm. After I read through the script and realized it wouldn’t affect the continuity of the movie to adjust, we set up for scene 16 and were blessed with the most extraordinary light of the entire shoot.

What I had written as a simple series of shots – what amounted to our priest happening upon a moment of intimacy between two kids and then choosing to spy on them – became an extraordinary composition, courtesy of Ian and the timing of the sun. When we turned around to do David’s coverage, I pushed the production to hurry and capture the flickering light that managed to both illuminate and obscure parts of David’s face in a way that felt peaceful, natural, and bizarre all at once. It was a gift.

This was one of the many days during the production that I felt the crew’s work and the elements in general collaborated to elevate the material to something that felt beyond any individual’s command. Watching the dailies I was proud that we’d delivered something that could heighten the aesthetic of the film and also our sense of David’s character in a simple moment.

After the days in the church when I felt we were, at times, pushing our compositions into square, predictable spaces for the purposes contrast to what we knew the film would later be, it was another enormous relief to see that moments in the woods and on the ice could feel both earthly and magical at once without bleeding into sentimentality.

Picture by Rachel Brosnahan

We shot only one day at the church exterior in Port Clyde, Maine, which proved to be more than enough time for what we had scheduled. After getting through the first three days of the shoot and finally realizing that we were going to be able to make our days as planned, I was able to relax and keep my eyes open much more effectively.

Keeping my eyes open, or making sure I’m looking at the real people and the real landscape (and the opportunities both bring) is something I try to remind myself to do when on set. This can be especially tricky when shooting digitally with such a clear, crisp HD monitor setup. Ian’s compositions and attention to detail were terrific to the point of being seductive, so I had to work to avoid becoming complacent and too easily satisfied.

Throughout the shoot, at different times, each of the actors asked me what the production felt like – ironically the people you see on screen are often the people who spend the least number of hours involved in the production – and the feeling I wanted to discuss was not of a weight coming off my shoulders but rather a relief in my heart that dialogue was clear, that emotions were legible, that we were executing delicate material with a technically strong hand so that the ideas could be engaged.

The first such experience was inside the church listening to David recite the Lord’s Prayer, and the second was outside the church on day four, watching Haviland perform the long opening dialogue scene that establishes the circumstances that create the story’s drama. Knowing that that was legible, clear, and done without any unnecessary histrionics gave me a kind of relief that eventually turned into confidence as the shoot went on. It was not the first time I was grateful for what the others were doing for the film and the subject matter, nor would it be the last, but it was the first time I was really able to appreciate it. We were outside, the weather had cooperated remarkably well, and I felt like we were over-achieving again.

The next day was our first day off, and it poured rain all afternoon. I spent the day going over footage at the hotel with Ian.

Our first week of production was, by most accounts, a great success. Our main character, Erik, is a priest, and we started the shooting schedule in his church. We were shooting at a very small, very welcoming church in Thomaston, Maine, with a lovely pipe organ and an all-wood interior that suited our story well. It’s the same one featured in the location photos that have been posted here and elsewhere.

We had originally scheduled our first day of production as a particularly light one, I think because we weren’t sure we would be able to get our act together in what could have been extreme weather in a new location, but a week before shooting, our new Assistant Director, Kit, decided that we should treat it just like any other day on the schedule and expect the professionals we were working with to do their jobs. He was right, and we made the first day just a hair under schedule.

I have to say that that first day was a real catharsis for me. Seeing Veronica in the church basement supervising the meals and organizing the production drove home how far the production had actually come, and knowing that the camera was finally turning over in a location I was happy with, behind performances I was satisfied with, gave me a lot of confidence.

Our efforts to execute our plan to its best, though, had only begun. Shooting in the church was fraught with a lot of stress (not least of which came from watching dolly grips sling eight foot pieces of steel track over their shoulders, less than a foot or two from enormous, irreplaceable stain glass windows).

The material we shot on those first days was, luckily, expected to be the most straightforward and square, as I tended to call it. So being a little tentative felt all right. But by day three we were itching to get more adventurous with our compositions.