Day Three

I arrived back at the old Lucent Technologies building in North Andover before my 9am call time on November 29th, 2007, and Alie took my breakfast order and guided me to the same half-trailer to get into costume.  Since we had blocked the scenes for camera the previous day, we got right to work shooting the NASA office sequences.  Gentry Lee, James Rebhorn and Bob Harvey sat at one end of the conference table facing me in both scenes.  With the camera fixed at that end, we shot the first scene, quickly changed our clothes, then shot the second scene from that same angle.  Then, as the camera was turned around to face me, we changed back to our scene one outfits, shot the scene from that new angle, changed again and shot scene two.  The only difference was that in scene two, the camera moved in incredibly close to my face.  This scene was not used in the final film, so I have no idea how this looked.

Rather than run back to base camp for each change, our costumes were laid out in an adjoining room and, during one of our changes, I overheard Bob Harvey asking Rebhorn if he was going to be in Virginia for the press conference in January.  I wasn't exactly sure what they were talking about, but it would ultimately affect me, although I did not know this at the time.

Though he was not an actor, Gentry Lee was an invaluable member of the team.  Many details in the film are based on Richard Kelly's parents, and Richard's father had actually worked with Gentry on the Mars Viking lander mission in the 1970's.  In 2007, Gentry was employed at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and was with us serving as a consultant on the film in addition to playing the role of the chief engineer.  He would not be at the press conference in January as he was going to be getting married at that time.

I felt extremely confident about the two scenes that we had just shot that morning.  Richard Kelly gave me little or no direction, trusting whatever I came up with.  Rebhorn and I had actually improvised the ending of the first scene when rehearsing it at the Intercontinental Hotel a few days earlier and we were allowed to play our version of it.  And, though it is not mentioned in the script, it had been decided that my character would smoke in both scenes, so props assistant Michelle Sherwood lit a fresh cigarette for me for every take.  My friend Dennis Price told me after he saw the film that he could easily tell that I am not a smoker, but I smoked at least half a pack that day.

There was a long break for me in the afternoon before we shot a strange sequence that also did not make it into the final cut of the film.  It involved my character skulking around the office at night, then noticing a commotion down on the laboratory floor.  The B camera was set up down there to catch my reactions to what I was witnessing through the window.  The operator of the B camera was a fellow by the name of Terence Hayes, whose mother just happened to be the best friend of a woman who worked with my wife - talk about a small world!  Terence continues to work as a camera op; I recently saw him back in Boston on the set of the newest Amy Schumer movie.

As confident as I had been earlier in the day, I felt that I was not quite getting the reactions that Richard wanted for this particular moment.  But, regardless of whether or not my work was satisfactory, I do believe that the action I was watching would have been very effective in the film and I have always wondered why it was cut.

I drove home exhausted yet exhilarated by the events of the last four days.  It had been a week unlike any I had ever experienced.  What was supposed to have been a single day of work had turned into a full immersion into the motion picture process.  It would be two and a half weeks before my services were required again, this time to shoot one of my character's biggest scenes in the film...and it was already being rewritten.