Day Four

The Deer Island Waste Water Treatment Plant juts out into Boston Harbor from neighboring Winthrop, Massachusetts.  It was serving as our location on December 17th, 2007 and I could see it from the Southeast Expressway in Dorchester as I made my way through the rush hour traffic to make my call time of 7:30am.  It was a bright, sunny day, but it was very cold and the wind was strong, whipping across the water at our exposed position.

Though I had been off the film for a few weeks, it felt familiar to be greeted upon my return by Alie, who guided me to my half-trailer at base camp and made sure that I got breakfast.  I was soon escorted along with James Rebhorn, Bob Harvey and others to the underground maze beneath the egg-shaped containers pictured above.  The smell was not as bad as expected, but it was not exactly pleasant, either, and we were instructed to not touch anything and immediately apply hand sanitizer if, by chance, we did.

The scenes we were shooting were to occur in the last third of the movie.  As originally written, it had been a dialogue between several people explaining what Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) was doing at the facility.  It had now been rewritten so that I had pretty much all of the information with only a few interjections from the others.  I must admit that I was rather nervous being the center of attention, and I fear I never quite achieved a solid delivery of the material.  We will never know, as the scene was deleted from the final film.  I do wish I could see some of the footage, though, as our walking and talking tour looked fantastic when I saw some of it on the monitors.

We spent a good deal of time shooting another sequence showing me with a nosebleed.  This happens to many characters in the film who are under Steward's control, but I honestly did not agree with this choice as I felt that my character Martin Teague was going along with Steward willingly, nor was it even mentioned in the script.  Fortunately, this, too, was cut.  All of the other nosebleeds were done with CGI, but I was told by members of the crew that mine was the only one to be attempted live.  It proved to be extremely problematic and not worth the effort.

A few other sequences took us down a winding staircase even further into the bowels of the facility (pun intended) directly underneath one of the eggs to a laboratory set, all the while continuing the dialogue.  I was even involved in another unscripted scene in which Dr. Z (Bridgewater actor W. Kirk Avery) emerged from a sealed chamber with the toothbrush of Norma and Arthur's son Walter.  These scenes also did not make it into the film.

On the day, of course, I did not know that none of this work would see the light of day.  I did my best to deliver the goods, seeking encouragement from James Rebhorn on and off throughout the day.  He asked me if I had been appearing in the long-running show Shear Madness since we had last seen each other - he remembered stuff like that, he was that kind of guy.  I believe it may have been in one of our conversations on this day that he revealed that he had been offered my role, but he had been playing a lot of villains of late and asked for the more sympathetic role of Norm Cahill instead.  This solved the mystery for me of why such a significant role had still been available just before principal photography began.

I also had a nice chat with local actor Scott Winters who was playing an FBI man.  He appears on the left in the above screenshot from the trailer.  Scott seemed to get cast in just about every production that came to the Boston area, and I had a great deal of respect for his opinion.  Sadly, Scott passed away a few years ago at far too young an age.

Before the day was done, Bob Harvey once again brought up the subject of the press conference in Virginia.  I still had no idea exactly what he was talking about, but I said goodbye to him thinking that I would no longer be working with him.  To the best of my knowledge, I had only one more shoot date on the picture sometime in January but, although absolutely nobody from production had told me anything about it yet, it turned out that I would be making the trip to Virginia.