Day Six

My call time was noon on January 29th, 2008.  Though the previous day had been an extremely long and late one, I made sure that I got up early enough to get an omelet for breakfast down in the Guest Quarters lobby, knowing that I had another long day ahead of me.

I was shuttled over to the base, where Alie brought me to a half-trailer - a definite improvement over the office I had been confined to the day before.  In the film, the crane shot that we had worked on the previous night occurs more than halfway through my big scene with Frank Langella.  We would spend the bulk of this day working on that scene.  In fact, we were the only two principal actors called on this day.

We wasted little time, heading up to the wind tunnel set as soon as we were ready to rehearse the scene for camera.  Director Richard Kelly deferred to Frank, letting him say how he wanted to play the scene, right down to the detail of having me stand by holding his overcoat.  We went through it a time or two and then returned to our trailers as our stand-ins took our positions so the camera, lighting and set dressing teams could make the final preparations for the master shot.

Even after we returned to the set, many small adjustments had to be made as we patiently waited to shoot.  Frank is a tall man, and I specifically recall that his overcoat was quite heavy draped as it was over my arm.  At last, everything was ready and Richard called, "Action."  We played the entire scene through to the end and then stood for a moment in absolute silence.  Finally, Richard said, "That was great."  Our superb cinematographer Stephen Poster said, "That was great."  Even Frank echoed, "That was great."  We had nailed it in one take.

It remains to this day the proudest moment of my professional career.

We shot it a few more times just to be safe before moving on to the many close-ups.  Then we moved on to the last chunk of the scene which follows the crane shot, again shooting from multiple angles.  Many hours were spent completing all of this, but there was still more to be done.  I returned to my trailer as Frank shot a number of short solo scenes on the wind tunnel set.  I had one brief solo scene on the schedule myself, but I was taken by surprise when Alie knocked on the door and informed me that it was time to shoot scene 120A.  Having no knowledge of such a scene, I inquired, "What's scene 120A?"  "Funny, Frank just said the same thing," she responded.

I arrived back on the set and was handed a new scene on a single page which had a quick exchange between Frank and myself, though it would require a few camera angles to capture this properly.  While they were resetting the camera and lights for one of these shots, Frank and I had our only real conversation.  It was all too brief, but I treasure the moment in my memory.

Eventually, Frank was wrapped for the day and I was left alone to film my solo scene last - a short phone exchange with Gillian Jacobs' character which I had somehow overlooked in the package of rewrites I had received at home weeks earlier.  Along with scene 120A, it did not make it into the final cut of the movie.  I miss both of these scenes because they showed just how complicit my character of Martin Teague is in aiding Mr. Steward's experiments.

It did not occur to me at the time that, aside from a few local Virginia extras dressed as black ops, Frank Langella and I were the only actors to get to work on that stunning set constructed in the middle of the wind tunnel.  However, two Boston extras, Don Warnock and W. Kirk Avery who were designated as Dr. Y and Dr. Z, do appear far above us in the observation windows looking down on the tunnel.  They appear at various points throughout the film and they, too, had been flown down to Virginia and were spending the entire week of the shoot at Langley AFB.