It's somewhere between rapeseed pollen, manure, diesel exhaust, decaying horseflesh and dogshit, I judge. The DoP immediately catches flack for making us all inhale the cloying stench. But it's not his fault, there's really no escape from it here at border control.
The first scene today is outside another busy workplace. I strut my stuff outside the glass windows of a customs office, with a row of pasty white truckers staring out at me like doped cows. Some of them even chew, cud-like. Snus, probably.
My costume came home with me the day before. Giving an actor charge of their own costume is unusual in the acting world, we're too
Bodes well, that. At least my confidence in my lines is better today. I've been drilling all the way up, at least when I wasn't nodding like a dashboard ornament, dazed by the 0500 start.
Although it's cool, clammy and cloudy when we start, by midday the sun is starting to blister through the overhanging drizzle. So far, we've got one scene. It's taken three hours - the first one for setting up equipment and watching the director stride about choosing frames, the next two for takes. After a conservative forty or so of these, my line-learning is peeling like the cloud cover. I'm better than the day before, but still confusing words and stumbling.
Forty takes doesn't help anyone. It's not all down to me, it's a broad mix of sound, lighting, camera, background movement, unexpected lawnmowers, abrupt changes of direction and hair failures. I look bizzare, I think, my hair is in the awkward half-way house between long and short where I have strange curled coils spiralling sideways away over each ear. Apparently the client liked it. An embittered part of me suspects production just didn't want to spring for a trip to a hairdresser. In my grey waistcoat, shirt sleeves and a full can of hairspray, I look like someone has electrocuted The Mentalist.
Anyway - forty takes. Yesterday left me rattled. You don't want to be the limiting factor on the production line, and I very much feel like I am. All my lines are about customs. Is there a difference between customs compliance and customs clearance? How many synonyms for 'enable' can you fit in a single PR-packed paragraph? How more secure is your core business score if you ensure you're insured in your core? What does any of what I'm saying even mean?
We don't have lunch, we need to catch the light.
Four hours later, I'm in shock. The ball has been dropped, and I'm the butterfingers.
On the northern side of the border, we've been performing to another herd of truckers. This time, I'm walking along a strip of asphalt along the end of a lorry bay. I follow the curb for a bit, then veer diagonally across towards the parked big rigs on the other side. I must time my delivery so I vanish between two cabs after asking a rhetorical questions (something balanced and informative along the lines of 'but why is the company in question just so bloody good at everything it does?').
The sun is baking down. Specifically, it is baking my eyes. From two directions, because even though I'm walking into direct sunlight, the director scuffles along next to the camera, holding a reflector screen that bounces anything missing my retinas back up my nose to scorch the underside of my sockets.
The trucks keep driving away, so the marks I'm supposed to hit change after every second take or so. My timing keeps getting off, so I deliver the rhetorical question, then cover three to four metres of road holding the same querulous eyebrow aloft in order to sustain the question.
The director then decides he wants to get a take where I deliver the lines as a truck passes behind me. He is irritated that this puts me off my stride, partly because I wasn't expecting it as I didn't understand the conversation where it was explained to me, partly because I've been nearly blindsided by a forty ton lorry. We don't ask any truckers to help, of course, so we just have to wing the timing on this. Fine, I'm winging everything by this point, lines, facial expressions, breathing, the lot. All I'm really doing is walking and talking simultaneously. Who knew it was so hard?
My brain is caught under a trio of magnifying glasses - trucker scorn, directorial ire and personal shame that my lines are falling apart. The lone banana propping up my blood sugar gives out at around three o' clock, and that's it. By the final takes, on the directorial command -Varsågod! all I can produce is blinking and spluttering.
There is no clean take of this scene. Before stomping off into a nearby ditch in a weakly contained fit of temper, the director tells the DoP to get closeups of my hands and feet in the scene, so they can use them as cutaways to splice together something functional.
We then spend the last filming slot of the day trying to get a take of a single sentence with a lorry driving past. You think there'd be plenty around, but the director has picked a stretch of motorway just on the other side of the customs pitstop. Rather than steaming along the tarmac, they all pull in to declare their goods some five hundred metres away. The few that do steam past don't have anything on the back. This spoils the artistic composition of the shot, it is alleged. Almost as much as, say, a well-steamed actor wilting into his grey serge three-piece.
The director seems oblivious to the logistics at work, however, and we keep trying. After thirty minutes of shots of skeletal lorries, he has a mild change of heart, and decides that he'll settle for a lorry that's leaving the truck stop, on the other side of the verge we're filming on.
But he doesn't give up hope of the original plan. For the next half hour, our production assistant (also our wardrobe mistress, runner, makeup artist, casting agent, extra wrangler, boom operator and floor manager) keeps a meercat-like watch on the incoming traffic. On the shout 'there's one!', we all sprint to our marks in the grass on the relevant side of the verge, hoping to set up, start shooting and time the shot right before the truck gets away.
The final moments of this deathmarch involve the director tromping back into the customs bay, plonking me down in the middle of the road and trying to get a clean take of my lines before I get hit by the next departing truck.
We do not succeed.
We go home with two scenes unbagged. Never before have I screwed up this much. In film terms, my face is Three Colours: Red, and only some of it is sunburn.
Nobody talks in the van. We're all too tired and cross, packing the BK meals we eventually get for our 1700 lunch into our grumpy faces. When we arrive back in Gothenburg, the director tells me to get some rest tonight, but spend a couple of hours running lines whilst moving around and multitasking first.
I go home. Still wearing my costume, because there's been no time or place to change.
Okay, everyone has a bad day now and again. Sometimes two in a row. But I can't really put the blame solely on the difficult conditions or the perhaps rather unreasonable hours. Turns out I just didn't know those lines well enough.
I've always had trouble learning stuff well. Innate slapdashery tends to makes me approximate at the best of times. Getting older makes it no easier - it takes so long to bed things in I run out of time. Sometimes they go in wrong as well. And it's not like I've got more free time suddenly, or extra energy to pour into this like I need. Two bad days in a row, both linked to my mnemonic limitations. Another day like this, and I'd fire myself. Even one would probably get you kicked off a film set or high-profile TV job.
A buck has stopped in my chest somewhere, and I'm wondering whether I'm really capable of this any more.
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