Filmstar - I/3

A short break from being a stay-at-home dad this week. I'm doing some film work, a short corporate ident thing.

Learning lines. Hate it. Drudge work at its worst, it's never over. Every time I think 'ah yes! I can recite this speech three times in a row with no mistakes now, that ought to do it!', I discover that in fact I'll need to actually act during the recital. It's a right bugger.

Worst of all, nobody pays you to learn lines. They pay you to have your lines learnt, fair enough. For stage rehearsals, the time you spend working on scenes helps you learn plenty. But if you want to get properly off-book and ready to actually work on your acting, you need to put in the time at home, out of hours.

There is no excuse for not doing it. Not one. Not convincingly. Not ever.

So I was really busy over the weekend with various family-related activities, my hayfever has been really acting up, I didn't get a final script until the day before we started filming, I can't stride round the flat proclaiming my lines in the evenings because it might wake F, I had to go out drinking with my brothers-in-law the night before because we've been trying to do that for two years and finally managed to arrange it and, well, and I'm getting old and my memory is fraying.

All true. All useless.

Come the afternoon of the first day of filming, I'm in an office block somewhere in the docks on Hisingen island. The people who work here (it's their company we're working for) have been roped in as extras, because that way we can use their offices during the workday. So we're filming as they try and work - very convincing, but not especially great because they need to use photocopiers, talk to each other and generally stand about gawping in a way that actual extras get fired for.

It's not been a great start to the day. We're two hours over schedule because some of the camera equipment is faulty, and because the camera guy discovered he can't walk his steady-cam rig backwards up a flight of stairs whilst filming me. The radio mics aren't very good, they pick up a more of my clothing rustling than my lines. They gaffer it to my chest hair to counter this. Every extra in the room winces when they realise it doesn't work and rip it off again. It's stiflingly hot outside. People keep having to repeat direction to me in various languages, because they know I understand a minimal amount of Swedish and I'm stubbornly trying to speak as much as I can.

But I'm mildly hungover, very tired, out of practice at camera acting (over a year since I last filmed anything) and more than usually confused.

And I don't know my lines well enough.

We do about forty takes of a scene where I walk along a corridor, spouting eulogies on the corporate support team, then vanish behind a glass screen. I have to keep talking behind the screen, on which various computer graphics will appear, then emerge at the other side, still talking, stride confidently to a globe and spin it. And then talk some more as the camera zooms into the globe for more SFX.

And I can't. I can't get there. I learnt the lines, but in chunks that don't turn out to coincide with what the director wants because my script was just words, no scenes or stage direction. I can usually reach the glass screen, but emerge confidently? No. Even if I manage it, the globe has been gaffered to the table it's on, and if I spin it too hard, it falls off. This always happens, because I'm so glad to get there I clutch at the damn thing like I'm falling down a lift shaft.

Pressure mounts.

My brain counters this by dismounting. Increasingly, I can't get down the corridor to the screen without a fluff or a stumble. The extras start whispering to each other in disbelief, it seems to me, that we need another take. The director lets me rely on my script behind the glass, then eventually takes kicks that crutch away and does it himself.

We get there, eventually, but I'm rattled. The last scene of the day goes much better, but I suspect that's only because everyone's too tired to care.

At the end of the day, the DoP drives home with my clothes in his car before I can get changed. The film crew is only four people, and I'm counting myself as one of them, because I end up helping the director carry lighting boxes, booms and cables down to their cars. My lift home turns out to be an attempt to convince me to help drive the van to Norway tomorrow, after we stop at the van hire place. I plead illiteracy of the left-hand-drive, and wiggle out of it.

F is asleep before I'm home. I'm shattered, so I watch TV with V for a bit and hit the hay after a bit of half-arsed line-running before bed. People still tend to think acting is glamourous. To which I say glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour glamour BATMAN, partly because this is basically an entirely typical day of screen work (even if I work at the lower end of the glamour spectrum at the best of times) and partly because I'm exhausted and my brain is fucked.