Filmstar - 2/3

The Norwegian border is lovely at this time of year. - Ah, smell that! the DoP says as we slide out of the minivan at 0800. We all do.

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 self-centered focussed on our craft to handle details like that well. So I left my shoes at home and had to dash back on the tram to get them before we even set off.

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.

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.

Command

F isn't very well again, she's got some cold or other. Twin green streaks from her nostrils, mild fever, a bit shivery. Nothing serious. So she's been curled up on the sofa with me watching The Little Mermaid in Swedish. Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun - The Small Lake Maiden, according to Google Translate. No cigar.

At some point (around Triton's destruction of Ariel's collection, iirc. Not that I was watching avidly or anything), she got bored and wandered off. A few minutes later, she appeared again in front of the TV, holding a plastic matching shape from one of her toys, a green star with Donald Duck on it, and started waving it at me and then the TV.

This is a surrogate for the tv remote, which she grudgingly concedes she's not allowed. The Duck is her new favourite - waving it in front of my line of vision is an indication I should put Donald on. No alternatives are acceptable.

It's hard getting used to having a tiny person who understands what's going on and knows what she wants. We were out for a walk a few afternoons back, wondering what to do after eating lunch. "I bet she'd like some carrot cake somewhere," I said to V, on my way to suggesting fika somewhere later on.

"Car ca'?" said F immediately, perking up and then throwing a massive tantrum because we then walked past a cafe she knows sells it instead of taking her in.

Being raised bilingual has this disadvantage, that we won't have a secret language. My parents used French until we started secondary school. F doesn't speak French. Nor does V. And I'm not sure what I can do to that language counts as speech, exactly. We can spell things out, I guess, but that won't last forever. I mean, it took our old labrador Rocket about two weeks to work out what W-A-L-K meant, and he was thick as a post. Adorable too, but even so.

She still doesn't speak much, mostly using single words and pointing. Or clinging to whatever surface is available if she doesn't agree with whatever course of action you've just suggested. Trying to prise a 12.6 kg baby from your facial hair in an attempt to put her on the changing table is increasingly quite a feat. She can virtually pull a headstand in midair to avoid being put on the floor. It's like trying to push repelling magnets together.

Her newest control method for parents is to grab your finger and then put it on what she wants. Particularly on the iPad, where even though she knows how to do a jigsaw puzzle by dragging and dropping pieces, she knows it's faster if you do it for her.

-

I dreamt of dusting last night. I fear for my mental health, the war on housework is taking a toll. And I would take lakes of burning fire and demonic hayforks over matching socks. In fact, a classical hell holds no sway with me. An infinite pile of near-identical once-black socks, that would get the old fear of death going. There's probably a pun about emperilling your mortal sole in it for those with a penchant for such things.

Ah well. You should always follow your dreams, I suppose. Back to work for me.

-

More Recent Frejish: -

Murmur - put the The Little Mermaid on, Daddy
Pra' - I will now consume your expensive restaurant prawns, Mummy
Mor peeth - More please, although you only get the 'peeth' by prompting and witholding at the moment
Gum - Strawberries, hence, I like this food. Short for Jordgubbar, I think. Not to be confused with
Gom - Gollum

Walk On

This has been an exhausting month. Hence the lower than usual number of blog posts, I guess. Nobody is likely to read 'o god I'm so tired' over and over again.

F can walk. Also climb, run, and spin on the spot until she falls over whilst chanting 'go go go!' About two months ago, F would only walk if she could hold on to both my hands and use me as a giant walking machine. I'm convinced that the popularity of giant walking machines in sci-fi harks back to our childhood memories of being walked about by a seemingly omnipotent parental figure, as a passing note*. But back then, I'd have given my eyeteeth to get a reprise from perpetually zimmering her round the world.

She started walking properly around a month ago, roughly. And in a few short weeks, this is now how she gets everywhere. She can stand upright from prone unaided, occasionally with a bumped head and a sorrowful look. I'd never have thought this would be more tiring, more nerve-wracking and more trouble than being constantly called upon to ferry her about. Which I still am, of course - walking is all well and good for fifteen minutes or so, then you need a horsey ride. Or a lift over a wall, or up a slide, or something, and god help your dad if he doesn't deliver pronto.

But if all the backache is a bit better now, thanks, the mental torment of walking into a room to find her teetering upright on the edge of the sofa and clearly contemplating a stage dive on to the corner of the coffee table is much much worse. I know I can't fling myself four metres accurately in the split second it will take her to topple. I also know I will almost certainly try if she does. And almost certainly make things worse, of course.

There was one blissful afternoon a few weeks back, at a friend's outdoor birthday party, when F first exhibited the independence that comes with independent motive ability. Once we arrived, she instantly buggered off to play with her friend's toys and relatives and left me feeling a bit spare. It reminded me of the teenage parties I'd gone to with girlfriends who weren't all that keen to remain such. "Take my coat, see you in five hours," that kind of vibe.

Once I'd relaxed, it was great. F would swan past riding a toy car or clutching a ball from time to time. From the safety of a deckchair, I could monitor her whereabouts and rescue her if she was wandering too far off. In a nice safe enclosed garden area, this was fine. Somehow, in the comfines of our flat, it's not - she gets out of eyeshot all the time.

I need to get used to this. I can't. There's a razor's edge between concerned parenting and becoming a one-man Nanny State, and it's a razor I'm slowly sawing myself in half on.

-

Bra adverts (bradverts?) irritate the hell out of me. They aren't marketing anything I'm likely to buy, and yet they're entirely designed to grab my poor, libidinous male attention. Manttention, if we're coining new words today. It's hardly difficult to get the lizard in my hindbrain to blink, so to speak, so it's inordinately aggravating to have that reflex manipulated by some lazy creative design nob lounging about in his relaxed penthouse office somewhere in Shoreditch.

Nothing about them really makes sense to me. If they want to sell to women, why have all the models got such provocative poses? If they want to sell to men, why are the models still wearing the bras? I 'm familiar with some of the theories touted about to explain this. That women apparently like to buy stuff they see on successful/attractive looking women and that men will basically buy rotting meat if you lean some on a partly-clad woman. But it all strikes me as the kind of reasoning put about by people, mostly men, who need to justify spending their client's budget by hanging out at underwear model shoots.

I am doubly annoyed that such ads work well enough that it annoys my wife when my hapless gaze falters on them. I'm trebly annoyed when they almost have my daughter's name printed over the pouting tresses of some artlessly posed harlot in a two-piece. Thanks very much, bra manufacterer Freya, for the awful dints you've delivered to my parental peace of mind with your recent carpet bombing of Gothenburg's tram stops. It's been the mental equivalent of a pogo stick to the balls every hundred yards on a daily basis for over a fortnight.

-

We took F to Liseberg, the local Alton Towers Analogue, today. Today was Swedish Mothers' Day, and was lovely sunny weather. Sunny weather does to Swedes what a swift kick to the bike does to wasps - they come seething out in an agitated state, determined to get satisfaction.

Even if I hadn't had the mental equivalent of a pogo stick to the balls every hundred yards on a daily basis for over a fortnight, after a month of being slowly sawn in half by giant razor, taking your speed freak and strong-willed daughter to an amusement park for the first time in her life was going to be a shattering event. Not for the first time, I am reminded that parenthood is the brick wall that just keeps on hitting.

*In my current, depleted state, if I was a mech, I'd be an Urbanmech. Bonus nerd points if you understand why this is funny.

Feeding Time

F's Sausage 'n' Pasta

Ingredients

2-3 frankfurter-style sausages, chopped into bite-sized pieces
1 medium onion, chopped or sliced
Olive oil for frying
2 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
2 mushrooms, finely diced
1 carton of chopped tomatoes (390g or similar)
2 tbsp white wine (there's a kind in Sweden that's for cooking and has no alcohol in it, but whatever)
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp oregano
1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1 vegetable stock cube
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 dl hot water
1/2 can of sweetcorn (about 75g)
Pasta, as much as you like

Method

1. Put Peppa Pig on.
2. Take F back into the sitting room to watch Peppa Pig.
3. Fry the onions until soft in a large pan over a medium heat.
4. Repeat step 2.
5. Add the sausages (really any kind of sausage would do, I think) and continue to fry until they've gone good and brown. Or until you need to repeat step 2 again. Or until you need to explain to F why hot things mustn't be touched.
6. Add the garlic and mushrooms, fry a little longer whilst stirring.
7. Put the water in a little jug and mix in the stock cube. If you've just discovered the mushrooms in the fridge have sprouted white hair, as I did this morning, you can crumble in some dried mushrooms too. Chanterelles are good.
8. Remove the glass tumbler you left on your desk last night from F's possession and explain why crying isn't going to get it back.
9. To the pan, add the chopped tomatoes, white wine, vinegar, thyme, oregano and paprika. Once this is boiling, which won't take long, stir in the tomato paste and the stock.
10. Pick F up, show her what you're cooking, explain it isn't ready yet and repeat step 2.
11. While you're repeating step 2, change the channel, because PP's theme song is probably giving you what feels like a brain tumour by now.
12. Reduce the sauce for at least ten minutes, until it's got a nice syrupy gloss to it. You can cook the pasta at the same time, depending on how long your pasta takes. Fusili and penne work well. You can also change nappies or remember that there are no clean toddler tumblers to hand and do some washing up.
13. Just before serving, stir in the sweetcorn. F doesn't like it cooked, nor do I.
14. Be aware as you serve that there is now at least one stuffed toy placed somewhere near your feet.
15. Pour the sauce over the pasta, slice some fresh cucumber or salady stuff to go with it, em-bib F and lay the table. By the time you've done that, it'll be cool enough to eat.

Serves 2 with at least one portion for leftovers, probably more if I didn't eat such large helpings. So probably 4 overall. For the complete experience, F suggests holding a fork in one hand and taking 45 minutes to pick out and eat individual corn niblets with the other.

And you should of course be wearing your new white cotton dress, because tomatoes.

Sickie

Having tried illness and decided that it wasn't all that bad, F went for another bout this week.

Nothing as serious, just a snotty nose coupled with a brief but high fever. And lots of enfeebled wails. And the same insistence on lying on top of mummy on the sofa, eating only the best raspberries and orange juice. I'm not exactly sure when she started feeling better. I have the impression it was some time before she started asking for V's china puffs* and she'd been getting away with a spot of light acting for a bit.

Summer is here. Early, as part of the balancing act that is still inflicting late snow on parts of the US. Our balcony is an excellent sun trap of which F is very fond. She stands in front of the chairs out there yelling 'uh uh uh' until I pick her up as indicated and sit next to her, explaining the windows and the thermometer over and over.

Adult chairs are a big draw at the moment. Adult most things are, of course, which is why I eat more of the food I prepare for F than the stuff I make for me. It's all the same, to be fair, her portions are just minced finer. But she'd still rather eat forkfulls of daddy's quiche lorraine with daddy's fork than touch any of the identical stuff in front of her. Eating it while sitting next to daddy on a grown-up chair was an added requirement the other day.

Actually, I forgot to mention the 'eating with forks' thing. It's about a month now since she suddenly started eating perfectly with a spoon as though she'd always done it. For about four months, she'd been eating whilst holding one, occasionally using it to bless the mouthful she was about to take like some miniature podgy bishop, but very rarely trying to eat with it. Then one morning over porridge, some internal revelation struck her and pow! spoon all the way. Fork followed soon after, although that's still mostly in crosier mode right now.

She also walks. Three or four times in the last few weeks, I'd come into a room to find her standing in the middle. She'd immediately sit down and deny all knowledge, and she still has a preference for having a parent's hand to hold (two for outside). Whenever she started this surrepticious practice, it's certainly paid off. She toddles about independently more and more every day.

I must be tired at the moment (actually, I know damn well I am) - all these milestones would have prompted long and gushing blogs before. Now I'm so swamped in astounding newness, it almost gets a bit ho-hum. Her vocab in Swedish and English is a couple of hundred words, although only in comprehension, she isn't talking very much yet. As with walking and spoon use, though, I suspect she'll start very fast once she finds a use for it. Right now, she can get her demands across perfectly well through the international language of pointing and stropping.

God help us when she can explain what the yelling means in more detail, I suspect. Parenthood is quite relentless, I do feel fairly worn out at the moment. The endless tide of housework, the insistence of routines - although it's good to always have something to do, it's tiring.

As a kid myself, I never understood why parents were so boring when they got together. Sitting down and talking? Given that they could go out and do whatever they wanted whenever they liked (it seemed to me), I didn't understand why they wouldn't be riding bikes round and round the block forever. Or why they'd want to drink coffee. Or sleep in. Or watch the news instead of cartoons.

Funny how times change.


*chocolate covered rice sweets, for those in the UK. The packaging has coolie hats on it, which is unusually un-PC for Sweden. It's one close step away from calling your confection a 'chinky gay'. 

Fever

Inevitably, F succumbed.

What a relief! I've been dreading this moment for ages. After her first minor flirting with illness, way back when, she's been relentlessly healthy. So much so that I kept thinking whatever got to her first would be double-extra-grim. Pea soup off the walls, frantic screeching at all hours, a frenzy of health care professionals whizzing in and out of the flat with drip stands, EEGs, etc.

Nope.

F sat down in the middle of the floor yesterday afternoon, looking a bit flushed and confused, and sobbed miserably a couple of times. She was trying to play. All the usual stuff was there - the gaudy aeroplane, a scattering of poker chips, three or four opened and discarded books and some dominoes. But she just couldn't get anything to work right.

She was burning up, but other than being a bit weepy and tired, she was fine. She spent the rest of the afternoon sleeping and watching TV on mummy, then woke up and marched me relentlessly round the flat with the 'plane, screaming every time it collided with anything. That was quite a lot, she doesn't really steer, and the screaming was to indicate to me that I needed to make a course correction. That's no way to fly, I kept telling her, you should scream earlier. But she wasn't in a listening mood.

She woke up today after her usual twelve hour sleep, still feverish but entirely perky. And now very much of the opinion that her morning and afternoon naps should be on the sofa whilst watching TV. I explained that wasn't going to happen (tantrum) and indicated that if she didn't want to go to bed, she could carry on playing (tantrum, no I should remain on the sofa so she could sleep on me), but I did give her orange juice instead of water to drink.

Using the bottle as a brush, she painted most of it under the coffee table, except what she got in her socks and mummy's hat, so I think she's probably better. I wish I'd had it that easy.