In Post-Production: The Body Watchers

Popular Melbourne burlesque performer Kelly Ann Doll stars in The Body Watchers.

Last November, I directed my first narrative film, a 6 minute short entitled ‘The Body Watchers’. The brief synopsis is ‘Burlesque meets B-movie Sci-Fi, when a peepshow stripper has a close encounter of the voyeuristic kind.’ Citizen Kane it ain’t, but it was intended as a directorial practice run for me, as I intend making another of my screenplays, ‘Turn Right’, later this year, and wanted to ‘bust my cherry’ (so to speak) on a less ambitious project.

The film was shot in one of Melbourne’s actual peepshows, Crazy Horse (located on Elizabeth Street in the CBD, for all you voyeurs out there). We were only able to film between the hours of 3am and 10am, when the peepshows were closed, so it was an intense seven hour shoot, with a minimal crew.

The other great logistical challenge (for our cinematographer, David Hawkins, at least) was that all four walls of our location, the interior of the peepshow, were covered in mirrors, which made finding suitable angles from which to shoot very tricky. But Dave’s good, and was able to come up with some simple but effective ways of concealing the camera without compromising our compositions or the story.

There were a couple of significant things I learned on this shoot.

The first was the transition from screenwriter to director, and how that affected my relationship with the script. The night before we shot, I looked again at the script, from a purely practical perspective, and was compelled to immediately hack away about a page of superfluous material (ie; 1/6th of the script). It was either ‘internal’ character stuff, repetitive action, or dialogue (which I found could be played silent and still come across). It was a very swift process and I didn’t have a moment of grieving for anything cut; I just knew we’d have to work fast, so anything that could go, must go, and better then than on the set.

The second significant lesson I learned was about half an hour before we had to wrap the shoot and vacate the location, and we still had 6 set-ups to do in order to get the whole film in the can. That’s a LOT of shots, in terms of the time we had. We were all tired and wired at the point where Helen, our boom operator, turned to me and asked “What’s the time?” I felt everyone freeze and turn to me as one. I’d just glanced at my watch, and got a bit of a jolt when I saw that it was 9:30 am. The first (real) stripper of the day would be arriving at 10am, and probably wouldn’t be too pleased to find a film crew in her ‘office’.

I realised that our ability to either finish the film or not finish the film depended on my response to Helen’s question. If I said “It’s fucking 9:30! We gotta hurry!” everyone would’ve panicked and started making mistakes under stress and duress.

I’d kind of been feeling all night long that I was the only person there who didn’t really have a function, or know what they were doing – I was frequently standing at the epicentre of a storm of rapid activity going on around me, and all I had to do was make the occasional helpful suggestion and observe the actors closely whenever the camera was rolling. But I realised the reason for this; I had chosen my cast and crew wisely, they all knew exactly what the film was about, because I’d discussed it at length with everyone long BEFORE we got to the set, so I just had to sit back and let them get on with their jobs and not hover over their shoulders or talk for the sake of seeming important. I  had to provide a calm, confident, stable centre around which the crew could orbit.

The Director is the nerve centre of the crew, and the crew will react to whatever vibe you are giving off.

All these realisations went through my head in a matter of seconds, after which I turned to Helen and replied; ‘Don’t worry what time it is. Let’s just do these shots.’ It worked.

The Body Watchers is currently in post production, and should be completed in March 2009.