We're down to the last few days. For many of the crew, the end can not come fast enough. They have been separated from their family, friends and home for a long time. For others, the end is a bittersweet melancholy. Every day is lived as a kind of peak experience, for better or worse. It is different, and there's no use pretending otherwise.
Shooting a movie on a far-flung location can sometimes be a bit like being marooned on a tropical island. It's filled with beauty and emotion, but there are incredible hardships that pile up day after day, until a seemingly immoveable exhaustion has settled in.
While it's been written about and over-glamorized and inflated with a precious self-importantance way too many times, it's no less true that a movie shoot creates its own weather. It actually creates its own unique ecosystem. People come together and come apart. People find love (or some version of it). Some keep it. Most lose it. Intense friendships with varying degrees of authentic and inauthentic intimacies are born. Some will remain close. Others will be mere acquaintances. But it was never not real.
When Sveta accidentally hit her head in Yalta, one particular key scene had to be dropped from the Crimean part of the shoot. Originally slated to be shot at Livadia Palace (the famous location of the famous Yalta Conference), the scene was rescheduled to be shot at Kiev's Lavra. But now it was cold.
Really cold.
It was 29 degrees fahrenheit in the morning and when the wind whipped through the Lavra's narrow passages it felt a whole lot worse. Although this little character didn't seem to mind.
But stopping is almost never an option. If you have light you keep working.
And if you don't have light you make your own.
Sveta had a bit of a rough day. The cold alone was enough to take the stuffing out of you. But there were hair and make-up snafus and there were rapid changes to the scene to keep up with.
During a rehearsal of some choreographed fight moves, Pasha accidentally brushed her face a bit too closely. She issued him a stern warning.
It happens.
Unfortunately, there were also technical problems in the morning which essentially cost Marius nearly three hours of daylight.
So what is a very complicated scene had to be re-worked on the fly in order to create a well-functioning moment. Because as the clock runs out and fewer and fewer days remain on the schedule, there become fewer and fewer chances to come back.
In the most practical possible terms, this is mostly Pepe's headache. As First Assistant Director, it's specifically his job to make sure everything gets shot. And on a movie of this scale and complexity, it's the job of an Army Field Marshall.
It might be more dramatic to report that we're somehow really behind or that the movie isn't getting shot. But it is. And that's because the team has ironed out most of its differences and incompatibilities. Conflict in working method or communication have either been repaired or resigned to with a grim acceptance.
It's too late now for anything else.
