48 Hours ... Sleep is for the Weak

I slept like a rock the last two nights to recover from the wonderful madness that is the 48 Hour Film Project. Although "madness" isn't the right word to describe how smoothly the filming went with director Darwin Meiners and Trick Knee Productions. I had the pleasure of working with Darwin in the indie feature Fairfield, Idaho, and he asked me to take part in his 48 Hour team.

The 48 Hour Film Project brings together teams of filmmakers who have 48 hours to write, shoot, and edit a film. At 7pm on Friday, they gave us the elements our film had to include:

• prop: a pillow
• line of dialogue: "When are you going to clean up this mess?"
• a character: Mark or Margo Plantagenet, Foreign Ambassador
• genre: romance

After getting the list, Darwin and producer Jeremy Moore whipped up a two and a half page script for a five-minute short called "Like Lightning" [Watch the completed film.] They had already pulled together a fantastic crew (including Jon Lohne, who shot and edited Fairfield) and cast (the highly talented Lin Shukla and Steve McMoy). I played a mechanic, which was a nice excuse to get my hands really greasy.

Watching all the elements come together was exhilarating ... they made use of all kinds of personal connections, from the sets (a mechanic's garage run by a friend of Jon's) to an amazing prop that was printed out on another friend's large-format printer. We filmed throughout the night on Friday (one of my favorite memories is walking in character through the quiet, near-deserted streets of downtown Santa Rosa), slept a couple of hours in a tent out back, and picked up again on Saturday morning. Darwin kept things really tight -- we actually finished shooting at dinnertime on Saturday, as promised.

I especially enjoyed watching Lin get into character: a prostitute who's been beaten by a foreign ambassador, and to whom I provide shelter. Lin has such respect for acting and her process, and is a wonderfully giving person. We improvised a lot to dig deeper into our characters.

We actors had it comparatively easy -- when we wrapped, Darwin and his team still had another 24 hours of work to do: editing, laying down music tracks, and actually dropping off the kit'n'caboodle at the 48 Hour Film Project's office in San Francisco by 7pm Sunday.

For me the weekend felt like the essence of the best in indie filmmaking -- smart, innovative, heartfelt, and FAST! Check out the final film (along with a dozen other entries) at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco on Tuesday, June 27 (you can buy tickets online). The program plays at 7pm and again at 9:30pm.

Playing Against Type

When I began acting, I assumed that I would usually get typecast as "the nice guy." Why? Well, when friends in high school signed my yearbooks, the theme was usually "stay sweet." In regular life, I shy away from confrontations and am a "pleaser." So, I thought that would translate directly to the screen.

Instead, I've been pleasantly surprised to get cast as ... a killer, an abusive boyfriend, a violent environmental activist, a scheming husband plotting his wife's bodily takeover by his dead witch mother. I still get enjoyable nice guy roles -- such as the gay neighbor in the upcoming feature Eve -- but there are enough wild roles in the mix to keep me coming back for more.

In the feature The Two Sisters, currently in production, I play Todd, a rich, arrogant, football-playing fraternity senior in college. If you know me at all, those adjectives will sound odd ...

• Rich: I grew up eating lots of Taco Bell and Kraft macaroni and cheese
  
• Arrogant: When arranging an outing with someone the first line out of my mouth is usually, "Wherever you want to go"
  
• Football-playing: I was usually the last person picked for teams in middle-school P.E. and got pummeled in dodgeball, although these days I'm certainly able to ride my bike from San Francisco to L.A.
  
• Fraternity: Never went to a frat party my entire four years at Stanford
• Senior: Yes, I was once a senior in college, but it wasn't last year. Or the year before ...
  

This is what's making it so fun to be Todd. My first two days of filming for this thriller were June 15 & 16 in Modesto. Director Terri-Dawn Arnold cast me based on my performance in the short film A Walk in the Park, which my co-star Vince Lasalvia had sent to her as his audition (he was cast as one of the leads). On my first day, we shot a scene on the football field where I'm telling my buddy how I "can't figure out this chick" that I recently had sex with -- Lannie, one of the sociopathic Two Sisters of the title, played by the incandescent Eve Lorraine -- and that I'm about to dump the girlfriend I cheated on. The next day of filming my buddy and I go on a double date with the sisters, and I'm repeatedly telling Lannie that "I know you like me." (Who wouldn't?) That scene concludes with Lannie kissing me aggressively (ah, the hard life of an actor).

Playing this guy, I've been focusing on lowering my "power center" -- a concept that came up often in Ed Hooks' class. I walk confidently, and a smirk lurks just underneath my skin, even if it doesn't always surface. But most importantly, I let loose the arrogant fratboy that's deep within me. We all have deep feelings roiling inside us -- rage, passion, vindictiveness -- but actors are given license to bring these emotions out. Acting is one of the most liberating professions I could imagine.