12 Films. 12 Weeks. There are worse ways to spend a summer.

The Things You Find Yourself Doing

One of my favorite things about filmmaking is the situations it thrusts me into, and the responses that seem perfectly reasonable at the time, but look, in the cold eye of retrospect, just a little bit insane.

Example: last Thursday, when we were finishing up “The Proposal,” we needed a bit of ADR (Additional Dialogue Recording) from Josh Conkel — specifically, his stirring rendition of “I Wish I Was a Fish.”  Josh works in the West Village, so I moseyed on over there with our trusty Zoom H4 and a pair of cans and met him at a Starbucks near his office.  I asked him if there was a quiet place nearby for the recording, and he steered us in the direction of a nearby children’s library.

I had to surrender my driver’s license to the librarian in order to get my hands on the restroom key, which let us into the deserted downstairs hallway, which is where we set up to record.  (We would have used the restroom itself, but there was too much echo, plus a fluorescent buzz.)  We did a couple of takes down there and then, for good measure, walked outside and did a few more takes next to a chain-link fence that encircled a playground.  (I was aware that two adult males hanging out by a children’s library and then a playground might seem a little suspect to a potential third party, but there are things you do in the name of cinema.)

Now, on the scale of bizarre experiences, this ranks pretty low — somewhere between “running into James Fauvell on the 57th Street subway platform” and “watching James Fauvell kiss James Creque over and over on a roof at 6 AM.” Still, picture it: I’m standing outside a playground on a drizzly day, holding a microphone inches from the face of a man I barely know, who is solemnly repeating the words “I wish I was a fish” in a kind of droning sing-song.  And I’m not doing this for the fun of it (though it was, admittedly, kind of fun); I’m doing it because it needs to be done.

It’s a magical business.  It really is.

Posted by Keith