Thursday, 24 May 2007
One down, five to go…
There’s no doubt about it - four o’clock is an ungodly hour to be starting the week’s proceedings.
However, since Warbo had informed me that he’d be on the doorstep to collect me at five-twenty I figured that the chance to move into the new day at a leisurely pace outweighed the risk of sleeping in and having to rush, I climbed out of bed, fixed myself a cup of industrial-strength coffee, and sat down to check my e-mail.
An hour and a quarter later I was ready to go and checking that I had everything I was likely to need later in the morning. In fact, once I was sitting on the front porch, I’d hardly selected a track on the iPod before the Warbo Wagon was pulling up outside and we were off....
Arriving outside the barricades around the crew, it was only a matter of ninety seconds before we were inside, rubbernecking through the predawn gloom as we headed towards the catering tent where the rest of the morning’s volunteers and breakfast were supposed to be waiting for us. Around us various trailers were disgorging the multitude of bits and pieces that are used in making a movie.
It was the first day of filming the Bowen segments of Australia, the new Baz Luhrmann movie and later in the day we were going to be helping out with the PR interface between the movie, the local community and the hordes of out-of-towners we were told would be inundating the town.
I’d hardly finished the cereal component when assistant location manager Mary Barltrop was joining us with the day’s shooting schedule in hand and explaining that they’d be making the call on whether to go with the preferred fine weather schedule or its wet weather alternative at six o’clock.
After an assault on the masses ranks of sausages, bacon, mushrooms and eggs that had materialised during the briefing it was off to the base station - the footpath outside the Grandview to work out how we were going to operate.
The original plan had been to set up three posts with three volunteers on each, and the co-ordinator floating between them, but a quick evaluation of the situation indicated there were only two spots where the public were going to be able to see anything happening on the set, so three posts was reduced to two and there was no question of any co-ordinator moving between posts without crossing the set.
Since the alternative would have involved compasses and cut lunches, once the film crew indicated they didn’t want anyone going THAT way, it soon became apparent whoever was manning the spot at the Front Beach were going to be left (more or less) to their own devices.
After we’d moved a tent to the Front Beach it was back to the Grandview to assess the situation. Since the road was roped off at the end of the building, the obvious spot for an Information table was, well, obvious and from there it was just a matter of wandering around and waiting for the hordes to descend on us. Bearing in mind that it was still only about seven-thirty it seemed like there was a while to wait.
We had a rough outline of what was being filmed, and the regular explanation (which I must have gone through sixty or seventy times through the week) went something like this:
Lady Sarah Ashley has arrived on a Qantas Empire Airways flying boat, stepped onto a pontoon, climbed the steps/ladder/whatever to the Darwin wharf (which was in Sydney) and comes into our picture about THERE (pointing to the blue screen on the Bowen wharf). She’s not very happy since there’s no one there to meet her. Hugh Jackman’s in the pub, getting himself involved in a brawl, and as she arrives outside the building he comes flying through the window, lands on the ground in front of her, looks up and says ‘Welcome to Australia.’
Sounds rather straightforward doesn’t it?
I arrived for my third stint on Thursday afternoon and they were still shooting the fight scenes, though I gathered that the preceding bit was more or less completed.
Lesson #1: Nothing is as simple as it looks and everything takes longer than you thought it would.
When I arrived for breakfast on my second stint on Wednesday morning, I found out exactly how long some things take - twenty-six takes of a thirty or forty second sequence where a small Chinese boy playing with some pearl shells is told to look at the pretty lady (which turns out, in fact, to be a broom head moving right to left behind the camera),
I must have used that story at least thirty times on Wednesday morning and Thursday afternoon. And I reckon I must have heard it another thirty times from the source of the information - Uncle Tony, who’d been the small Chinese boy’s minder.
Lesson #2: There’s a lot of repetition in a gig like this and once you’ve got a basic spiel worked out there won’t be too much variation unless someone comes up with a new question that you haven’t already covered in the standard version.
So that brings us to the next point: What did people want to know?
First up, it didn’t take too long on the Wednesday morning to realise that there were plenty of people (mainly, but not exclusively, Bowen locals) who’d been down there before, knew more or less what was going on, and were there to while away an hour or two in the hope that they might see something interesting.
Talking to people from out of town, once they knew what was going on, there seemed to be a couple of standard questions:
What is the movie about?
How much will it cost? and
What was over there before?
The first question prompted my quote of the week.
There I was, explaining to three female backpackers that the movie was about an aristocratic English lady whose husband dies and leaves her a cattle station the size of Belgium when the one in the middle interrupted, demanding, AND HOW DID YOU KNOW I COME FROM BELGIUM?
When hit with the question about the budget, lacking any definite information I tended to suggest that at the current rate of progress it seemed like the final figure was likely to be closer to two hundred million than the various figures that had been mentioned to date.
And what was there before?
Simple. Eight weeks ago there was nothing between the retirement village down there and the backpackers’ hostel over there except a hole in the ground and the telephone box that’s underneath that shed over there.
Some other bits and pieces:
All the buildings on the set were prefabricated in Sydney and shipped north on the back of a truck. Most of them are just a shell, but there is a bar in the hotel and a bedroom upstairs....
At the moment the set is supposed to be Darwin in 1938. We’ve been told that what’s there is actually an amalgam of buildings from Darwin and Broome between the late thirties and the early forties. Once they’ve finished filming with this version of the set there’ll be slight changes to turn it into wartime Darwin (1940 or thereabouts) with troop camps etc. and the final version will show Darwin after the bombing....
