Yeah; how do you do that? And that was what was great about getting Ben as a producer and T a as a producer, and Ben saying that he liked this movie too; once you have your lead cast and a director committed to making the film and recognizing that this is quirky, this is dark, that it doesn't have to reach 3,000 screens on it's opening weekend it just has to be true to itself, somehow. And if we think it's interesting and I think that's one of the more satisfying things, is that I think that Ben, T a and I signed on, saying "We have no idea what we're getting ourselves into, but let's see what can happen.
" Because there's really no safety net. If something screwed up, if a scene was bad there's absolutely no safety net, so you have to kind of get there and make something happen that day, and there's something kind of exciting about that. I don't think there really it was exciting; we never experienced to be fair, and myopic in my opinion, we never had those scenes that went 'kerplunk' or we wished we could have gone back and re-shot.
I think you come into it with such a readiness that you have to make it work; you have to find it or it's going to get out of the film. And every scene was important; we dropped very little, we didn't cut that much. I'll give you one example; we were doing that scene in the parking lot, where (Kingsley) crashes a minivan into a dumpster.
Well, there was supposed to be another scene after that, during the day, where basically Ben Kingsley sleeps in a parking lot the entire night, and the next morning it's filled with Volvos and BMW's, and he's laying in the only available parking spot. And this woman in a BMW honks her horn to wake him up thinking he's some kind of homeless guy and he kinda stands up and then she parks. It's kind of a funny scene -- but we didn't have the money for all those Volvos and BMW's -- and what happened was we were getting ready to film the scene and we were on the praries of Winnipeg and you can just see a storm coming; 20 minutes later, it was just pouring rain.
"Well, we're not shooting that scene;" in fact, we're scrambling back to the studios to shoot everything else for that scene on green screen, all the interiors. And Ben? That was one of the few nights where he was a little testy.
He had been there all day just to smash into a trash can. So then I had go to him and say "Ben, how do you feel about laying in the parking lot and getting rained on?" So then Renaldo, our Assistant Director, was laying in the parking lot, getting rained on, to show where (Kingsley) would go.
So we brought Ben out. "Right there? I'll do it.
" But we talked about it; I remember thinking that this was a quirky, different picture. And you know what that does? If you start with that attitude, you get to fly under Yeah; how do you do that?
And that was what was great about getting Ben as a producer and T a as a producer, and Ben saying that he liked this movie too; once you have your lead cast and a director committed to making the film and recognizing that this is quirky, this is dark, that it doesn't have to reach 3,000 screens on it's opening weekend it just has to be true to itself, somehow.
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