In college I wrote a short story, which was a huge success in my 14 person creative writing class. A few years later and now my director brother, Eli, has decided to make it into a short film while he is in film school. We are teaming up as a dynamic brother/sister duo to tackle this project and this weekend we held auditions.
Despite this being a student film, I wanted to make everything as professional as I could. We held the auditions at Eli’s school, The Art Institute, and were given a room used by the culinary department for the two-day casting. This made my first order of professionalism to be taking down the posters of how to slice meat. It would have been uncomfortable for the actors to stand in front of a backdrop of sliced animal products, as if they themselves are a piece of meat. Which is exactly what they were: a vulnerable carcass waiting for us to tear them and their acting apart. Just kidding, that didn’t happen. My highly overused declaration of “that was awesome!” made sure everyone’s confidence got a little boost.
The next order of professionalism was to take notes during the auditions. This was abandoned upon reviewing my notes after three auditions and seeing, “purple shirt”, “she’s from Seattle and that’s ALWAYS cool”, and a doodle of a brick wall that took up the majority of the top right corner of the paper, as the only things I had written down. I decided to go a different route, which became staring at the actors internally critiquing every line of the script, the very words I had written, to the point that I asked myself why I ever thought I could write a memo let alone a script.
Professionalism all together was forgotten by the end of the day when I threw up the “303” hand sign, (a gang sign of confused, rich, white kids in Colorado) to our last actress as she entered the room. I knew she was from Colorado but wasn’t sure if she was going to be familiar with the sign. What can I tell ya, this business is a gamble.
Auditions were fun. It was interesting being the one that people were trying to get a “job” from instead of the other way around. I was able to turn my back on my usual game of masking my resentment for not having a job by enthusiastically interacting with complete strangers.
This is the first time Eli and I have worked on a movie together in years. We’ve come a long way since the candid moments caught on tape of me publicly undermining his artistic vision or blatantly showing my unhappiness with the shoot through unpredictable facial expressions while filming. Unfortunately he’s a much bigger deal now so I can’t undermine him at all times. Although I probably still will. I will post a link to this film when it’s all finished and you can all laugh, cry or forgo the link completely and continue to follow me through written word alone. How primal of you.
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