Got wood? Ed Wood?

I sat down with Jonathan King to view the first and very rough assembly of Realiti, and it's looking good. We have about three shooting days in total to go, although they include capturing something complex that I dashed off quickly. To paraphrase Harrison Ford, you can type this shit, but you can't film it. But I have faith that Jonathan will. He has so far.

The best thing about the movie so far is the direction and the performances. The actors are nailing it, and the images are lovely.

To date, only one corrupted file (touch wood) which our editor Jonathan (no relation) saved by importing it a frame at a time, and one misbehaving computer (cue Wilhelm scream), now reformatted. My role now is mostly sitting nearby saying, 'I'm sure it'll be alright' and, more than once, 'Why don't you just cut that line completely?... Yeah, that's better.'

In the same month, I finally got my writing desk out of storage. It's been a long time, baby.

Changes

Camino has been discontinued, so I've started using Firefox. Deleted Facebook's iOS app in favour of Facebook Messenger. Because iOS switches between different e-mail accounts if one is slower, I've been nudged to migrate from my original and very first email account at Yahoo to my Gmail, which I initially used as a dead email account. My iPhone is the only thing I make calls on, or Skype on my Air. I've been to a movie theater once in the last five months -- Fast and Furious 6. Although I'm living a house with Sky and Soho, the last TV I watched was repeats of The Sopranos, Columbo and The Wire, and a MP4 of Mad Men. Of the last four books I bought, three were on my Nook -- from Barnes and Noble UK, which is cheaper than New Zealand. The last seven books I sold were on Kindle.

But the last music I bought was secondhand CDs, and I still write with a pencil on a yellow legal pad and still carry a Moleskine notebook / diary.

Update: Confirmed? Twitter for iOS does seem to be a data suck.

Hubcap diamond star halo

Bullitt (1968), Vanishing Point (1971), Christine (1983), Fast and Furious 6 (2013)

Earthbound

I bought a secondhand car with a six-CD player but Led Zeppelin Remasters is only two discs: what to choose for the other four? To start I picked up a secondhand copy of Lisa Ekdahl's Back to Earth (1998) with the Peter Nordahl Trio -- quite possibly the exact same one that I'd sold to the store after listening to it in 1999 and deciding that I didn't like it at all. Plus ça change and all that.

When I first heard Back To Earth I found it clockwork but now, 14 years later I like it: I find it clockwork. I remembered her cover of 'Now Or Never' that hits like espresso but forgotten her charming version of Cole Porter's 'Laziest Girl In Town'. And 'Tea for Two', 'I Get a Kick Out of You' and 'Night and Day.' It's like being in a five-star lobby that never closes.

Ekdahl is Swedish, the daughter of a nuclear physicist and a kindergarten teacher. She takes after both parents: her voice is perfect and innocent, precise and untroubled. The band whirl around her like electrons while she glows at the center, neither positive nor negative, on time and in key.

Critics are divided on Lisa Ekdahl, most of them rating her as not very good. Her voice is one you either love or hate, and she makes no excuses for it. As she told Time Out Hong Kong:

I'm aware that I have a tiny voice, and I try to do the best with what I have. So I accept my voice and try not to make it bigger than what it is, because, for me personally, I love when someone naturally has a big beautiful voice, but I don't think it's so interesting when someone with a not very big voice tries to make it sound big. Another thing is that when I record, I'm aware that my voice is tiny, so I want to make a lot of space around my voice, so for me it's very important to work with musicians who naturally leave a lot of space.

The future's uncertain and the end is always near

 

 "When something dies is the greatest teaching." -- Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

Out of the past

This month's movie top box office earners were based on a 1966 TV series, a 1963 comic book and a 1925 novel. And Daft Punk had a number one with their disco single 'Get Lucky', based whole or in part on guitarist Nile Rodgers' work with Chic circa 1976. Nile talked to GQ about recording with the French duo:

Once it got down to specifics — once I had to pick up my instrument, and it was like, Now we've got to translate from concept to reality, we go from nothing to something—I said, Well, this is how we used to do it. And guess what, guys? You're also in the place where I cut my very first record. This is where Chic became Chic. And not only that, I also did INXS here, the biggest record of their careers. And I was here when the studio was built for Hendricks, and I was here before that, when it was a nightclub called Generation, and I played here and hung out here as a teenager. There's a lot of great ghosts in these walls. And at that point, it was like, Okay, the magic is about to commence. I started to deconstruct my parts — I do one pass where I'm playing it, and I take it apart, and do it sort of in single notes and other components. That process seemed to be the way they worked, because they were working with me. They would sing little licks that they'd hear me do, or I'd play something and that would spark an idea.

It's a nice thing as you get older – things come around.

Also announced this week: John Slattery is going to direct a movie version of Pete Dexter's God's Pocket starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Christina Hendricks and John Tuturro. I'm a huge fan of Mr Dexter, and this means he gets paid.

The dream factory

For the last few weeks I've been working with director Jonathan King on our film Realiti, picking off one day of scheduled shooting at a time. Production on the feature has been made possible by the generosity and spirit of all involved, from location owners to the local film students and hardened professionals who've worked on the crew, and to the wonderful actors who have found time between stage, TV and (very) big film productions to come and be part of Mr King's third feature. When I was writing the screenplay and casually dashing off phrases such as 'EXT. HOTEL EXTERIOR - NIGHT' it never occurred to me that the result would be six people standing on a wet, rainy city street at 11p.m. with their faces turning blue. But stand there they did, until they got it right, and not a complaint from any of them. Honestly, guys, I thought 'INT. NIGHTCLUB' was keeping it simple. And don't get me started on how easy I thought it would be to film 'INT. OFFICE - DAY'.

Realiti is still a work in progress. Without giving too much away I can tell you that I've seen the rushes and they're amazing. But don't tell anyone: we don't want to peak too soon. In the meantime my ongoing thanks and gratitude to Chow and Good Luck Bar; to the crew to date which includes Jack Barrowman, Oren Graham, Joseph Hambleton, Cath Maguire, Kelly Manu, Lee Tolley and Niki Winer; and my admiration and respect to the immensely talented actors including Michelle Langstone, Johannes Meister, Nathan Meister, Miranda Manasiadis, Graham McTavish, Aroha White, Richard Whiteside and Tim Wong. All of whom are being corralled, encouraged and captured by the directorial eye of Mr Jonathan King. Jonathan has been shooting a lot of handheld, and can hold a half-crouch for a really long time.

And hats off, too, to Wellingtonians. Their city might be home to one of the most expensive film productions in the modern world but the locals still brake for a micro-budget New Zealand movie. Literally, sometimes: we've been filming on the street. Sorry about that, chief.

Pictured: Graham McTavish and Miranda Manasiadis between takes at a very special house; cast and extras in the club; Graham, Oren Graham and Nathan in the wind; and Michelle Langstone -- a star and a star on Twitter.