“Cut right there,” the Director said. And though everyone could hear him, the Actress felt he whispered what he said next. “I could see the shape of your breast. Keep your right arm down and use the left if you must, but keep the right one down, elbow in.”
“Hair?” asked the stylist. “Do you need it dry again?”
“No, just go as is. As if you’ve been under the nozzle for several moments,” he said to the Actress, and the camera rolled again.
This time, the Actress monitored her right arm, the feeling like a constriction. Suddenly the bathroom set seemed oppressively contained, the physicality of the scene becoming like a series of dance steps to be practiced, rehearsed, and replicated with supreme precision. She rinsed her hair, her body contained, but her face registering what it was supposed to.
“Cut. Stop there. Your entrance,” he said, before the Actress realized he was speaking to the tall, thin woman. “Open the door, but pause before you enter. Don’t rush through.”
The water was still running and the Actress stood as far away from the stream as she could. It was getting cold.
“Again,” the Director said, motioning them all to start. She stood back in the shower stream, her eyes closed serenely against the water, realizing she wasn’t playing the part at the moment, but no matter. She just wanted to hear the sound of the curtain being pulled, but the seconds dragged on. Even before the Director called out for a cut, she knew something had gone wrong.
Something about the lighting was displeasing the Director, and the wardrobe mistress motioned to the Actress to get out of the shower. The water was turned off, the set becoming quiet as the Director conferred with the men around him, until finally he said, a little dejectedly, “Early lunch. One hour.”
Half a day and hardly anything burned onto film just yet. Over a sandwich and a cup of coffee, the Actress studied the script again, turning to the pages that described the shower scene, but then she pushed the whole thing aside. For all its audacity, this was a technical exercise, and all she had in her head about this woman’s vulnerability, her moment of surprise, and her terror was now revealing itself to be almost irrelevant. When the scream came, it needn’t be done with an eye to its believability, but to its function, how she looked when she did it, if her face was in focus, how she carried her scream over the sound of the water falling in the echo of the shower. On the one hand, yes, it was a moment that she knew was different from other movie deaths. It was real carnage, not an actor going down in an elegant ballet, clutching his stomach, his face grimaced in perfect pain. In her teenage days back in the Valley, sneaking into movies midway through a screening, she’d seen gangsters fall majestically in a rain of bullets, women screaming bug-eyed at a movie monster and raising their hands like museum statues. But for this scene, something else was at work, and even the Director’s explanations and his revelations on the storyboards hadn’t been enough for her to realize what he was doing until she had come into the middle of the action. It was now a measure of camera angles, how water appeared on the screen, the height of the shot, the overheads, the sound — her body as a prop — and she finished her coffee and sandwich and reported back to the set a little early, readying herself to be used as needed.
All afternoon, they worked with slow precision. The Las Vegas girl stood in the shower completely nude, and a different shower curtain, a little more opaque, was hung up to conceal her nipples. Lens condensation corrupted a couple of the shots when the shower ran too long, and they had to start over. The back wall of the shower jammed in place and the grips finally muscled it out, their dirty fingerprints wiped away from the edges to maintain the illusion of a bathroom so pristine it gleamed. The warm water ran out and they had to wait awhile to let the tanks reheat. The Las Vegas girl took to sitting topless so much that even the crew stopped noticing.
The next day, it was the same thing. A new girl, equally curvy and coached to be more demure when off camera, came in as a replacement. More camera setups, failed takes, mole-skin applications, arms over breasts with the back almost to the camera but not quite. Sometimes it was the new girl in the tub, doing exactly as she was told while a camera shot from overhead, keeping her head down as much as she could so there was never a possibility of noticing she was a stand-in. She dried off and quickly robed, paper cup of coffee in hand, watching the proceedings. The screaming was easily done, only a couple of takes because the editing would take care of the rest, and all the thinking the Actress had done about the moment of this young woman’s death was really for naught. What was more important was how the woman walked into the bathroom, what she was doing right before, the casual way she went about making a grand decision in her life, her effort to change course, and how the certainty of that decision was going to be silently clear to the audience: this was a changed woman, and she was doing the right thing. She was good enough to be forgiven.
It took seven days to shoot the scene, almost as long as it had taken to shoot the preceding drama, and with the holidays so near at hand, the pressure to finish fell heavy on the set. Who knew it was going to be so demanding? But it wasn’t the time involved — it was the physicality and trusting that the Director could see what he needed to see. It was the appearance of nakedness without being naked, hard as it was to tilt her body away from the camera when, right out of the corner of her eye, she could always see a voluptuous pair of Las Vegas breasts at the ready.
But in the end, she was stunned at the effect. Sitting in their screening room, never having seen any of the daily rushes, never having seen the rough cut, but now watching the finished film itself — with music! — the Actress hardly recalled that she was witnessing herself. At every sequence, she could remember the Director’s hand guiding her through the moment. Her elevated sensuality in the hotel room with her handsome costar. Her face registering the feeling of being pursued and the fear of being caught as she made her getaway. The shadings in her expression as she reveled in her own conniving and cunning while her character listened to interior voices. Even the angle of her head as she listened over a motel dinner of sandwiches and milk, a woman listening to a story, but matching it to her own, comparing it, her disrupted life not ruined at all, but a shiny thing in her hands once again, renewed.
She had become that woman entirely.
The Actress knew it even as she watched her character sit at a motel room desk, her moment of reckoning coming. In a little notebook, she scribbled out the simplest of subtractions: seven hundred from forty thousand. Something she could have done in her head. But she did it because her character was alone and silent, not even a voice in her head, and the audience in the dark needed to be looking over her shoulder as she began making amends.
She tore up the note, about to throw it in the trash, but then turned to look to the bathroom, as if remembering it as the one place where everything vile gets washed or flushed away, the camera gliding along with her as she moved to that space.
She was framed in the doorway of the bathroom, bending down to the toilet.
The camera showed the toilet, pristine and white, but unsettling somehow, a toilet never having been on the screen before, and she soiled it with the torn-up pieces of her crime and then flushed.
She bent down to lower the lid, stepping over to close the door firmly, looking up as if to make sure it was closed, then took off her robe, her back exposed to the camera.
Off came her slippers one by one, the robe on the toilet haphazard, her bare legs stepping into the clean tub, and the curtain pulled back with a quick rush of metal rings.