“Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive.”
Occasionally, I will go against my own rules to cover a film too interesting to ignore. While I only speak English, Day For Night is the one film that shows how a production is about 100+ different personalities with different backgrounds all come together to create a film. A film that in this case looks as bland as can be and guided by a director who – unlike most portrayals – is more passive in their decision-making.
“What is a film director? A man who’s asked questions about everything. Sometimes he knows the answers.”
Because Productions are all about creating a false reality, I’ve always been interested in working on a show that takes place around a Film/TV production. Where the sets include the equipment kept out of frame and there’s a Basecamp for the actors to get ready separate from the Basecamp set where they’d film scenes. (I was a fan of HBO’s The Franchise.)
Day For Night breaks past the magic of cinema to capture the grind of tackling the unexpected problems of each day’s scene. With so many people working on the project, everyone has their moment to be the cause of delay while the rest of the crew tries to keep the train on the tracks until we finally get to the last shot and everyone is emotionally spent but elated by the brief time spent together.
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