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Through a Glass Clearly
First AD Ricardo Méndez Matta on the making of
Bread and Roses in Los Angeles
Director Ken Loach (far right) with his DGA team
(from left) 2nd AD Sharon Swab, 2nd 2nd Bradley Morris
and 1st AD Ricardo Méndez Matta.
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If 15 years as an assistant director had taught me anything, it was that all movies are made the same way. The size of the budget may vary, but the scheduling, budgeting, rehearsing and shooting of every film are always grounded in the same basic principles. You schedule exteriors before interiors; when you move to a new location, you don't leave it until you have shot all the scenes that take place there, etc. It took decades for Hollywood to come up with this formula, and I firmly believed it was silly for anyone to try and reinvent that wheel. But after a week of working with Ken Loach on Bread and Roses, I threw everything I knew out the window and got ready for a new learning experience.
Ken wanted to shoot in continuity order, even if it meant moving in and out of locations. The crew was not keen on this; after all, they are the ones who carry the equipment back and forth. Ken would also not allow the production trucks anywhere near the locations. The crew wasn't crazy about that either, not to mention the drivers. The cast had its own set of doubts. Ken not only vetoed the use of makeup, wardrobe and cast trailers, he would not allow the actors to have a copy of the script, because he didn't want them to know how the story turned out. Whenever I mentioned these things to anyone, I would invariably be faced with dropped jaws and wide-eyed stares. And there was my challenge: if the cast and crew didn't understand what Ken wanted, they could not deliver it. So, I wondered, how could I convince a skeptical American crew, used to the "Hollywood" ways, to embrace Ken's European sensibilities and unorthodox style?
The best way I could explain it was that we would all have to stop doing what we do for a living so that we could do Bread and Roses. We are not going to make just another movie, I argued, we are going to embark on something very similar, some sort of cross between film, documentary, theater, and real life. When we're done with Bread and Roses, we'll return to regular Hollywood movie-making with great war stories to tell. The argument worked for the most part. Even though we still had some doubters, most in the cast and crew were visibly excited. But if I had managed to convince others, I was still worried. The schedule and the budget seemed horrendously tight, and none of us had ever done anything remotely like this. How were we going to pull it off?
Luckily, Ken provided me with the answers. First, he imported his key group of collaborators from England: producer Rebecca O'Brien, cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, sound mixer Ray Beckett, script supervisor Susanna Lenton, production designer Martin Johnson and assistant cameraman Carl Hudson. At first I thought this would backfire. The locals wouldn't like being passed up for the job, it would be expensive to fly the Brits in and put them up, etc. Plus, I thought, I'll have even more people to train the "Hollywood" way. I was wrong. They trained me. Not a day went by when Ken didn't ask the production to do something that was outrageous, unreasonable and unheard of by local standards, but perfectly fine by the Brits.
Take our very first day of filming. The script begins on the U.S./Mexican border at dawn, so Ken wanted us to start on day one, at the border, before dawn, photographing real coyotes smuggling our cast into the country. All of us, including me, objected. Why shoot at the real border when we can fake it at the nearby Tujunga Pass? It made more sense: the border was three hours away, we'd have to spend money on hotels, and we'd have to deal with the INS. I tried to talk Ken into it. "Fake it?" he said, flabbergasted. "Why fake anything when we have the real thing?"
Needless to say, we did it Ken's way. We shot that scene literally right at the border, with a half-dozen crewmembers, and without using any lights. The entire grip, electric, makeup, hair, prop and wardrobe departments remained back in Los Angeles, as did my 2nd ADs. I found myself chasing the camera up and down a dry riverbed, out of breath, in the dark, while looking out for rattlesnakes. I was hiding behind Ken, who was behind Ray hand holding the sound recorder, with all of us scurrying about trying to stay out of Barry's shot. It was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever done. The Brits didn't even blink. They knew what to expect from Ken and were ready for him. I can't fathom how we could have done the movie without them.
Ken also brought along a great script by Paul Laverty, who had also written My Name Is Joe and Carla's Song. The screenplay was written in the traditional format, but the similarity with Hollywood fare ends there. Ken and Paul were not interested in making a film about doctors, lawyers or secret agents. Our two leading characters were janitors. Not only that, they were female, they were Mexican and they spoke in Spanish! The city of Los Angeles is 45 percent Latino, but you'd never know it by the amount of Latinos that appear on the screen. It took a British crew crossing the Atlantic (and the American continent) before our own story could become a movie. However ironic this may be, I knew no American studio (or network) would ever produce a story such as ours. You see, Bread and Roses is not about Armageddon, aliens or serial killers; it's about labor organizing. It doesn't have special effects, gratuitous sex or a happy ending. Instead it offers ordinary people struggling to overcome everyday problems. The cast relished such a rare opportunity to play truthful characters. They were also excited by their own process of discovery, as none of them knew how the story would end. Ken had second assistant Sharon Swab hand each individual actor just enough of the script for them to be able to play the next scene. At most that meant a few pages. Often it meant nothing at all. The crew, on the other hand, had full scripts and knew where the story was going. Or so we thought.
The script featured an intensely dramatic scene between two sisters, where one forces the other to leave their home. As Ken always did, he kept one of the actors, Pilar Padilla, the one being kicked out, completely in the dark. She had no idea what was to occur in the scene. It would be up to the older sister, played by Elpidia Carrillo, to push her out. Ken loves doing this, he explained, because it allows the camera to capture a genuine moment of surprise, where the actor becomes the character. "Why act surprised, when you can be surprised? If it works," he reasoned, "we've got it. If it falls to pieces, we'll just do another take." But this time things did not go one way or the other. We began shooting in the morning, thinking that later that afternoon, we would film scenes of Pilar moving to a new home, once her sister had kicked her out. Elpidia worked the scene beautifully. She was strong, rough, and brutally honest. But it didn't work. Pilar simply refused to leave. She couldn't. She felt such deep love for her sister, that no matter what Elpidia said or did, Pilar would not leave. Finally, after many tears, Elpidia gave up, probably thinking, "We'll just have to do another take." After Ken asked Carl to end board the take (he never says "cut") a quick conference with the writer was in order. After huddling for a few minutes, Ken and Paul announced that the afternoon scenes were being canceled. What Pilar and Elpidia had improvised was the truth, and they were not about to argue with that. Paul would spend the night rewriting the script to accommodate the sisters staying together. The rest of us thought about how truly magical filmmaking can be.
Had Ken filmed Bread and Roses in the conventional way, that scene would have been a disaster. In Hollywood, scripts are filmed out of order, which makes it difficult for the story to change course midstream, since the scenes following it are likely to have been shot already. You can make changes, and people do all the time, but not without great cost. By scheduling the scenes in script order, Ken hangs on to the luxury of rewriting up to the last minute, but without the expense.
How does one shoot in continuity without wasting time and money loading and unloading heavy equipment in and out the same location each time? The key, I found out, was in the approach to cinematography. Ken never uses a crane or a Steadicam. We didn't even carry a dolly. Every shot in the movie was done hand held or on a tripod. Barry used very few lights, sometimes none at all. We went through more than one shooting day where we did not use one single piece of grip or electrical equipment. This made moving in and out of locations a breeze, which meant Ken could have what every director dreams of. He was free to shoot any scene he wanted, whenever he wanted.
Ken would also not allow idle crewmembers (or unused equipment) to remain on the set. When you finished whatever you were working on, you were expected to leave, take your gear with you, and not return until called for. It was difficult for some at first. But once everyone got used to it, it worked like a charm. The set was quiet and uncluttered. For the cast, it was a dream. By the time they were brought to the set, all vestiges of movie-making were gone. No one would be in their sight line. There were no director's chairs, no video playback, and there were no tape marks on the floor. The actors were free to move wherever the scene took them. The set was no longer a "set," it was a real place. It was only fitting, since most of the cast members were non-actors. Real doctors played doctors, cops played cops and janitors played janitors. Whenever an actor told us, "I would never do it like this in real life," the answer always was, "do it however you really do it." Rather than bend the truth "for dramatic purposes," the film adapted to the truth in the story. The dog would wag the tail.
Pilar Padilla makes a statement in
Director Ken Loach's Bread and Roses
(Photo: Merrick Morton)
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Sometimes reality threatened to work against us. We staged a large union protest march, at the Citibank Tower in downtown, which appeared a little too real to the neighboring building's security guards. It was hard for them to believe me when I said it was only a movie. All of us who live in Los Angeles have grown to recognize the ubiquitous movie shoots, with their maze of barricades, trailers and camera cars. When the alarmed security guards looked around our shoot, they couldn't see one truck or one foot of cable; surely this couldn't be a movie. They insisted we vacate the premises. We had real union protesters playing the union protesters, of course, which only added fuel to the fire. Before I knew it, my protesters (and my director) were arguing nose-to-nose with the security guards. I had to use every persuasive bone in my body to pry them apart so that we could go on with the filming.
Once we got past that, the scene progressed rather well. After all, we had cast real union activists to march on a building that they had actually picketed only two years before (the building had since signed with the union). Everything had been arranged for a smooth shoot and as far as the protesters knew, the scene was about a successful demonstration, a victory for the union. But what they didn't know is that we had arranged for the police to show up unexpectedly and arrest them. As the 200 or so picketers triumphantly sang pro union chants inside the Citibank lobby, 24 of Los Angeles' finest (all real LAPD cops, of course) were deploying outside, decked out in riot gear and ready for action. Many of them had arrested the very same union protesters at a real picket line only months before. When the moment came, Ken looked at me and gave me the signal to cue the police. Only a few of us inside the overcrowded lobby knew what was about to happen. I turned on my walkie-talkie and, struggling to be heard over the loud din of the protesters' song, I relayed the cue to the police. I felt chills go down my spine. When the police entered that lobby, the protesters were horrified. Some of them angrily and violently resisted arrest and had to be forcibly subdued by the police. After the first take was completed, the head police officer, LAPD Lieutenant Greg Montgomery, informed us that the police were refusing to do any more takes unless the protesters agreed not to resist. Everyone agreed to that and we did one more take. It went down quietly and everyone was happy in the end, although I suspect the final film will use the first take. The truth always has priority in a Ken Loach film.
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