what the story was about.’ It was an amazing experience. It was an eye opener in a lot of ways.”
Working with the Actor The realism helped because Thomas said they did not work off a script. He talked to the actor, Mike Wade, “about what needed to happen to move the story forward.” About the facial expressions, that “was all him,” Thomas explains. “I gave him the parameters and said, ‘Action.’ He's a really, really good actor.” When Wade was walking through the salt flats, Thomas gave him this parameter: “Imagine just being stuck here, and that's all the water you have in the canteen. That was enough. That got him to the place that this is life or death, because that's what it is about.” Thomas would talk to Wade if there was a beat in the performance that didn't feel right. “For the most part I let him interpret what we had talked about,” Thomas says. Most of the scenes they did in two takes. The last scene with the sphere took about 10 takes, Thomas explains. “It was hard, because it wasn't fear, so much,” so he had to get Wade in the right frame of mind. Thomas pulled out C.S. Lewis from memory. “There's a book by C.S. Lewis called The Problem of Pain, and he talks about the idea of “fearing God.” Thomas adds: “The word, fear, in the Hebrew is more like reverence, awe. And it's hard to explain something like that [to the actor]. So that took a little while to say, you're not afraid, you're in awe. So it was difficult to get to that emotion. But we eventually got there.” One of Thomas's favorite shots was the sunrise (see Figure 11.10). “Right as the sun started to come up across the mountains, it was this nice bluish-pink light and the actor had a garb on all the time, a head wrap, and he had it over his head like this, and he's standing waiting for direction because we are getting our next camera set up. So he's just standing there and the garb is flowing forward in the wind. He's just standing, pointing the way the wind is going and I'm like ‘roll on that.’”