Trouble September 2017

The trick with this work is finding something to immerse yourself in to allow the painfully tedious hours of waiting to slip by faster. For me, I take a book or find a bi-lingual Russian extra to converse with, as there are many Russian expats living here. If you don’t find something, the day drags on like an old whore with a smack habit, and you are at its relentless mercy until the gods of the filmmaking universe release you back into your life.

This one was a French movie, which meant there was no Hollywood budget to make the catered food edible. On some shoots I have been on, you are presented with a Thai banquet three times a day whilst the likes of Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Alba eat their smashed avocado sandwiches and room temperature sushi in the comfort of their private buses. No, this one was definitely not like that, if the extras scattered around on the concrete floor eating cold chicken and cabbage stir fry were anything to go by.

I find out that we are shooting a Songkran festival scene, the quintessential Thai water/fertility festival, and one of the ridiculously handsome French actors is to be gunned down in the general melee, not that I was at all concerned or interested. One thing you learn as a warm prop is that it doesn’t matter what you are doing, and if you do show unnatural enthusiasm for the job, the crew will soon put you in your place. The trick was to be there, but not be there at all, and I was getting better at it with each gig. This was Patong, after all, where nothing is real. So, what better place to be involved in an extra layer of artifice.

I have to admit, I was a touch excited at the start of the day as I watched the crew get their cranes, cameras, sound gear and lights happening. It almost makes you feel like something big is going to happen, something lasting, something that you can look back on and say to your grandkids that you were in that movie, even if it was only as an extra. But soon enough the excitement fades as you are reminded how gruelling and time-consuming the filmmaking process is, how many hours it takes to capture a few seconds of usable footage, and how dispensable that image is in our culture. This scene we were about to shoot could easily end up on the cutting room floor, along with the millions of dollars they spent flying into Phuket to shoot paradise in the first place, this strange little city being the last place I would’ve thought you would find it.

After three or four hours of standing around waiting, the crew are ready to shoot, so all us warm props gather around the cameras and await our cue to turn on the excited, buoyant festival vibe. Some warm props have even brought their own Super-Soaker-5000’s to drench us all in, and the prettiest of the warm props have managed to position themselves right in front of the cameras, caught up in the vain hope that their studied pout will be noticed, that their arse thrust out will be Finding the Art in Phuket / Tony Cameron