A director
His life is falling apart back in Stockholm. But it is easy to forget Stockholm here in the long grass, in the frost. They are on one hill in a rolling chain of white, and though they have only been filming for a week, his vision is clear.
The director turns his eye to the day ahead, to the star of the section they’re shooting.
Seb is new. This is his first feature, having blown them all away in that audition room last spring.
They have erased his tattoos, covered him in dirt, dressed him in rags and placed him here, outside a draughty shepherd’s hut in a field of sheep somewhere in the south-west of England.
The cold wind bites at them, and Seb seems to be harnessing it, drawing it into his character as he prepares for the scene.
He brings to mind a restless horse, his breath coming out in clouds, his stamping feet churning up the mud.
‘Stand by,’ the director says, and they stand by. ‘Action.’
Seb’s is a minor role. It will only take five days to film, and most of his dialogue will be cut in the edit.
This job is pitiless. Existence is a scythe.
But in the footage that survives, his presence will shine through, a furious intensity that feels like it’s reaching out and pulling you, physically, towards the screen.
One of the production assistants stands to the side of the director, watching intently over the top of the camera.
The director wonders what she is thinking.
He knows that she wants to make films, because everyone does, and because she’s one of the rare inferiors that his producer Agathe actually seems to have time for.
She’s one to watch, Agathe had said. And so, he does.
Her name is Clara, and it would be easy to assume that she’s standing so close to study the precise interplay of light and shadow, to work out what she’d do differently if she was at the helm.
The director knows that this is not the case.
He knows that Seb is her boyfriend, and that they have been fighting.
He knows this, because a good director reads people, sees things.
If only a film set could bring him and his husband back together.
He’s observed it between Clara and Seb, over the last few days.
A thawing, like the wet grass underfoot.
It started with a look, shared over the top of a camera like this one, on Seb’s first day of filming.
A look that said, despite everything, break a leg.
Then, a note, slipped into the pocket of Clara’s jacket, and, finally, a hushed conversation outside the craft services trailer, ending in a hug that started awkwardly but lasted longer than either of them seemed to expect it to.
After this scene is ticked off, Seb and Clara will share a coffee and skirt around the bigger issues, talking only about her short film and all the insecurities that come with it.
‘You’ve got this,’ Seb will say. ‘You’re going to blow people away.’
And the director will do his best to act like he doesn’t overhear them, because Clara’s film sounds esoteric, and because he dreads the day that she asks him to watch it, as all assistants eventually do.
She never asks. There will come a time when this troubles the director.
As if she didn’t need his opinion. As if he should have offered it anyway.
Her short will be noticed by all the right tastemakers at all the right festivals, and Clara will suddenly be a wunderkind without need of this would-be mentor.
But all of that is in the future. Right now, the director stands in a frozen field on a hill somewhere in the south-west of England.
He takes a breath that hurts his lungs, and he feels filled up by his process, his peerless vision.
Through it all, he waits for Stockholm to call.