Chapter 8
I’d begun to see a pattern with Kathryn: She’d let us take each shot according to our own instincts several times, and then she’d slowly ask for it more her way—me as innocent and confused by the Big Boy World, Kai as expressive and entranced by me.
I worried she’d cut a movie using only her takes, but at least she was letting me act from within myself a bit, which is more than can be said for many directors.
By that Friday, we were shooting from seven p.m. to seven a.m. to get some night shots. We first filmed Kai and me at Magic Hour on a rooftop talking about Andy, about his genius for not letting anyone get beneath the skin. “I am,” as he once put it, “a deeply superficial person.”
In interviews, I’d noticed how often Andy referred to things as “wonderful” or “excellent” without ever seeming to derive any joy from their wonder or excellence.
For someone constantly surrounded by pleasure—fancy food, great parties, celebrities, art, and everything else—he seemed curiously immune to it.
So that was in the back of my head as Kai and I sat on that roof.
Then we transitioned to the nightclub set, where my character is partying.
I wasn’t in the first scene. Andy and Kai stand outside the club and Andy tells Kai he’s beautiful and Kai says, “If you want to sleep with me, Andy, just ask,” and Andy responds, “I like sleeping I think more than I like the other stuff.” Which I found relatable, although sometimes I think that maybe I’ve just never had good sex, whereas I’ve definitely had good sleep.
By the time I was needed again, it was closing in on midnight.
I was tired, but my mom had trained me to use the fatigue.
If the fatigue makes you cranky, feel that emotion and know that you can transform it into any other emotion.
In the scene we shot next, I snort coke until my nose is dripping blood and Jude screams at me for being a goddamned idiot and he confesses to me that his brother died from a drug overdose after years of them both being beaten by their father.
The fatigue helped me, as feeling always does, so that by two a.m. I was a weeping mess, all my nerve endings on the outside of my body, feeling exhausted and exhilarated, fake blood all over my blouse mixing with real snot from my sobbing.
I didn’t even need to think about my mother, my actual family member who died of a substance use disorder.
I didn’t have to think about the times I’ve watched people snort coke at parties, invulnerability thrumming through them.
Didn’t have to think about the one time I tried weed, maybe a week after Mom died.
A friend gave me some gummies and I took one in the hopes that I might be able to sleep, but I just lay in bed immobilized, thinking about all the worst things that still might happen, how if my brother and dad died I’d be actually alone in the world.
I didn’t need memories to be within Carly. I only needed what I already felt, to feel the fatigue in my body and transform it into fear and longing and pulsating yearning.
_____
With each take the word cut was a slight surprise, and then Kathryn would talk to me, but I couldn’t really listen because I was so deep in the experience of being high as hell, wanting to fuck someone just so they would look at me the way men do when you make them come.
“You’re doing great,” Kathryn told me. “I hesitate to tell you to pull it in but we probably need a smaller version as well.”
“Got it,” I said. I closed my eyes. Took some slow breaths.
I was high in a nightclub where the music didn’t actually play while we shot, because we didn’t know what would be on the soundtrack yet.
Kai was yelling over silence, because he needed to be shouting above music that wasn’t there.
And I was screaming at him, blood dripping from my nose, trying to make “a smaller version” of my most emotional scene in the movie.
Jude was crying, too, begging me to go back to his apartment. “You’re gonna die like Cam did. You’re ruining your fucking life.”
“MY LIFE!” I shouted back. “ALL FUCKING MINE.”
“I care about you. Because you’re worth caring about.”
I danced sloppily toward him, then lost my balance but saved myself by grabbing hold of him. I tried to kiss him and he dodged it. “WE ARE HAVING A GREAT FUCKING NIGHT.”
“I am having a terrible night.”
“TAKE A LUDE AND CHILL THE FUCK OUT.”
“You’re bleeding.”
I looked down at my shirt. Blood dripped. I wasn’t crying now. I was more casually baffled. “ANDY IS HIGH TOO AND YOU’RE NOT YELLING AT HIM.”
“Andy’s not bleeding on his shirt. I gotta get you out of here.” He sounded strangely distant as he said it, but I tried to stay in the scene.
“MY LIFE,” I shouted back, pulling away from his grip. “MINE TO SPEND. MINE TO WASTE. MINE.”
Jude rolled his eyes, raised his hands in surrender, and watched as I fell to the ground, then walked away.
“Cut,” Kathryn said. She took Kai aside, and I could hear her whispers but not what they meant.
Kai felt somehow blocked off, like he wasn’t quite meeting me in the scene, as if he was worried about embarrassing himself.
And maybe that was true to character, but I felt like the scene needed to properly explode, the way in a movie everything has to go fully wrong before anything can resolve.
“Let’s go again,” Kathryn said.
_____
Kai tried again, hitting his marks and his lines, but there was something a little dead-eyed in it, something self-conscious. He kept looking around at the other people milling about, as if they mattered.
“Cut. Going again,” Kathryn said.
We tried again, but we were getting further away, not closer now, and I could feel myself pulling away from him, trying to find a Carly that could exist separate from his slightly aloof Jude.
“Cut. We’re gonna go again.”
We tried again, and now there was anger in Kai, a frustration, which felt closer to the right note but still lacking in depth. “Let’s just take lunch,” Kathryn said after that take.
“Bit early for lunch,” Jo the Line Producer responded.
“Lunch.” Kathryn said it again, this time more forcefully.
As I was walking with a PA toward the van that would take me back to my trailer, Kathryn grabbed me by the shoulder. “See if you can get through to him,” she said. “Your costar. See if you can unblock him.”
_____
Kai had been great to work with all week—fearless and heartbroken and ambitious and fast-talking and absolutely dripping with charisma.
But I knew what Kathryn meant. Although there was nothing radically out of place about his actions or line readings, he seemed more concerned about the other people at the club than he was about me, which felt strangely wrong for an actor whose natural choices were always extremely right.
I went back to my trailer. I was exhausted.
I could hear Kai playing a video game as I lay down for a minute on the little vinyl couch.
It always took me a while to emerge from the character after intense scenes.
I had the cathartic rush you feel after crying hard for a long time, when you’re reminded that somehow, in spite of it all, you’re still alive.
I remembered the morning after they told me my mom had died, I took a shower, and as the water droplets hit me I kept thinking, I am still alive.
It seemed impossible that I could exist without her. And yet.
I went outside into the crisp Pittsburgh darkness and poured myself a cup of coffee at the beverage station, then knocked on Kai’s trailer door.
He opened the door. He looked down at me and at my blood-soaked blouse.
The props team really had that fake blood pouring out of my nose and onto my shirt.
He tilted his head, gesturing into his trailer.
Kai’s tight white shirt was glued to his skin, his arms still prickling sweat from the heat of the lights. “You okay?” he asked.
I nodded as I closed the door behind me and sat down on his couch. “This stuff is fun for me,” I assured him, which I’d been saying for so long—on set, in interviews, to acting coaches—that it might’ve been true.
“You’re so good,” he said. “You make it easy.”
“Right back at ya.”
He was quiet for a while, our eyes settled on each other.
“Are you okay?” I asked, and he shook his head a little and then started to cry.
I got up to give him a hug, but I was thinking about the blood on my shirt and how I didn’t want to fuck up his costume, so it was awkward.
“It’s a lot,” I told him. “And it’s your first movie.
But you’re doing amazing, Kai. You really are. ”
He extricated himself from the hug and looked down at me, silent tears falling. “I’m trying to bring my whole self to it,” he said at last. “But I know I’m fucking up. After every take, Kathryn tries to tell me what to do, but I just can’t do it. I can’t get there.”
“How do you get there?” I asked. “What’s your process like?”
“I don’t know how to do it except to make it real,” he said.
“I’m not like you. I can’t just prepare my way into it.
I have to make it real. Have to think about my own self, my own life, my own…
history or whatever…and then take that and use it.
But this. This scene. I knew it would be this one that cracked me.
I tried to run it a thousand times in my mind, but I’m not good enough. ”
“You are plenty good enough.”
“I keep trying. But to really embody the worst thing that ever happened to Jude, I have to embody the worst thing that ever happened to me, and I keep blocking off from that. It’s too much.” He was really crying now. “I can’t do this, Juniper.”
I let him cry for a while, and then finally said, “Listen, Kai. Whatever’s happening in there is not real.” I touched his head. “It’s not really happening. What’s really happening is that we’re tired as shit stuck in a trailer in Pittsburgh.”
“I need to use it but I can’t,” he said.
“Define it.” I needed Kai to be ready for this, to be up for this. Getting this scene right was absolutely essential to our movie.
“I can’t, Juniper. I can’t. I can’t define it and I can’t use it. And it’s blocking me.”
“It is the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
“Yeah, I need to use it but I can’t use it. I need to use it to get fully open, but I’m scared to, or I keep trying and it overwhelms me.”
I was curious, of course, but knew better than to ask.
“Hey. When you felt these feelings in the past, wherever you felt them, you weren’t safe. But this is safe. That’s what acting is. It’s going everywhere you can go…but safely.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, it’s just intense for me.”
“Don’t be sorry. But the worst thing that ever happened to you, that’s not happening now, Kai. Now you’re with me.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
“And if you need to use something to break everything down when we go back, use it. It has no power over you, whatever it is, because you’re here and you’re surrounded by people who care about you and are rooting for you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Okay. I think I’m gonna play video games till they call us back. Love you.”
Weirdly, I believed him.
When we got back to set, he crushed it. After two takes, Kathryn announced we were moving on. “Don’t know what you said,” she whispered to me between set-ups, “but keep saying it.”