Chapter 7
When the studio’s logo filled the screen, I felt a weird swell inside me. Something like happiness but not quite. Juniper was still holding my hand—hers on top of mine—and she squeezed when my name appeared in pale blue out of the darkness.
In the movie’s opening scene, Matthew and I are playing a video game together—Super Mario Brothers on the original Nintendo.
When we shot the scene, Kathryn kept wanting me to move my body and arms along with the controller, like I was trying to move Mario inside the game by moving my own body.
I didn’t want to do it—I felt like my character was not the sort of person to make unnecessary movements of any kind, and in general I wanted him to be very still so there would be a big shift toward the end of the movie when he gets into a fight with Juniper and is flailing everywhere.
But Kathryn really liked this idea of me trying to move my arms to move the guy inside the game, so I was trying, but it felt awkward. It was still our first week on set. I felt like the crew and producers were getting mad at me.
After a few takes, Kathryn told everyone to break for ten and brought me into this other room in the house where we were shooting.
It was a kids’ bedroom, and the crew had all kinds of steel rigging there, but we managed to find a corner of a twin bed to sit on, and she said, “Five slow breaths. In and out. Nice and deep.” I was looking at some kid’s Pittsburgh Steelers poster, wondering if he was psyched or pissed that his room was being used by a Hollywood studio, and I took five slow breaths in time with hers.
“Here’s a story Bradley Cooper told me once.
He’s such a philosopher. He said, when a human has a fight-or-flight response, they often get stuck between fight or flight.
The feeling is so new, so powerful, so overwhelming, that they just stand there.
It’s not the decision that kills you, Kai. It’s being between decisions. Yeah?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s like my favorite Onion headline: ‘Road-Kill Squirrel Remembered as Frantic, Indecisive.’ But today, my lovely squirrel, you will dart this way and that way, and you will survive.
” Kathryn stood up, and I followed her. I sat down next to Matthew, and the crew returned to the cameras and lights.
The boom guy picked up the mic. Camera speeding.
Sound speeding. Kathryn said, “Fight. ACTION,” and I fought with the controller, moving my body in concert with the little guy on the screen.
She let the scene run a little long, until Matthew and I were improvising jokes, and then called, “Cut. Great. We go again. Now flight, Kai. Flight.”
And when everything was reset, she said, “Action” again, and I played the scene like I wanted to.
Minimal movement. Economy in everything.
Tight. Close. Interior. And when we were through the lines, she said, “Cut. Beautiful. Let’s move on.
” Kathryn used her version in the movie, of course, me ridiculously moving the controller all around. It was still a good scene, though.
_____
I found it hard to watch the parts of the movie I was in, because I couldn’t stop thinking about my face and my voice and how I sounded like an idiot.
But the stuff with Matthew was incredible.
Andy Warhol, always this soulless enigma, was suddenly human—performing, sure, just like the rest of us are, but still a person, with all the frailties and insecurities of one.
As he walked through his childhood home in Pittsburgh, you could see in his eyes everything he wasn’t saying—how this had been the only safe space in a bullied life, and it wasn’t even that safe. Your heart broke for him.
And Juniper was brilliant in it, too, raucous and unpredictable in her movements, a wound-tight cacophony of talent and self-destruction.
She seemed younger than she did in real life, unready for all the adult stuff she had to go through.
In the club scene where she’s bleeding and I’m begging her to go home, she was so good that I started crying.
I couldn’t tell if I was crying for Juniper or her character, because I loved them both.
Watching the movie, I kept thinking about how the most cynical or ironic people tend to also be the most vulnerable, because they can’t afford to risk sincerity. Andy was always somewhere between sincere and detached, and Matthew found that place so well.
Beside me, Juniper constantly scribbled notes into her notebook. I looked down to try to see them, but it was too dark. I hadn’t even thought to bring a pen and paper. Typical.
_____
I kept remembering what was happening on the days we shot each scene.
I recalled the day Matthew invited me to his trailer to play a motorcycle racing simulator someone had sent him.
I thought about how one day we had to wait for planes to pass in order to get the audio right, and Lon was shouting from behind the video monitors, “These goddamned planes have cost me twelve thousand dollars today. Do you know what twelve thousand dollars could buy?!”
During the scene where Andy and I drink beer together, I remembered laughing with Matthew about the ridiculousness of the fake beer labels.
Matthew offered to pay the props master whatever it cost to get some actual Stella on set, and then I made fun of Matthew for liking shitty beer, and then Matthew said, “Can you even drink?” And I said, “Hell yeah I can,” and then he tilted his head way back and looked up at the ceiling while he laughed, like God had made the joke.
I couldn’t get my head into the actual movie at all, really, until the last twenty minutes or so.
As Andy got sicker and we started to fall in love, the movie became so heartrending that I forgot about what had really happened and who Juniper and Matthew really were, and even who I really was.
There’s a scene near the end where Carly and Jude are making love and I’m sobbing into Carly’s shoulder after we find out Andy died, and it had been intense to film but was somehow more intense to watch.
I just felt so bad for everyone. The movie is really about what you owe the people you love, and how impossible it is to pay all those debts, and the whole thing just ripped me up until I started crying.
I glanced over at Juniper and she was dabbing her eyes, but I didn’t see any tears. She looked really pretty, the light of the movie goldengray on her face.
By the time the movie ended, I was really crying. I wasn’t crying about the movie, even. I was crying because even Andy Warhol was so fragile, and because everything fragile faces the same fate eventually.