CLICK HERE FOR DAY 1, featuring Maximilian Schell, Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody!!!

Quint here with Day 2 of my BROTHERS BLOOM set visit. But first let’s step into the Wayback Machine and go to the very end of yesterday’s shoot. I punked out at the end of my last report and left off the last scene in order to catch the 7 hours of sleep I could get before my next day onset. If you remember, my last report ended with a bit of action. Mark Ruffalo’s character, Stephen, smashed a wine bottle and sliced the hand of Maximilian Schell’s character, Diamond Dog. The last shot of the night was a quiet one, taking place after the mess has been cleaned up. Adrien Brody’s character, Bloom, was slouched on the empty bar, now cleaned up, but he twirls a fragment of the wine bottle in his fingers, examining it. Ruffalo comes walks in, jacket off, sleeves rolled up, but no worse for the wear. He puts a comforting hand on his brother’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you,” he whispers to Bloom. “You can’t always be there,” Bloom says back. They have a small conversation about how the plan is going, Bloom noting that Stephen has made a large tonal shift involving a character called The Curator (played by Robbie Coltrane). Stephen laughs, admitting he’s a fan of tonal shifts, but he didn’t plan that one. That was yesterday… here’s another picture I snapped before we head into today’s coverage:

The very first shot of the day is an establishing shot of a cityscape. Looks to be Tokyo. Bustling city, cars zipping by, people walking on sidewalks… then music starts playing and suddenly these words appear on the monitor “The storm is passed – there is peace at last.” The camera pulls back and in steps Rinko Kikuchi, dressed up in a silver glittering outfit, looking hot as hell and belting out this song (“Sleeping” by The Band). The camera pulls back further, showing a bank of monitors behind her, continuing to display the lyrics of the song as Rinko really gives it her all. She’s swinging her hips, throwing her arms about, totally in command of the scene. I caught a few pics of this. Check ‘em out… and yes, that’s Rian Johnson, director, on the right edge of the pic during rehearsal, waving his arms about, showing Rinko what he wants.

Yesterday Johnson told me that Rinko was originally supposed to sing this song in Japanese, but she insisted on doing it in English. He reluctantly agreed to hear her try it out, but said that there’s a danger of it sounding too comedic, that someone singing an English song with a strong Asian accent has become almost a form of comedy in our culture. The song is really pretty and she sings it really well. It’s not William Hung or South Park. Rinko’s accent can be detected, some of herself does shine through, but it’s definitely not a parody. The interesting thing about this scene and her character is that she expresses more vocally here than at any point in the movie. I mentioned in yesterday’s report that Rinko’s character, Bang Bang, is a silent partner, a true hard ass that knows how to inflict damage and pain, but has this weird girly goofy side that pops up at odd moments. She doesn’t speak for most of the movie, yet here she is at this Karaoke Bar singing her heart out, completely comfortable performing. For the rest of the morning they got the remaining coverage of this bit. Johnson was happy that people will be a little surprised to find this little musical number smack dab in the middle of his fairy tale-ish Con Man movie, a kind of disorientating bit of unexpected craziness.

There was the high angle close up in profile, a low angle shot looking up as she struts her stuff on the stage and then a close up of her feet, the Tarantino foot fetish shot, as her high heels dance across the stage. There’s lots of movement, the camera rubber banding on a dolly, being pushed and pulled across the length of the stage. They shot this all before lunch and began setting up a dolly track actually on the stage after lunch, cheating in a small platform for Rinko to stand and dance on. This was the rock concert shot, the HARD DAYS NIGHT shot, with the singer from head to toe, bright spotlight shined directly on to them, backlighting her. Around lunchtime I ended up talking a little with Johnson about this sequence. He said he was incredibly happy that he got that rock star shot, something that I think wasn’t on the shooting schedule. It’s a good shot and I told him that for something like this, something so crazy and random, if you don’t fully integrate it well then it’ll feel tacked on and superfluous. Johnson agreed, saying that he knew when writing he could only pull this off if he did it just right and shot it just as well as he shot anything else in the film, if not moreso. Keeping the same set-up, the crew changed the lighting a little to feature Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo who are standing past the extras (a rather seedy bunch, a mixture of cultures from Asian to African to unknown) watching Rinko perform. The shot is a wide shot that begins washed out, bright white. The spotlight is right on the camera. After a few seconds the spot goes down and we see Rachel Weisz as Penelope standing next to Brody as Bloom, both eyes to the stage. Penelope as a character is very childlike, eyes wide with wonder at the thought of adventure. She has a vulnerability that is perfect for this character and important for the romance angle of this story. Penelope gets along with Bang Bang, the two bond immediately and she applauds enthusiastically and waves to Bang Bang. Ruffalo (Stephen) steps up to the group nonchalantly before cut is called. Weisz changed up her performance for each take, I’m assuming to give Rian a little buffet of choices in the editing room. One time she blew a kiss, another time she applauded hugely, another time she bowed with a smile. All in character, but all different. The final sequence of the night was an exposition bit, covering a couple pages of dialogue. This would be a good time to mention that the script is always shifting, the plan revealed to be more and more intricate. This conversation is a little late in the script and covers some spoilers. I’m not really going to go deep into them, but you’ll know a little about the progression of the story beyond what I’ve mentioned previously if you continue on. But then again, if you do continue on you’ll get a pretty picture of Rachel Weisz… sometimes life is filled with tough decisions… They set the four main actors on a pair of large couches, facing each other. One couch, back to the wall, had Penelope and Bloom, the other had Stephen and Bang Bang. The first shot had the camera on a dolly, but the move was subtle. It starts as a three shot (meaning three people were in the shot); Ruffalo was sitting on the edge of his couch, camera seeing his back and side, talking to Bloom and Penelope. The shot ended with a two shot of Bloom (right side of frame) and Penelope (left). Here’s a shot I grabbed, having to wedge myself into a corner next to the sound mixer, Pawel Wdowczak, who was gracious enough not to rat me out or yell at me for crowding him. Here’s the pic:

In the time between the camera and sound was rolling and Rian called action, the group started talking together, like a little impromptu bit of conversation that leads into the exposition. The second action is called Weisz went into her line. “So, what’s the next job?” Ruffalo is leading the conversation, steering it where he wants to. Stephen is trying to sell a rare book they’ve acquired on their previous Con before moving on, a book that Penelope was led to believe was fake. Stephen tells her it definitely is not fake, just not worth the money they led her to believe it was. It’s still worth some dough, maybe 400k, and the only problem is finding out who to unload it on to. Stephen asks who they got the book from in the first place. Bloom says, “Minskie.” Stephen’s eyes light up. “Perfect! We’ll sell it right back to him!” At this point the silent Bang Bang hands a note to Stephen. This is where having someone like Ruffalo pays off. He’s got a great sense of comedic timing. Here’s how it went: “Perfect! We’ll sell it right back to him! (he gets the note and reads it in about 2 seconds)… if he wasn’t dead.” Really funny stuff. Johnson later told me that the piece of paper just has the word “Dead” written on it. Brody suggests some other buyers in the US, but those are too traceable. The only option is deep black market, a place that both Bloom and Bang Bang don’t want to go judging by their expressions. Penelope’s eyes are as wide as saucers… “Where?” They turned around, getting Mark Ruffalo and Rinko Kikuchi’s coverage. Ruffalo had some trouble getting over a particular line and kept stumbling over his dialogue, but after some coaching from Johnson and the inclusion of another line of dialogue, he got the puzzles pieces to fit right in his head and they got the shot. Before they wrapped, I was enjoying a banana, scrolling through the candids I snapped today, pulling the ones I wanted to take around to the actors to get their approval (they contractually had photo approval, but without exception they were all cool with the shots I’ve been taking) and chatting with Alisa Buckley, the cool as hell publicist, when she said, “Look out. Someone’s coming to say hi,” and drifted into the background somewhere, leaving me with a big chunk of banana in my mouth as Rachel Weisz came up to my table. I fumbled some sort of apology and tried to chew my food as fast as I could, standing up to greet her. She was very gracious and beautiful, of course. Rian Johnson had led her over to me and she turned to him and said that we had met somewhere before. It was Comic-Con in 2005. She and Darren Aronofsky had previewed THE FOUNTAIN there and there was a small reception after the con where I had a chance to talk with them both. It was all very informal and conversational and so long ago that I couldn’t believe she’d remember it. I don’t know how long we talked. It felt like an eternity of small talk as I was trying not to sound like an idiot, but thinking every word that came out of my mouth was more useless than the one before it. She was very nice about everything, though. Maybe I wasn’t making a fool out of myself, yattering away about Austin and my plans in Belgrade, or maybe she was just nice enough to humor me. She stayed to talk until the AD called her into position for the next shot. That was about my day. I found out I’m going to make an unexpected visit up to a location an hour and a half outside of Belgrade before I get back on my plane to the States, so I’ll have final report about what I see there (supposed to include lots of fire) up sometime after I travel back. I’ll work on it on the plane, though, so you won’t have long to wait. I leave with another very pretty production still from the talented Slobodan Pikula. This is of the Brothers and Bang Bang in Prague. Click on it for the super big version. Enjoy!!

-Quint quint@aintitcool.com