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CLICK HERE FOR DAY 2, featuring the lovely Rachel Weisz and Karaoke!!!
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here.
Let me just say for the record, the new Continental 777-200 airplanes are the most amazing creations ever. The flight out to Serbia (via Amsterdam) was cramped, the plane older and lame, showing nothing but FREEDOM WRITERS and some other shit I didn’t want to watch.
As I begin writing this final report I’m stretched out (keep in mind this is economy class), feet up thanks to a not full flight, with my computer plugged directly into a power socket under the seat, a real one that doesn’t need an adaptor, as JAWS plays on the screen in the seatback. It’s one of my 250 movie options, which include everything from ALL ABOUT EVE to FIGHT CLUB to JAWS and JURASSIC PARK, to all the LORD OF THE RINGS, HARRY POTTERs, GODFATHERS and X-MENs. Like video on demand… And all free!!
I was really dreading this flight back, but now I don’t have nearly enough time to enjoy myself. There are a dozen movies I’d like to play, a few stories I’d like to type up and only 9 more hours of flight.
So, JAWS will play through my headset and on my little touch-screen in the seat as I write up my last night on the set of THE BROTHERS BLOOM. Quint’s introduction is starting as I type this… so…
Y’all know me. Know how I earn a livin’. Most recently I’ve been reporting pretty much live from the set of Rian Johnson’s Con Man movie, THE BROTHERS BLOOM. Days 1 and 2 are up already. Be sure to click on the links at the top of this article to catch up if you need to.
I was planning on 2 days of set with a day to explore Belgrade and do some shopping instead of hanging out on the set. As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to do both thanks to a perfectly timed change of production schedule. The crew call wasn’t until late afternoon, with the shooting going on well into the night.
The producer, Ram Bergman has been treating me like a prince on this trip and he arranged for a person from the production office who spoke both English and Serbian to take me around.
So, I was joined by the lovely Margarita as I picked up some cigars, a couple of pieces of fantastic local art, and looked at some amazing pieces at various antique stores, some of which dated back over 500 years and in a price range that I’d have to hit the lotto to afford.
I was very blessed to tourist about with a beautiful lady on my arm that spoke the language. Margarita bears a striking resemblance to Carice van Houten and those of you who have seen Verhoeven’s BLACKBOOK knows just how lucky a geek I was this day.
“You knew there was a shark out there… you knew it was dangerous, but you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things, but still my boy is dead now. And there’s nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead…” God, I love this movie.
Shit, this is going to be a little more distracting than I thought. I’ll try to keep my focus, I swear.
Alright, prepare for a shitload of pictures. I really went overboard on this, my final visit, which was only about 6 hours long. But I couldn’t help myself. There was too much cool shit going on.
For starters, they were shooting at a location about an hour and a half drive from Belgrade, so I got to see some of the countryside and rock out with Margarita to a disco station she found on the radio. They love American music here.
The place they found was incredible; gothic, creepy, rundown, ancient and completely abandoned.
There’s supposed to be an incredible backstory to this house, but I never heard more than snippets, The main thrust was that it belonged to a Jewish family in the early ‘40s and they either left it to hide from the Germans or they were forcibly removed. I never got the full story, but the place felt wrong.
It was massive and beautiful, of course, but there was a distinct feeling that something bad had happened there. Sometimes you get that haunted house feeling, just something in your gut. That was this place.
Today was a day of introductions… funny since it was my day of farewells. Both scenes are very early in the movie and set in completely different locations in the story, but I guess since they got this huge fucker of a house, why not have brilliant set decorator Jim Clay (CHILDREN OF MEN) make a nice little kitchen on the third floor and a rundown library on the first?
The kitchen is where we’ll learn about all the backstory for Rinko Kikuchi’s character, Bang Bang, that we’re going to get. Adrien Brody tells how she came to join the Brothers Bloom and in flashback we’ll see this scene, with Brody’s voice over to be added in later.
He’s making breakfast, alone in a bright kitchen. Bloom turns his back and suddenly Bang Bang is sitting at his small kitchen table, feet up and stone-faced. She’s kind of catlike. She’s almost annoyed that she exists, you know?
She’s looking mighty fine in a tight blue outfit, I must say. Check it out:
Damn… bye-bye Robert Shaw… love that blood vomit thing he does. What a way to go… (Yeah, I know that seems quick, but they served lunch and I took a break from writing, but not a break from watching the movie).
Anyway, Brody is grinding some pepper when he glances up, noticing Bang Bang for the first time. He pauses, a glimmer of confusion rippling across his face before it settles back to normal again.
Bloom approaches Bang Bang. She’s facing away, her appearance not betraying any hint that she’s even aware Bloom is in the room.
When he’s a couple of steps away from her, she reaches out to the table, again not looking anywhere but straight ahead, and pulls a tea cup a few inches closer to herself. Bloom stops at the table, thinks for a second, then pours her some tea.
Taking a look at the sides, the dialogue that’ll play in voice over pretty much says that she arrived mysteriously and unexpectedly and Bloom expects she’ll leave in the same manner.
Johnson and crew blew through the coverage of this, getting everything within about half an hour, including a wide shot that shows the whole action and a close up on Adrien Brody as he notices his guest.
The next scene was easily the most complex setup I’ve seen on this production, but before I dig into the flames, squibs, blood and mass anarchy, let me pause a bit to fill you in on the opening of this story.
On my second day, at the Karaoke Bar, Johnson sat me down to watch a presentation he put together that detailed the opening of the movie. It was very crude, nothing but storyboards edited together with his own voice coming in for each bit of character dialogue, but it set up the story really well.
The movie opens with a very fairy tale bent to it, with a narrator telling the origin of the Brothers Bloom in rhyme. As young kids they had no one. They were shifted from foster family to foster family and only had each other to survive through it.
You’ll see a young Bloom and a young Stephen pulling their first con and as simple as it is, it’s still got a bit of a zinger out of left field, a little piece of intricacy way beyond your expectations of a pair this young. You’ll also see the beginning of Bloom’s own personal torture, the Catch-22 of his personality. He craves interaction and love, but as himself he can’t do it, he doesn’t have the nerve. However, same people, same locations, can be involved, but if he’s running a con he can be the person he wants to be.
You also get a feeling of Stephen’s outlook on this whole thing. He always says the best con is when everybody gets what they want, where the mark doesn’t realize they were ripped off, or if they do, they don’t care because they essentially bought the experience they wanted.
The opening of the movie ends with the climax of their very first con as kids. There’s a time cut, a shot of a grand book case and the title “25 years later – Berlin.”
This is what they were shooting, this whole post-kids sequence.
Let’s start with the storyboards. One of the first things Johnson showed me this day were the storyboards for the sequence. He even let me snap a photo for you guys, so here it be:
He decided to start with an intricate shot. In terms of camera and movement, it’s deceptively simple. For the first time on this shoot I saw him bring in his B camera to film alongside his A camera.
Here’s the shot, and the reason for the tension on the set. It starts out on books. Something blurry rushes by the camera, someone getting punched out and falling across the frame, as the title comes up (although Rian said he was seriously considering changing it from Berlin to Belgrade in honor of the time he’s spent shooting in the city).
After the title fades, the book case starts to catch fire, flames licking the shelves and burning the books, as Adrien Brody steps into the shot. Alright, so already we have action, fire, dialogue and on top of all that Brody’s chest will pop with three squib hits.
Because of this complexity as well as the need to wait for the sun to set before they could start shooting there was nearly 2 hours of blocking, rehearsing and tweaks to the timing.
The tension was thick, but there was also a positive excitement. I’ve noticed this before on a few sets, where everything is riding on one take doing well because a reset will take way too long. On BUBBA HO-TEP they had to get the mummy catching fire just right.
I caught a lot of pics from the rehearsal, even for stuff that I wouldn’t be able to stick around for. My flight out of Belgrade left at 8am, so I had to leave the set around 11:30pm (remember it was an hour and a half outside of the city) so I could pack and get at least a modicum of sleep. You'll see a lot of them below...
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