You're on an Airplane

by Parker Posey

  I also recall that Faye and Burt/Burke seemed to have had a past. A rumor that they’d had an affair back in the day surfaced almost immediately, because when she entered the set the first day and strode in with outstretched arms to hug him, they were both laughing and he was blushing. She grabbed my forearm years later, seemingly out of nowhere, on an empty red carpet at the Golden Globes (we were both running late) and told me how much she loved Personal Velocity, an independent movie I’d done with Rebecca Miller. She still cared a whole hell of a lot about movies, enough to grab my very arm.

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  Liev Schreiber got the part that Sam auditioned for in Party Girl, the part of the bouncer. We’d auditioned in another basement apartment, in the West Village. Liev came in fresh off his motorcycle, holding his helmet and exuding a strong actor’s attitude. He acted like he’d just finished Yale School of Drama, which he had. This was before the New York Times said he was the greatest living theater actor of his generation, or something to that extent. He was the envy of so many of his contemporaries and treated the small part as a favor to Daisy, which it was. Liev is spectacular onstage. He later told me that he almost didn’t do the part in Party Girl because I seemed like an idiot.

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  Independent filmmaking felt small-town, which was nice. There was congeniality and favors were granted if people had good relationships. Michael Clancy, our wardrobe designer, borrowed clothes from designers and friends to dress my character, Mary. Vicky Bartlett, Clancy’s wardrobe assistant, gave me the shirt off her back in the first wardrobe fitting, which started in my closet in Chelsea.

  Liev introduced me to his friend Greg Mottola, who wrote and directed an independent film called The Daytrippers, which is a wonderful movie all around. The production company’s name was Fiasco, which was funny since on the first day of shooting the camera was stolen from someone’s car. It was the fastest and tightest schedule I worked on during my indie days. It was only a nineteen-day shoot, and most of the movies averaged twenty-two or twenty-three days.

  There was a scene where my mom, played by Anne Meara, collapses on the sidewalk and we think she’s having a stroke. I asked Greg if I could say “Don’t go into the light, Mom,” and he said I could. Liev groaned a bit, thinking it was dumb, and then when he saw the movie told me that it got the first big laugh in the film.

  Greg did something really smart suggested by Steven Soderbergh, who’d seen Greg’s short film at Columbia film school—it was shot in one take and called The Party. His advice to Greg was to write something contained, with not too many locations, and the locations you’d need could belong to your friends and family, who you could also cast. So we shot in Greg’s parents’ house, as well as in their station wagon, and in Campbell Scott’s apartment, who also invested in the movie. We shot a party scene on Liev’s rooftop in Brooklyn, as well as in his apartment—where Marcia Gay Harden was hysterical in a cameo. Greg wrote a part for his friend Andy, and we shot in his apartment, of course, while using Greg’s place as a holding area since they lived in the same building.

  Anne Meara I loved and adored so much because she could make me laugh without trying. She got mad at me once, though, in her close-up, in Greg’s parents’ kitchen, when I couldn’t control myself. I was close to being punished and sent to my room. Watching her bend over to pull her panty hose up from her shins to her legs in Greg’s cramped apartment, with nothing to hold on to but hanging clothes and an open doorframe, is something I’ll never forget. She started laughing at herself, and then I started laughing at her, and then she was laughing at me laughing at her, as she tried to figure out which of her legs had the best balance. It was like watching a vaudeville routine—it was so pure in its humor and she was real and exposed and loved every second of it.

  Films cost money and in those days, the budget went to the cost of the film itself and the time it took to edit—to cut and splice the film on what’s called a “flatbed.” Now films are made in digital and edited on a computer. I guess it’s comparable to doing your dishes by hand as opposed to putting them in the dishwasher, where you lose the experience of seeing and feeling for yourself how the plate gets cleaned. But if it’s digital, then the plate goes into a dishwasher, and when it comes out, it’s clean, like too clean, so the technical team of engineers (on their computers) dirties up that plate so it looks real again—or as real as it can, since digital doesn’t have the depth of field that film does. The digital cameras now are better than they were twenty years ago, but still, it’s a whole other thing when they can push buttons to create the light of a sunset. With film, you had to be there when the sun was actually setting. I need to watch Heaven’s Gate again.

  Anyway, the focus and energy to shoot in film, which is costly material and not disposable, made the work happen differently. Everyone whirled like dervishes. Actors hit their marks, made their cues, and knew their lines—there wasn’t time to spare. No dillydallying by the crew but horses at the gate, reflexes on, moving large equipment like C-stands and ladders and sandbags to blast off the shot as quickly as possible. “Time is money!” was shouted all day long. Sometimes, I’d sing back, “GE, we bring good things to life.” “GE” is short for the grips and electric department—the ones doing the heavy lifting and loading of the lighting and electrical equipment.

  In Party Girl and Daytrippers, this mode was full-on and it wasn’t unusual to work more than twelve hours in a day, but sometimes being overtired frees you up and the commotion around you fades away. I was almost dreaming, while standing sometimes, holding the focus puller’s measuring tape at my nose—the center of focus on the face. I’d release the tip of the tape from my fingers and listen for the sound of it snapping back. All the hubbub would put me into a fantasy where EMTs were trying to revive me: “Roll sound” was like “We have a pulse.” The clapper in my face and the assistant cameraman shouting “Marker!” woke me, thinking, “Huh? Marker, Parker? I’m here.” Then “Action,” and I was in the scene.

  I remember Daisy saying, “We have a hundred feet of film left, do you think you can do the shot in two takes?” I remember Greg Mottola was lying down in the back of the station wagon, recording sound, with barely any film in the “mag” (which is what the container is called). There was no room in the car for other crew except for camera, who yelled, “We’re fighting for light!” as the sun was close to going down.

  Something else that doesn’t happen in digital is “checking the gate.” This is when the camera assistant would shine a flashlight in the little window of the camera where the film was exposed, to see if any minuscule particles had stuck to the film. When the gate was dirty, the assistant camera person would shout, “Hair in the gate!” This meant that the last three or four takes held in the mag were ruined “in the can.” “Don’t shoot the messenger!” you’d hear a lot afterward. I’d freak out when there was a hair in the gate and act like a child. And like a child, I’d let go and move on and want to see the hair in the gate, which was not a hair at all but a piece of fuzz. That little piece of fuzz destroyed the entire mag of film? Wow.

  They also call independent movies “guerrilla filmmaking” but it’s more like punk rock because no one cares if the movie makes money and you’re in it for the experience or for the art of it. John Cassavetes is probably the king of this and I got to work with his daughter, Zoe, in a movie called Broken English in 2006. The first time we met, we hung out on the grass at the Chateau Marmont from one in the afternoon until eleven that night, drinking wine and talking about the character of Nora, who I played, and the painful and funny stuff we’d get to expose of her. “None of that cute shit,” Zoe would say. What does she look like when she’s alone and no one is watching? That’s what we were interested in.

  We shot just two weeks later in New York. I lose things easily before I start a job, and of course left my cell phone in the cab on the way to meet Zoe’s mom, Ge
na Rowlands. I would work with her the next day, in the first scene on the first day of production. I told her, “I have to tell you, to get this out of the way, but Opening Night is my favorite movie about an actress and your performance was so incredible . . .” She smiled and sighed, remembering, “Well . . . how do you think I felt when I read it?” And we sat there in silence for what seemed like a while and got comfortable being mother and daughter.

  Zoe and her sister, Xan, and brother, Nick, grew up making sandwiches for the cast and crew of their parents’ movies, because they shot all those films in their home. There’s a documentary about John Cassavetes called A Constant Forge.

  What it is to forge—where metal is heated and wrought to make malleable.

  Zoe has the intensity of her father and the beauty and spirit of both her parents. She nurtured and inspired easily since she’d experienced home in that way. She’d hunch close to camera, disappearing with her crew in whatever setting we were all shooting in. I was in her story, feeling more like an extension of her—like an appendage, the fingers to her hands.

  The woman’s touch is drawn to subtlety and nuance, like emotions and instinct—and the space of expression between the words. That space is everything.

  Hal Hartley has a similar scope and places his actors like dance partners with his cinematographer, as well as composing his own music while writing his screenplay. The notes of the music fill in emotions or transitions and that space says more than words or just as much.

  Hal and I have done five movies together and the last time was in his movie called Ned Rifle. We shot in a prison and I asked him if he ever felt like he was going to be locked up and sent to jail. We were both raised Catholic and I wondered if the thought had ever occurred to him, if he felt guilty or needed to confess. He was emphatic when he said “Yes. Look at what we do. We get to make movies. We should be in jail.”

  7

  Earth, Wind, and Fire

  I love New Mexico and got to work there in 2007 and visited the Hanuman temple in Taos. I was filming a movie in Albuquerque called The Eye, starring the beautiful Jessica Alba. It was a Hollywood movie based on a Korean horror film and directed by two Frenchmen. Jessica plays a blind violinist who gets a cornea transplant. The cornea she now sees with belonged to a girl in Mexico who had hung herself after receiving a vision of a horrible industrial accident she couldn’t prevent. After the transplant, Jessica’s vision becomes psychically blurry because she’s seeing with the eyes of the visionary girl. The horrible accident keeps playing in her mind’s eye as she progressively loses her grip. Therein lies the horror. I never saw the movie because I’m not a horror movie fan.

  I liked the part I played of her sister, though, who shows up intermittently to tell Jessica that she’s acting strange and to ask if anything’s wrong. I was relieved not to know any of her horror, and I got to play a flight attendant, which I’ve always romanticized. I wanted to wear soft materials Jessica’s character would find comforting, and since it was a gothic story, I thought playing guilty was the way to go. I threw on a comfy sweater but looked too much like a schoolmarm, according to the producer, Paula Wagner, who wanted me to dress more like her. I ended up getting fitted for expensive power suits that a flight attendant would never have been able to afford.

  I was difficult for a day in wardrobe fittings because my character’s clothes were less personal, but understood this was “genre” and I’d need to blend in with the dark color scheme of everything. I was grateful for the paying job, really. My last film, Broken English, had been at Sundance a few months prior and got good reviews, and I was hot enough for a second to land a Hollywood gig. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you, I learned, and plus, I was already digging the horizon and the air and driving to my music, like Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter. “We’re going to come up to the eyes of clarity / And we’ll go down to the beads of guile.” Joni Mitchell and New Mexico went hand in hand—and the expanse of sky was like medicine. I need the wind.

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  There was an Ayurvedic café in Albuquerque called Annapurna’s, which is Sanskrit for “full of food” or “goddess of the harvests.” I wanted to see if it would be my hangout during my downtime. I always check out the yoga or vegetarian places when I’m on location, because they attract people who are searchers, or looking to heal themselves (and in turn others), because they’ve suffered (or are suffering), which I think is deep and cool—and because I’ve suffered. No one gets away without it.

  An Indian man named Prakash was the chef of Annapurna’s. He was effervescent and liked to name-drop Julia Roberts, who’d been there a few times. I told him what Shirley MacLaine had said about her, that everyone knew she was going to be a big star when they did Steel Magnolias. Then I went into my spiel: “Why do these movies with these big actresses never have roles for her friends? What happened to the funny friend in those movies? I always thought I’d be that friend. Rhoda to Mary Tyler Moore. Friend to Julia Roberts.” Blahblahblah. I was still suffering in that gripe mode.

  Prakash led me to the Ayurvedic Institute, where Dr. Vasant Lad taught Ayurveda—a belief system and practice of balance through food, movement, and the climate or place you inhabit. I went to the institute one evening to drop in on a lecture, which took place in a small room where everyone was sitting on the floor. The students were writing in their notepads while Dr. Lad was telling a story about a boy who’d received a kidney transplant from a boy who’d died. The boy found himself sleepwalking to the village where the deceased boy’s family lived, and he knocked on their door. I don’t know what he said and can only imagine. After introducing himself, he asked to use the restroom.

  There was also a story about a man who’d been given the heart of a suicide victim. He reached out to the wife to thank her for this gift. Well, they fell in love; he married her and fathered her four children over twelve years. And then he killed himself in the same way her first husband did.

  Dr. Lad explained that organ transplantation was not condoned in Ayurveda because it’s considered taking a part of someone’s soul and putting it into someone else’s body. I thought, well, hey, you could get lucky, and the new soul could make your life more interesting and give you more of a personality or make you better at math. But it wouldn’t be very Ayurveda of you. Ayurveda is more about psychological mindfulness solutions to illness, which is part of your soul and the diet that goes with it. It’s not just about being sick; you have to get deep about it and think that it’s teaching you something. It’s not a “fix it” solution with a pill; it believes that illnesses are part of your karma, your path—and the actions you take can remedy the imbalance. I’m not saying I’m balanced, by the way, but I work at it.

  “Ayur” means life, in the Vedic culture, and “veda” means science or knowledge. It’s a five-thousand-year-old system, which says a lot. It’s a belief that humans are a part of nature. How could we not be?

  There are three fundamental energies to our nature, to our inner and outer life, that are dominant in particular body types: there’s Wind (Vata), Fire (Pitta), and Earth (Kapha). Or Earth, Wind, and Fire, if that’s easier for you to get down with. We each have all three qualities, or doshas as they’re called, and they each have different attributes that manifest physically. So, to give an example, a big burly man carpenter would be Earth (Kapha) dominant: he’s slow and steady, and can focus in on a task. The Kapha-dominant person is grounded and can tell a long story without going “all over the place.” Let’s say that you have a Kapha contractor working on your house and he’s overweight from drinking too much beer, but he tells great stories. Everyone has seen that guy (like everyone’s seen a skinny bitch). On a good day, the contractor is doing his job and is content. On a bad day, he’s gluttonous.

  I am Wind (or Vata) dominant: I have lots of energy, am a small person, am changeable, and like to move. But when I’m out of balance, I move too much and spin
out and have anxiety and forget what I’m doing; I’m prone to spiraling down or spinning out. Vata people eat a meal at the same time that they’re walking down the street and talking on their phone—and while they’re running an errand. I could benefit from burly carpenter/Kapha energy, and there is a whole system of vegetarian fare that will bring me back to balance. Right now, I forget what it includes.

  Fire- (or Pitta-) dominant people are intelligent and ambitious and intense; if they’re out of balance, they tend to be assholes and have prostate problems. Think of the skinny “live wire” comedians you’ve seen who do lots of coke and become impossible to be around.

  Places, as well, carry a dominant dosha: New York City is Vata, Los Angeles is Pitta, the South is Kapha. I suppose Canada is, too.

  Anyway, I liked the talk; it rang true. It reminded me of drama school and a teacher named Joan Potter who typecast based on physicality and essence, and would recommend which Chekhov character would best suit each of us.

  One of the things that Dr. Lad said in class was, “We never see our own faces, we only see them in mirrors. We will never see for ourselves our own image.” Maybe for you, this isn’t a mind-blow but something obvious, but for me, it blows my mind.

  Excuse me, I’ve brought my tea and thermos for some hot water, when you get a minute. This is a dosha-balancing tea from this place called Premium Steap. I got it when I worked in Philadelphia. It’s a local company and the tea sommelier, Peggy Stephens, is really nice and cool.