Day 111: The Wife’s Back!

Eleventy-first day here in China! In Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, “eleventy-first” is an important number to the Hobbits, and to me, well, today it means the world; for my wife comes over for a little over a week today, and those who’ve been reading this blog know it means a lot to me. A world, to be more precise.

So it’s not a surprise I’m a bit antsy the whole day. Also, we have kind of a dumb shooting day ahead of us: three company moves, only one actual scene and the rest is just b-unit stuff. Sometimes I feel the scheduling is not the strong point of this movie: another days we have days like this, just one-sixth of a page to shoot, and another days are just packed with scenes and pages. Preferably, they’d be a bit more even, but it’s a lot to do with actor availabilities instead of anything else.

So, today was a light day. And it turned out to be even lighter: I shot the only scene with actors in it, and then decided to call it a day and let the 1st AD take care of the rest. David had picked my wife up from the airport and after I was done with my work, I rushed to the hotel where she was fast asleep after no sleep on the plane. We snuggled in the bed until the evening, when I had a costume fitting and then a dinner with one of the big star actors of the film.

The fitting went pretty OK, and afterwards we headed for the dinner with my wife and some of the production people, and had a fun evening over seafood and even more seafood. To be honest, I’ve had so much seafood the last week that although I thought I’d never get fed up with it, I think I’m craving for a big-ass pizza right now more than anything.

The unfortunate thing with my wife on this trip was that the jetlag hit her really bad. It was very much like mine was when I first came over: we fell asleep around midnight, like I normally do over here, but she could only sleep for 2 hours, then she had to spend the rest of the night up and awake, until after breakfast she was able to get some more sleep. She would then wake up around 5-6pm, head over to the set for the last shots and then we’d be off to a dinner somewhere. It’s actually pretty good rhythm if you think about it, but she was really, really tired after every night getting absolutely no sleep at all.