DAY FOURTEEN – 3 SCLUBBERS WAIT IMPATIENTLY FOR THEIR BAND-MATES TO RETURN. THEY GET ARRESTED. Unsung Heroes of the Set part 104: Drivers. Mine is called Biel and every morning when I emerge from the hotel at 530 he is sitting outside in the car ready to drive me to work and not once throughout the whole movie will he fail to get me to set by the most direct route or ontime. Today I’m very tired and grumpy and fail miserably at keeping it to myself – he tactfully ignores my mood. Tonight when I am spent and tired, maybe joyful with the days work or disappointed at an error of judgement I may have made, he will sit in silence as he drives me home. Thus, like nearly everyone else on the film, he starts before me and finishes afterwards. Luis, who drives the band to set starts even earlier and is always ready to greet us with a smile. The dashboard of his carefully tended van is festooned with glass jars filled with sweets. He obviously loves his job and one only has to look up onset and notice his happy figure, with his hands held behind his back, to get an all too brief moment of perspective.
On the slopes of Montjuic, doubling for a hill on Mulholland Drive, Jo sings Never Had A Dream Come True wonderfully and her opening lines remind me of Karen Carpenter – she tells me she used to sing Carpenters tunes a lot – wish I’d been a fly on the wall for her performance of Say Goodbye To Love. Alan has persauded me to shoot the arrest scene in the park which I didn’t want to do (I thought the confines of Barcelona’s old town would be more intimidating and apt) but he reasonably points out this is the best way to slot it into the schedule. I compromise on the condition he gives me two police cars for the scene. He’s a man of his word and the cars arrive but we are running late again and I choose a compromise of the already compromised location and the cars cannot skid to a halt as I’d wanted and are hardly noticeable in the scene. As he’s a true gent he makes no comment that I’ve just wasted 3 or 400 bucks of our precious production budget. We complete 43 set-ups.