The Sands of Time

and the threads that bind

Dear friends,

Last night, a few days before my upcoming flight to Korea, I remembered to clean out my pipes. Forty inches long, aluminum, and four in number, they are portable dolly rails for a little skateboard contraption that the camera rolls on. On their inaugural shoot in Sicily last year, one of our cinematographers gave it an intimate experience in some limestone sand, and the threads have been clogged ever since. I found a travel toothbrush in the bathroom at home and gave it a good scrub. 

This particular travel toothbrush, now bristling with Sicilian limestone, Saharan oxides, and heaven knows what else, will not be making the trip to Korea. My packing list is predominantly film equipment, despite the fact that our director of photography, Ezra, brings the lion’s share of the gear. Most of the Wicked Delicate filmmaker life, truth be told, involves moving heavy black hard plastic cases from one location to another. I’ve developed a peculiar obsession with weighing my luggage ahead of time, even purchasing the sort of industrial scale that shipping companies use to weigh crates. I mailed a hand-held scale to Ezra in the hopes of defraying future luggage fees, but I’m pretty sure he chucked it into the Atlantic. 

I can appreciate his love of mystery; when you arrive at the check-in area and weigh your luggage for the first time, it’s a marvelous feeling when it comes in under weight. At foreign airports, it is a good practice to exclaim things like “How do you like them apples!” to check-in agents after a particularly good weigh. There is a unique shame in repacking a 70 lb Pelican case in front of a long queue of Germans with sensible carry-ons.

Here is our crew and equipage at 1:48am in a Norway airport, en route back from the Arctic. The cursed case in the foreground contains C-stands, which are not easy to rent in Ny-Ålesund, but in this instance this horribly heavy case served as a Wicked Delicate Cot for our intrepid director.

Preparation for a film shoot is 50% equipage, 50% psychology. On this film (tentatively titled “The Observer”) as a rule, I don’t spend time learning too much about where I’m going. Once our itinerary and plans for the shoot are set, I embrace an easy ignorance about our locations. It’s an attempt to stand on somewhat equal footing with our future viewers: suddenly we land in a place, and we must see it with fresh eyes. This film is all about how we observe and perceive the world, so I’ve been endeavoring to be more intentional about my own gaze. Korea, a land I’ve never walked! Let it awe us. In an era where we can pull enormous quantities of information from our telephones in an instant, the raw bliss of disorientation is precious. 

What I must prepare is mostly an attitude. I don’t mean a swagger. (Although that would be interesting.) It’s more of a spirit of openness to spontaneity, surprise, and strange turns. Sure, there are always a few things I’m hoping to “get” on a shoot, borne of daydreams shaping what I think the film might be. But the best things to “get” are unpredictable. By their very nature, I cannot yet imagine what they are. It’s when an encounter surprises us that we come home with footage that might make the final film twinkle.

Which is why we mustn’t avoid getting limestone in our dolly rails, or worry too much about repacking our obscene American luggage in front of responsible people. These are the clunky accoutrements of Wicked Delicate filmmaking, and come what may in Korea, we must count ourselves lucky to see new lands; may we ever clog our pipe threads with abrasive sands. 

— Ian

PS. I would like to acknowledge my slightly inappropriate use of the word “equipage” in the text above. It’s a word that more or less means chariot (or archaically, equipment, says the dictionary), but it’s beguiled me since I read it in a Wallace Stevens poem in high school. If you pronounce it somewhat French-ly, I think it gives a good flair to what I want it to mean: the hordes of equipment we carry on film shoots in our vans/chariots. For example, we might be on the streets of Seoul, laden with gear in the van, and as we wander into a night market we might say, “let’s leave someone with the van, to protect the equipage.” Wouldn’t that be marvelous?

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