Written By
Ted Nicolaou
During the Making of Subspecies
September – December 1990
NOV 23 — Fri — I stumble down to breakfast to find Anders drinking his usual dozen cups of Nescafe. I down a couple myself and order a bottle of mineral water to take to the set. We ask for the bill. The waiter deducts Anders’ 105 lei breakfast allowance from the total, checks my room number and tells me I’ve already signed for breakfast this morning. I tell him this is the first time I’ve been down here today and ask again for him to deduct my 105 lei so we can settle the bill and leave. The Chief of the restaurant comes hustling over, refusing to hear my side of the story. He knows all about our incidents at Hotel Flora and how we skip out on our bills. Anders starts to complicate things with a premise that there are 12 of us on 105 lei allowances, and since all 12 of us don’t usually eat breakfast, the ones that do should be allowed to spend the unused allowances. I cut Anders off, take the Chief aside and insist that he hear me out. Eventually he calms down and lets me pay what I owe, and Anders and I escape, furious that we have to deal with these little grifts every day.
I’m scheduled to leave the hotel at 1 PM to scout the location of our festival sequence, a cemetery at Cernica Monastery on the outskirts of Bucharest. The hotel restaurant opens for lunch at 12:30, and since all I had to eat yesterday was the late night room service salami sandwiches, I really should eat before leaving. At 12:30 sharp, I’m at the door, but the door stays locked until 12:45. When it finally opens I rush into the restaurant and ask the waiter to PLEASE turn in my order quickly, I have to leave for work soon. He’s unusually accommodating by local waiter standards, and takes off with my order. But 1 o’clock arrives and my soup has not materialized. I step out to the lobby and find Carmen, Colombo, Valentin, and Lucian the art director waiting for me. I apologize and promise to hurry, but I really have to eat. I rush back to the restaurant, wolf down my soup and pray the steak comes soon, but it doesn’t. I pay the tab, leave a big tip for the waiter for trying, and head out.
We get to the monastery and explore the grounds. It’s my first time to lay eyes on the place. After we abandoned the Purcarene location due to scheduling hangups and the no-show Steadicam, there hasn’t been an opportunity to scout alternate locations. Art Director Lucian picked Cernica. It’s not exactly what I had in mind, but imagining how it will look after dark, Vlad assures me it will be fine. We find one area of the cemetery that we all agree will work best for our scenes.
The festival in our film is based on a peasant superstition we learned about during preproduction from a professor of anthropology named Doctor Popp. Romanians scoff at the idea of vampires. To them, Dracula is a stupid western invention. But in the old days, and in some places even today, there’s a belief, when misfortune or disease plagues a village, that the cause is a body in the graveyard, interred but undead. The remedy is to find the blighted grave through a ceremony involving a white horse, to exhume the corpse, cut out its heart, and boil it in a cauldron of soup for the village to consume. Intrigued by this grisly tale, I revised a section of the screenplay to weave it into our festival. Costume Designer Oana commissioned a local artist to make the folk masks, and choreographer Dan Ionescu styled the ceremony.
The horizon glows with a spectacular sunset. As the lights are beging rigged, I ask Vlad to get the camera and shoot the sunset. But the camera truck isn’t here yet, so the moment is lost.
Tani arrives and begins setting up the Steadicam. But the small magazines for the Arriflex are missing, left behind at Buftea. The camera assistants claim no one told them we’d be shooting sync sound with the Steadicam. I don’t feel like hassling the camera crew, even if it was their mistake. They are one department that’s consistently good at their jobs and I like them a lot. So I ask Production to send a car to Buftea to fetch the magazines.
It takes a long time to light the first shot, a complicated 2 minute Steadicam move through the procession, starting with the horse, 45 masked dancers, and 60 extras, discovering Laura and Irina, and ending on Lili Dumitrescu, the Crone, weaving through the crowd stirring up trouble. It’s the kind of shot that’s an interesting challenge, but it’s also a gamble. If it works it’s worth it, but if it doesn’t, you’ve burned a lot of time orchestrating it, and you better leave yourself some options for editing. I pace around in a state of nervous energy, sorting out cues for the various bits of action. The horse, ridden by Viorel the stunt man, is spooked by the crowd, and it’s almost impossible to get it to stand still for the beginning of the shot, then when it moves, it keeps bumping into the Steadicam.
The two minute take doesn’t work out so well, so we cover ourselves with enough takes to piece together all the beats of the sequence. By 10 PM we’re ready to move on to the closer setups. We have two nights here, so we prioritize shots with our leads in the midst of the extras.
We wrap at 2:30, and head for the cars to go home. But there’s a problem. Colombo drove Tani back to the hotel a few hours ago, and no one told him to come back for a second run. So there’s one Mercedes left to transport Michael, Brenna, Laura, Irina, Lili Dumitrescu, Carmen, and me. Irina’s been here since 3 o’clock and is not feeling well. Lili is tired and worried about getting home so late. Relu tries to blame Carmen for not telling Colombo to come back and that makes her furious. I’m peeved because I’m seeing my quick ride home and my salami sandwiches fading away. I send Irina and Lili to fill up the Mercedes, and Carmen and I take the slow bus to Bucharest with the extras and dancers, dropping people off all around city before letting me off, the last passenger, at the hotel after 4 AM.
I call room service, have some sandwiches and a beer and go to bed, marveling at the never ending variety of things that can go wrong on one film. Dancing in graveyards, drinking blood in monasteries, I’m beginning to wonder if we’ve awakened some ancient vengeful spirits. The production is like a runaway train, with Vlad and me at the controls.
STILL MORE TO COME. . .
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Ted Nicolaou
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