First of two days spent in the surreal business of being a movie extra. The film in question is Gambit, starring Colin Firth, Cameron Diaz and Alan Rickman. It’s a remake of the 1966 Michael Caine crime caper, though every film buff I speak to is only dimly aware of the original. Few seem to have actually seen it (I make a mental note to rent the DVD).
Being an extra is hardly the world’s most difficult job: mostly sitting around, catching up on reading, chatting or flirting with one’s colleagues, and sleeping. You also get fed, and (I’m hoping) paid. Today’s call time is 5am, tomorrow’s is 4am, so everyone grabs naps when they can. In one section of today’s location -an ornate, high class restaurant – crowds of spare extras are dozing, heads on each other’s shoulders. As the men are all dressed in suave suits, it’s like a scene from Inception.
So I pretend to be having an expensive evening meal at 7 in the morning (red grape juice for wine, some food real, some plastic), while the proper actors perform their dialogue somewhere behind the back of my neck, to the left. And again. And again with different lighting. And again with different lenses. And again with the cameras set up on the other side.
At one point the director asks us to be a little more animated. So myself and the man opposite on my table start to have a heated (yet entirely muted) debate about the life cycle of lobsters, using increasingly florid hand gestures. We are not then asked to be less animated, so I presume it was okay.
Tomorrow’s alarm set for 2am.
Tags: extra work, lobsters
