“Where Else Can I Go?” Or, How I Reckoned With My Movie Almost Completely Falling Apart On Day One

Nothing has churned my stomach into an anxious boiler room like an on-set panic attack. It’s so tumultuous, it has singed my hairline way past my forehead over the years. I had a director cry-yell at me when I took too long to light a shot in film school. I got ripped apart by a production coordinator who left me out to dry as a production assistant when moving cars. I had a raid drive fail on me the day before DIT-ing a multi-million feature film. I have so many moments of stress seared into my memory because everything about making a movie has to be done right and it has to be done now, or you lose people jobs, and you may lose the movie. It’s that simple. And if you survive these moments, you etch the learned lesson into your brain and you move on to avoid these types of situations. Because you love movies. And you can’t see yourself doing anything else for the rest of your life. 

Thankfully, I’ve had some moderate success and a ton of luck over the past 15 years in the industry to be able to pull together funding, cast, crew and a schedule to shoot my first feature film, a small science-fiction thriller called Things Will Be Different. It’s a tiny independent movie led mainly by two characters set at mainly one location. It takes a couple of wild swings on some set pieces (a couple of shoot-outs and a fight scene) and has a heady script that takes some interesting chances and risks. But it was exciting, bold, full of soul and, most importantly, doable. And doable in a way where if we could execute this, we could feel like a real movie that could play with movies above its weight class. And I could tackle the film knowing that years of panic and stress had hardened me for any obstacles to come. 

So we started pre-production. We had some wins early on (landed a great cast and a talented yet humble crew), but we immediately got burnt a couple of times. We pulled out of our original location, my family farm, at the last minute and had to scramble to find a new place. We had to rewrite much of the script to remove snow after the hottest winter on record melted everything during pre-production week. But we were able to pivot quickly to accommodate the new circumstances while still aiming to tell the story we wanted to tell. All those years of on-set fires protected me from the occasional ember pops or smoke wisps hitting my eyes. I even felt great during our last day of pre-pro, when we made our final adjustments while watching the Super Bowl, as written here in my production diary (still in its raw, unedited form):

And then we started Day One. We all arrived at the farm location and took our COVID tests (still mandatory for SAG productions in early 2023). I ate some breakfast and started setting up our first shot inside the house. I couldn’t believe it. It was all finally happening as we planned. It was gonna happen. We brought our first actor, Riley Dandy, to set to shoot some smaller moments around the house while our other actor, Adam David Thompson, was going into makeup. While setting up for that shot with my cinematographer, Carissa Dorson, we noticed something changed: crew members started putting on masks. My heart sank a little. “Oh no, someone has COVID?” I thought to myself. Immediately our producer/first assistant director, Shane Spiegel, pulled me and Carissa outside as if to tell us someone had died. And in the moment, it felt just like that: “Adam’s tested positive for COVID. Twice.”  

My on-set PTSD cracked through my hardened shell. I asked Shane what that meant. He said that it was too soon to tell, but they were taking him into the city to get him officially tested at a clinic. So I clenched every muscle in my body, grinned like nothing happened, and went back inside to get the first shot. I made sure to keep my demeanor light and jokey to keep the morale up (a thing I’m good at faking as a kid of divorce who moved around a lot). Right before we hit lunch, we heard back that Adam had tested positive for a third time. And as was explained to me over a hazy lunch I could barely process, Adam had to go into quarantine for at least five days and then test again before he could come back. I genuinely wouldn’t listen to it. Our winter shoot was only 10 days long. It was about 75% of our movie. And half our cast was gone. But there was nothing to be done. This was what we had to do. 

I saw Adam briefly, double masked, away from set as a production assistant packed up his stuff for the Holiday Inn out of town. He couldn’t believe it either. He tried to apologize, but he didn’t need to. Everyone knows that COVID can get you, even if you have had vaccines and wore masks every damn day. It’s still a risk, no matter how safe you try to be. He asked for us to recast him to save the movie, but honestly I wouldn’t hear this either. He was our guy. We didn’t want anyone else. We had to make this movie work with him and for him. So I reassured him that we would make the movie work without him and we’d be ready for him when he returned the next week. All we needed to do was keep shooting, adapt to the new circumstances and … not get COVID too. 

We finished the day with a scrambled assortment of shots we could get with Riley and huddled up for our end-of-the-day meeting. Despite my strained high spirits, everyone around the room only had one question: “Is Adam coming back?” Shane and I assured everyone he would come back after the quarantine and that we were going to make the best movie possible in the meantime. Shane, Carissa, myself and my other producing partner, Jake Rosenthal, walked back to the guest house we were all staying at. I could feel my head-coach adrenaline start to wane. As soon as we stepped inside the house and felt the quiet of the air, I sat on the couch and started balling my eyes out. “It’s over. The movie is over,” I kept telling myself. The three of them consoled me as we ate leftover lunch, turned our brains off, and downloaded about the day. I cried my weight in saltwater before I just stopped feeling anything anymore. I immediately slammed this into my diary, which even I tried to put on a happy face for: 

So, how do you come back from that? This wasn’t me getting yelled at because I was too slow, or was told conflicting things, or had equipment fail on me. This was the movie burning alive right before my very eyes. I couldn’t breathe. We barely had money for contingency and we had no room to extend the schedule. We had to make this movie work now with the time and money we had and we had to make it good enough where no one could tell that we’d had this setback. If we didn’t, the movie would die and people would lose their jobs. So, where else could I go? 

Then Shane said the four greatest words I’ll ever hear in my whole life: “Lets watch Shark Tank.” He turned on an episode of Shark Tank and we just stopped talking about the movie. And for one network television hour, we felt like normal people. My charred numbness gave way to simmering sanity. We laughed at the ridiculous sales pitches. We guessed if Marc Cuban was going to make a deal. And we just felt human for a little bit before going to bed. I then took a couple of CBD drops (to make sure I got at least six hours of deep sleep) and I called my wife, Jori, who has this amazing power to make every problem feel so tiny while building me up to feel so big. I was then lulled to sleep by my favorite podcast, Blank Check, in which two funny people watched and talked about how awesome The Matrix was. 

I woke up the next day refreshed, reset, and … ready to keep making this movie? I was shocked. It was a damn miracle. I wasn’t dead on the inside: I was just as excited as I was on Day One. We continued to shoot and I rewrote to compensate for Adam’s absence, while making sure not to lose what made the movie work originally. It was still rough for a bit, but we finally hit a morale high on Day Three after shooting an amazing escape sequence in the crop fields: 

We felt reforged and completely unbreakable. The movie was being reborn from the ashes. We survived the week and got back Adam, who absolutely rocked it, for the best high we had so far:

And from that point on, it was smooth sailing. Except for a winter storm nearly destroying the property three days later. We also had no power or working bathrooms for the rest of the winter shoot. And that’s not counting the stress of getting the SAG waiver mere days before our second block of shooting, later that August. But all of it was doable after that first day. Not because I was trying to white-knuckle through another on-set panic attack, but to feel normal with some filmmaking friends, eating a cold dinner, while yelling at our base-camp TV, “What? There’s no way she’s going to invest half a million for a 2.5 percent equity share!”

Featured image of Michael Felker by Jori Lynn Felker.