04/19/2019
“Lava, Christine, The Final Scene and The Pyrotechnics Guy.” From Adventures in Filmmaking by Lana Lekarinou
After we “wrapped” the film, I had trouble with the “final” scene, because I knew in my heart that it was not the last scene, “how can you let it end like that, what about the miracles that are put in place to support us when we set out to do the impossible, are you not going to include that?”
I knew I had to, however by this point I had run out of money so how I was going to now create and film an additional scene, the final scene at that - it had to be good, better than good, it had to be great.
I had an idea of what I wanted, in my mind's eye I could clearly see Sophia rising out of the ashes like a phoenix and that meant pyrotechnics. I also wanted to blow a car up, but my AP said that didn’t fit into the context of the thing, and he was right, blowing up a car would have to wait for another project. What he did say was this, “it has to be good, really good and the dialogue has to be spectacular.”
My best friend had recently moved to Hawaii and was adamant that I visit her and till I figured out what our next move would be and with a free ticket II decided I would do just that, “come back with a great ending to the film” my AP said, it was not a suggestion, it was an order, a tall one at that.
Hawaii was wonderful, being with my friend even better but the uncertainty of what lay ahead kept my level of revelry to a minimum (except on certain nights, and some days, when we got drunk like the night she stretched out in her garden and I outlined her body with glow in the dark rocks) but overall concern over the lack of funds for the final scene as well as what that scene was to entail was worrying me, to say the least.
One night at a local bar a man who had just come back from Alaska made me a “money” ring. He took a hundred dollar bill and folded it into a ring and put it on my finger, For me, it was a sign that money could and would appear out of nowhere and you least expected it to.
One day we went to look at the lava fields, a desolate place that looked like it had been made out of crusty layers of charcoal. It was like someone had baked a dingy gray cake and had forgotten about it causing it to bubble and overflow, covering the entire oven in goo that n time turned into a kind of barren petrified forest.
But what of the eruption? What of all the lava that flowed into the ocean? When it gets to that point when the pressure is that great, it can’t be stopped or contained, this is what is going to create the new life forms. And with that I had the dialogue, the ending of the thing I realized was very much what happens in all our lives when something is over, a new chapter begins.
I then contacted Christine, my most trusted and worshipped friend, sometimes assistant, sometimes make-up and hair person, set designer and carpenter - she preferred the title “vortex counselor.”
Christine was always inspired and inspiring, filled with childlike enthusiasm and altogether otherworldly knowledge she was also an excellent painter, “Christine we need an ominous painting of a lava flow, a man and a woman in abstract forms flowing from a cliff into a body of water where they merge into one,” she said she knew just what I was talking about and she did.
Turns out that while I had been randomly picking out found objects in the form of rocks from the ground Christine was drawing nearly identical images of them back in L.A. Later when we discovered this we were baffled and amazed, but not really because by now these things were happening with eerie regularity.
On the flight back I was accosted by a man who was far too eager to meet me. I said a friendly hello and quickly got on the plane. As it turned out he had the seat next to me but instead of chatting with him I decided to change seats and so I could spend time working on the script.
I think there are times when God lines up the most amazing “coincidences” for us only to cringe as the angels watch us bat them away. Luckily this time I did not miss out at the opportunity at hand.
When we arrived at LAX I found that there was only one other person sharing the shuttle with me, can you guess who it was? The same man I had been avoiding the entire trip. It turns out he was a pyrotechnics guy who was all too happy to help provide the fog we needed for the final scene.
And so it goes, in adventures in filmmaking, and in life in general, so be careful who you bat away and take the time to get to know who is being sent your way, for during times of creativity every meeting has a meaning.
