The Southern Indiana Recycling Yard

I’m at an outdoor café in sunny LA, but all I can recall about the BITE MARKS shoot is rain & mud & rain. So much rain, that the first thing I did in the morning was check my i-phone radar to see what the possibilities for shooting were for that day. And we were working at a real junkyard with real dirt ready to become mud. I wish the audience could smell the finished product on screen. So many movies are about famous stars battling a studio green-screen monster, and putting on synthetic dirt between each take. We definitely didn’t take that direction, and I can’t think of a better place than where we went to shoot.

Because…

It rains in Indiana junkyards! Its rains mud, blood, and shirtless-muscled-up grips. It rains bugs never seen outside of Pandora. It rains a sort of lead smelling sludge that is probably still in my hair. I got oil and in places that one should never find oil. At one point I asked Windham if the blood on his neck was real or fake? ...He responded, “I don’t know? Isn’t that cool!” Prepping for my vampire fight was simply moving most sharp jagged things from a patch of ground beforehand, and then letting the location do the rest of our prep work.

When I was pulled on my back through a junkyard, I was pulled through a junkyard. And when I was in a moving 18-wheeler truck cab, I was most defiantly in a moving truck cab. On the second day of shooting, I was to deliver multiple lines in a large truck. Now…I am a city boy, and I do not drive an 18-wheeler. I was in the driver’s seat and my truck was tied to a smaller pick up. My job was to steer, brake, act multiple pages of dialogue, and hold on for dear life! I turned to Clifton(the DP) trapped inside the cab with me to smile a ‘this-is-really-happening’ smile. -Mark(director) gave a devilish thumbs up. –I asked Clifton, “Has anybody ever died in a semi-truck being towed by a pick-up?“ Clifton didn’t answer.

But the mud, the bugs, & impending death were awesome.

…And at least when I watch the movie, I can still smell the Southern Indiana Recycling Yard.