Amazingly, that night I managed to get some sleep, and woke up on June 3 feeling relatively healthy. I drove to the house where we were shooting, a thousand butterflies in my stomach. Nine days to shoot an 80-minute film. And we were allowed to be in the house for no more than twelve hours a day. That meant we could arrive no earlier than 8am (though Julia Stemock usually showed up at 7:30 to get the coffee on), and had to be done and gone - "taillights," as Julia called it - no later than 8pm. Factoring in at least two hours to set up lights for the first shot and get the cast through makeup, an hour for lunch, and an hour for wrap (because the story takes place before sunset, we couldn't film anything after 7pm anyway), that gave us no more than seven or eight hours a day to shoot anywhere from 17 to 48(!) different camera setups. The pressure was on, and immediately got worse - the moment I arrived at the house, I discovered my sound recordist, Kelvin, in serious pain. He had to have a wisdom tooth pulled. Immediately. So he was out. (Click here to see Kelvin's tooth.) Fortunately Paul Deng knew how to work the deck and filled in. Nevertheless, the first day of a shoot is always awkward, as everybody is just getting to know each other, feeling their way around the material. I was overly ambitious about what we were going to be able to accomplish that day, and we wound up only filming about two-thirds of what I hoped. Ouch! That meant somehow we'd have to pick up that missing third somewhere during the other eight tightly-packed days.

That evening, when I went home, it was the first of many horrible nights alone, waking up at 3am after just three or four hours of sleep, heart racing, sweating, fearful that there was just no way we were going to get everything shot within nine days. Not only that, but I had to deal with new pressure from the owners of the house, who started believing that every scratch in their floor, every nick in their furniture, every stain on their rug, was the fault of me and my crew. I didn't need that. Add to that my three actors' incredibly busy lives. They kept getting called in to auditions! Their agents would call me on the set and beg if I could somehow reschedule the next day so their client could disappear for several hours for an audition. I didn't want to let the actors down - after all, I wasn't paying much, and those other auditions were for juicy parts (Melanie Lynskey actually landed one, for a film called Shattered Glass), so I did my best to schedule around them. Rescheduling is a pain in the neck, but in a weird way I enjoy it. It's like a logic puzzle. But that didn't make the shooting days any less stressful. I could barely eat. The crew kept hearing me hyperventilate during some scenes. There were a couple of times when things got so frustrating just trying to set up a shot that I wanted to call the whole thing off and go home. But I kept at it, thanks to my ever-patient First AD Michael Holm, whose main job was to keep the film on schedule.

Kelvin was still out for the second day, and Paul Deng had to go to a funeral, so I spent another nearly-sleepless night worrying how on earth we were going to record any sound. But Julia found a guy at the last minute and we were up and running. The shooting went a little more smoothly, which I knew it would, for each day that we worked together, we got to know each other better and the work vibe became more comfortable. Still I would go home at 8pm and wish the film could simply shoot itself while I stayed in bed all day. I should point out here that when I went home, my workday wasn't over: my editor would be at my house, digitizing all the video we'd shot that day, checking it for glitches and having me look at the footage to see if I got everything I wanted, or had any notes he had to be aware of. He would leave at around 11pm and I would crash.

Kelvin returned to the set on the third day and filming continued throughout the week at a steady clip, with no more great disasters. Except that Second AD Lucas Young got an ear infection and had to leave for a day. And Michael Holm reported that he couldn't work on the last day of the shoot because he was closing the sale of his house. And there was massive construction on the apartment building across the street throughout the day, causing random unwanted noises. Plus the infamous police helicopters of Los Angeles. Plus an hour or more of noisy trash delivery across the street, three times a week. Plus leafblowers. I started to long for the return of silent films.