08/12 Ian's Motel

Ah. Ian's Motel scenes. These are scenes that are all shot in one day but must be set up to look like time has passed over the course of maybe a month. "11"'s production crew took over room 112 of an Econo Lodge off of 29 in Virginia. I showed up on the scene Saturday night and stayed up all night trying to do a painting for a special dissolve we had planned.

If it looks like I am making a funny face, it's because I knew the task at hand and that time was ticking away. Everyone feel asleep around me and I painted through the night. The end result was a tiny watercolor made to look like an old post card. I was hardly happy with it, but we made it work.

This is NOT some of my best work, but I post it here anyhow. Cut me some slack! See, in the film, there's a previous scene where Shelly is sitting next to Alex at his apartment, and her position dissolves into this watercolor that looks similar to her and the camera pulls away to reveal Ian's motel room. I had decided to designate the Iris as Shelly's flower, as I explained before, since Iris is the greek goddess responsible for carrying women's souls across the river in death. In my painting there's a woman sitting on the bank of a river, irises at one side... aye. It really turned out nothing like I intended. I originally wanted to make something more along the lines of Degas or Georges Serat with his Sunday in the Park, but, whatever. It's done.

Here is Ian, portrayed by Ryan Mulkay, in an earlier shot. The bottle of Jim Beam there is full of apple juice!!

I had to create three floral arrangements for this series of scenes. The arrangements had to look consecutively more dead. This was a visual cue for the audience to see the passage of time. This was also symbolism to show (with more subtlety that I liked) that Ian is the type of person who is at a stage in his life where he sucks the life out of everything and everyone around him. The flowers were put into a vase and situated behind the postcard that symbolizes Shelly. This is to show that when Ian first arrives on the scene, the flowers are lively, colorful, in congruence with Shelly as a person. But when Ian is done with the room and with life overall, the flowers are black, dead, behind the postcard...visual foreshadowing of things to come.

The maid dropping off the daily paper, see there's a stack at Ian's door, and a stack of dirty towels...Ian's been holed up in this motel for quite some time now, and he's not interested in the daily news, there's enough going on within him to care about the current events of the world. He does, however, want clean towels now and again...

Those were just a sequence of filming Ian coming out of his hotel room, and the director Neil making fun of me for something or another.

Pete Dowty, Director of Photography.

Director Neil is telling our male lead what he wants in this scene.

This is right before one of the most poignant scenes in the film "11": Ian's bitter monologue about the tragedy of his youth.

Above and below are from Ian's 'cleansing'.

And here is one last shot of the motel room we trashed for the love of art...before we cleaned it back up again. We had to put the motel's curtains back up again (the black ones were ours, to make two white columns in the backdrop of Ian's table scenes, of course to denote the numeral 11) and clean up all of our prop pizza boxes, beer and liquor bottles (that we had a lot of fun emptying so they would be available to use as props for this particular shoot...). There sits our assistant director, tired as the rest of us.

Our director was ecstatic after the long day of shooting Ian's Motel scenes. We got off to a late start (because of production design...I'm such a perfectionist...) and things looked doomed to start but it was a victory in the end that reminded all of us why on earth we're doing this to begin with.