July 09, 2011 08:00AM EDT

Sure-Footed Ponies: Slightly Homesick for Vermont Maple Syrup

Tags: Sure-Footed Ponies  Andrew Mudge 

Entry 11: Slightly Homesick for Vermont Maple Syrup
July 5, 2011—Leribe, Lesotho
We are now one week into the second session of filming The Forgotten Kingdom. Seven shoot days down, seventeen to go.



One of the primary differences this time around is that we’re now shooting in the peak of winter. The hours of daylight are much shorter, which means we have to move faster to get our shots, and make our day. It also gets bitter cold in the early mornings when we arrive on set. Today, our first day off, it snowed in the mountains. A group of us drove as high as we could up the mountain pass in our little two-wheel drive mini-van (which we call “soccer mom”) until the road turned to a sheet of ice. We slid to a stop, took some photos, and promptly had a snowball fight. Harry, our South African sound mixer, remarked that this was the first time he’d seen snow in four years. He pulled apart snowballs and ate them like they were slices of tangerine.



A friend of mine, Julie Hand, arrived from the States to join the TFK family. She showed up with a duffel bag full of warm gloves, headlamps, hand warmers, and hats - all of which came from a generous sponsorship from The Mountaingoat outfitters in Manchester, Vermont. Another significant contribution to the film came from the Lesotho Sun Hotel, which has provided free rooms to all our South African actors, as well as a rehearsal space. On a particularly lucky day I was invited by the hotel management to their breakfast buffet, where I witnessed the miracle of piping hot pancakes for the first time in seven months. The chef there, who goes by the name of Rambo, dashed to the kitchen to procure a bottle of maple syrup that he assured me was the real mcCoy, despite that lip-smacking high fructose flavor.



The scenes we’ve been shooting this session bring new challenges in that they require filming in busy public places, with the need for large amounts of extras. To find our extras, we called on the people who came to auditions back in January, and also ran advertisements on the radio and newspaper. We then held an open meeting at the movie theater, where we explained the logistics of the upcoming shoots. Last week, while shooting a scene at the old St. Michael's church in the town of Roma, we had arranged for a hundred extras to show up for a funeral scene. When the day came, only about thirty of these people arrived. While the crew and I went ahead filming other scenes, the producers made a mad scramble into the village to round up additional people. Between camera takes I'd see van load after van load of amused, somewhat bewildered villagers brought onto the church grounds. By the time we were ready to shoot the funeral scene it had all come together. Not exactly the way we had planned, but clearly the way Lesotho meant for it to happen.



I’m particularly daunted about three days of shooting that will take place at the end of this week in Maseru, in the area that’s known as “bus stop”. It’s as bustling of an African market place as they come. Even when we go on a simple tech scout with a small handful of crew members, we’re constantly trying to push back the crowds who want to know what we’re up to. In one of these upcoming scenes, the film's protagonist is beat up by a bunch of tsotsis, or thugs (see pic below). We've been doing makeup tests today to create the most realistic fake blood and bruises, and I'm impressed with what our makeup artist has come up with. The upcoming marketplace shoot is sure to be complete chaos, but we’re lucky to have the support of the police, who will offer us security and a bodyguard for our lead actor Zenzo. Because of his soap opera celebrity status, he often gets followed by a mob of star struck teenagers. Quite curiously, nobody seems to recognize me from a 2001 television commercial I acted in for WMUR news in Nashua, New Hampshire.



In the last session, it seemed like we were always off in distant mountains, making a western, having our actors jumping off and on horses. This session has more raw drama - subtle flirtations, words unspoken, fists pounded onto tables. Directing these accomplished actors has been a fulfilling, humbling, and sometimes daunting experience. The greatest obstacle is the fact that I neither fully speak nor understand the language in which they are talking (I wrote the script in English, and had it translated). I get by with the help of my scrupulous language consultant Sejake, the erudite painter and professor from Morija, and likely the only fan of Jim Jarmusch in the entire country. Sejake speaks very slowly, with crisp pronunciation, which somehow reminds me of an Amish man peeling an apple. This session I've had more time with TR and Carlos to plan out the shots, and we seem to do far less takes. The on set machinery runs smoother and, so far, the crew morale seems high. The catering is stellar, thanks to a genial Ethiopian woman named Sunny who cooks delicious chicken curry and I suspect is going to send the entire TFK team home with slightly larger waist sizes. We are also fortunate to have a group of interns from the film department of the local university in Maseru. They are honest, good-natured kids who organize their own bible studies late at night, and don't mind getting their hands dirty filling the generators with diesel early the next morning.

I've now been in Africa for seven months, which is the longest I've been away from the United States in one stretch. There are things that shocked me before that hardly phase me now, such as the fact that a nation's capital city only has water about fifty percent of the time. With regards to the ever-present roadblock bribery, I'm pleased with myself to have finally developed a detailed and much practiced story (involving an urgent meeting with government officials) that has waved me through countless roadblocks and bribery schemes. For corrupt officials, TFK's convoy of trucks - all driven by foreigners - continues to be an easy target. Our production designer, for the crime of not having his license on him, spent an entire night in a paddy wagon under the watch of a couple of drunk cops, who only let him go when they grew tired of his non-stop rendition of Broadway musical numbers.



We're now getting ready for our final ten days of shooting here in Lesotho, then we'll go to Johannesburg for our handful of days filming in Hillbrow and the township of Diepsloot. It's hard to believe that we're so close to wrapping the film.

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Want more Sure-Footed Ponies? Get caught up:

Sure-Footed Ponies: An Introduction
Sure-Footed Ponies: The Beginning
Sure-Footed Ponies: Return to Lesotho
Sure-Footed Ponies: Tortoise's Pace
Sure-Footed Ponies: Rain, Rain, Rising Rivers
Sure-Footed Ponies: Where There is no Sunscreen
Sure-Footed Ponies: Finding Our Tau
Sure-Footed Ponies: Great African Location Scout
Sure-Footed Ponies: Cameras Rolling, Cue the Lightning
Sure-Footed Ponies: The Quiet Before the Storm