I told her all my stories.
She'd sit on the couch and I'd stand in front of her, demonstrating, like we were playing charades.
"So this guy is fucking me and it was really good so instead of saying the usual Oh..yes..yes that women say so delicately in a man's ear, I was looking at this guy and scrunching my face and I was like God..fucking..DAMN! and this guy—while we're still fucking—is like, 'You fuck like a man,' and I was like, 'Is that a good thing?' and he was like, 'Yeah!' "
Then I put on a valley girl accent and I'm like:
"I heard these two models talking yesterday, ok? They're talking about how to make the perfect facial expression for a pose—I don't know, I'm not a model, I don't know model-speak but that was the gist."
I put my hand on my hip.
"So the one girl says to the other: 'Just make your face like you're looking at a guy right at the moment he sticks it in.' "
"His dick?!"
"Yeah, his dick!! Make a face like you would make right at the moment a guy sticks his dick into you, and if you can show that to the camera, you've got the perfect cover photo for a magazine or an album cover or whatever."
"Oh my fucking god."
We talked about film:
"So why don't you use zooms?"
"I had this friend way back in film school—"
"Wait wait wait. They have film school in Portland?"
"Yeah, they do. LA isn't the only place making films. They have film school in New York."
"Did you go there?"
"No. I thought about it but I didn't. Anyway, in my dinky film school in Portland, there was this guy named Michael Sandow. And he was a cinematography student who always used to read Bukowski and one day I said I would never make a movie that had a zoom in it. He was totally offended. He threw out a couple movies with great zooms in them: Barry Lyndon, The Royal Tenenbaums. He said—as a cinematography student at the time—that he considered zooms just one of the tools in the cinematographer's toolbox and he could never make a statement like I just did: excluding one of the tools without ever knowing what kind of movies he might ultimately make that might require a zoom. And I was like, right, as a cinematographer you can't make that decision now, but as a director I already know the effect zooms have on the audience and I don't ever want to create that effect."
"What effect do they make?"
"They draw attention to the camera."
"Oh!"
"And even when I was..26?..I knew that I would never have a zoom in my films because that's not the kind of film I want to make. I want neither the comedy of the Royal Tenenbaum zooms nor the subtle drama of the Barry Lyndon zooms..nor do I want the stupidity of the zooms from the nineteen-eighties and before, where they really should have had a push but they didn't have the equipment or the time or the discipline to do a push, so they just did a zoom instead. And it looks terrible. You can look at every single one of those shots and say, yep, that shoulda been push, or a pull, but they cheaped out and did a zoom. I fucking hate those shots..I hate zooms..and this topic is making me angry so can we please move on?"
"Sorry boss."
"No problem."
"So what did Mike say?"
"My cinematographer friend from film school? He thought I was crazy. But the funny thing is, he writes me an email a few years back and tells me he's become a writer—all that Bukowski payed off—and he published his first book and he tells me he thinks about punctuation a lot now."
"Haha."
Kristi rolls back on the couch.
"And he says: Lauren, I understand what you said way back when about zooms, because I found myself thinking the other day: I would never use a semicolon in one of my books."
Kristi laughs again.
"So he gets it now and he's explaining how he understands where I was coming from because the type of book he's writing would never use a semicolon, because it's outdated and this and that and he goes into all this writer-speak I don't understand—a three-paragraph lecture on the connotations of a semicolon—but..yeah..it took us half a lifetime but we finally understood each other on the zoom thing."
"Wow."
"Yeah. And that, my friend, is why I don't use zooms. I'm more into the cut. That's old-fashioned in this town. How old am I?"
"I..don't know?" giggling.
"Well, however old I am, I'm old enough to be one of the only directors in this town who doesn't shoot everything on a technocrane. So I must be pretty old."
Kristi goes off one some big speech about the magic of our current film, how she's seen the magic in the faces of the crew, in the product put on screen, even the magic in the electricity on my set.
"The most collaborative set I've ever seen."
"Well..I suspect there were more collaborative sets in history."
"I'm trying to give you a compliment."
"I'm gonna thank you for your compliment. Thank you for your compliment. Now I'm gonna tell you something that I've never told anyone. Mostly because no one's ever asked, and you having the curiosity or the desire to flatter me..that is one of the threads in what's becoming a high-tensile climbing rope—"
"You told me to stop you if you were getting poetic."
"When did I tell you that?"
"You say it all the time."
"Ok, so, basically..there is no magic. I'm sure that's not what you wanted to hear."
"I want to hear the truth."
"Well there's no magic! You want to know what there is?"
"What," unblinking.
"You really want to know? 'Cause this'll shatter your little fifth-grade mind watching The Wonderful World of Disney every Sunday night getting ready to go back to school."
"Then shatter it."
"Ok. There's no magic. There's only honesty."