Idle Mist part IV: Casting

To make use of the equipment the university was lending us as a favor we had to rush into preproduction with a first and extremely rough draft of a scrīpt, scout a ridiculous amount of locations and most importantly, find our actors in record time. We cast a relatively wide net throughout our whole city, probing colleges and art schools, growing desperate by the hour. We needed, not just the right guy, but someone who could believably front a band and play a song as the male lead. I was initially pushing for someone I saw on campus who looked just like my drawing of the character on the comicbook. Not a very good reason for favoritisms I soon found out. Someone I was dating, whose personality in retrospect could have matched the part, decided on her own to cut and dye her hair just like the female lead, but our relationship was ending and afraid that would bring more complications to the set, I never auditioned her.

I had to find the right "Valeria". She was the heart of the story. But we weren't having any luck. One part we'd cast before we started was the silent role of "Shade", the ghostly cat-like creature. It demanded extreme acrobatic agility and we knew just the man for the job, Juan, one of my best friends and one third of our crew. Juan had long been competing as a gymnast but was handling props, stunts, set dressing, sound and a variety of other functions in our team. He was also the only one we could have gotten to let us put all that unhealthy regular paint all over his body! (Not true, he somehow got all his gymnastic team to let us do the same to them, painting them as the hunters).

Liana, one of my absolute best friends at the time and remaining third of our crew was handling the multiple roles of producer, assistant director, casting director, scrīpt girl, etc etc...

She and I were getting desperate trying to find our actors and on the verge of our deadline we went to an acting school which was also the headquarters of an interesting theater troupe. We were after the main man, Carlos Augusto, the director, a teacher and also an actor that had impressed me with a recent show during the International Theater Festival. He ended up playing the shrink, and we'll get into that, but the most important thing that day was that on our way up to his office we walked past Catalina Gallo. Liana and I looked at each other and when Catalina came in, briefly and gently interrupting our meeting with our "Shrink", something instantly clicked: we both blurted out an invitaton to the last day of auditions.

We already had a sort of favorite, but something was telling us Catalina was it.

Thos last auditions weren't going very well.

All our hopes were crushed for Cero, the main lead, when actors failed to show up, and the one I was rooting for only looked the part. After his audition, he left the room and Liana and I were shaking heads, wondering what we were going to do with no time, and no one else left to audition for this crucial role. We had no other option, she said. I should give it a shot: I had the added benefit of knowing all the lines, the song, and we could count on me to show up. It was true, I admited, but I also had twenty other roles to play on the set. What the hey, I gave it a shot and left it up to them too choose from the tapes. That's how I ended up on film, completely distracted, exhausted and obviously more focused on something else, directing. This experience did give me a greater appreciation for acting. I never had any interest in acting before having to plunge into the middle of the action, but it was kind of fun and it could be even more so, and more productive, under different conditions.

I was, however, still feeling like the last audition day was a disaster until Patricia Salazar, a.k.a Pato, our past "Valeria" favorite contender, showed up and did a good reading. Then Catalina came in and knocked it out of the park. I asked Patricia to come back in and read for the other part of Camila, Valeria's friend. After talking to her, it had became apparent that she resembled Camila much more than the people we'd brought in with that character in mind. Patricia sat down and read with Catalina and sparks were flying. There they were, "Valeria and Camila", those people I knew so well, naturally behaving as the closest of friends, even when the two actresses had never met each other before. What a great memory. Thank you both.