Ten Days in the Hills Read Free

lighting, we could make that skin look any way we wanted to. Rich, deep peachy pink. Parched, bleached-out sand color. But how would we make it look like you, just like you? That’s what I would want, except, of course, the actress wouldn’t be you. Frances McDormand, maybe. I thought of her. Anyway—”
    He turned her palm and kissed it. “This is a fabulous idea. Never been done before. But you can do almost anything as an indie feature now. Not like fifteen years ago, when you were stuck with what they gave you.” He grinned. “Let’s look at your arm again. Put it here, next to your stomach. Now, see that contrast? That’s a beautiful thing, only seen in fifty-year-olds.”
    His hand was the beautiful thing, she thought. It cradled her wrist, made a contrast with her own hand, about which she had no opinions—it was hers, she made do with it. But he said, “I mean, this film would have things that
My Dinner with Andre
didn’t have, like penetration and a variety of camera angles and lots of point-of-view shots. Voice-over. I don’t think
My Dinner with Andre
had very much voice-over at all—I need to watch it again. The actor who plays me is talking, and the camera reveals things that he’s looking at, sometimes things that he is staring at—for example, the skin on your arm. What if the camera focused on the skin of your arm for five minutes, or even for a minute? Probably I haven’t stared at the skin on your arm, or, say, your belly, for five minutes, but I bet I’ve stared at it for a minute more than once. What did I see? I can barely remember. But I know I stared at it with fascination. After all, it was your arm! Love you, love your arm! I mean, just as an example, let’s turn your arm over and look at the inside of your wrist. Here’s the base of your hand, kind of rounded and mounded up, and then here are your tendons. If we move your hand backward and forward, we see that the right tendon, as we are looking at it, pops in and out—when your hand is flexed forward and backward—but the left one barely moves. That’s interesting. Don’t you wonder why that is? And then the veins are so visible—down here, where they begin to emerge from the forearm and then branch around the right tendon—and then up here, right where the lines you’ve made in the skin by bending your wrist cross laterally, the veins branch again, but very faintly, and disappear into the fatty tissue of the palm. Isn’t that beautiful?”
    Elena made a waving gesture with her hand, mimicking a sea anemone.
    “How much of that sort of thing is too much in a film?” he went on. “I don’t think our models are really Hollywood movies at all, more like National Geographic specials. But even so, if I can look at your hand for a minute, in fascination, then why couldn’t an audience look at it for a minute, too? Maybe they could. And, of course, there would be just the tiniest difference between how he sees the room and how she sees the room. Her arm would look different to her from the way it looks to him, so let’s say for part of the movie—and not exactly half, that’s too obvious—the room is slightly brighter or more vividly colored, or more full of depth than it is in the other section of the movie. His film stock, her film stock. Anyway, think of it this way. Frank kept that show to three hours. Everyone said he was draconian about it. You open your mouth for one more second than your allotted time, and you get the hook. Hallelujah, they held the Oscars to three hours! But, my God, it was three hours long! No camera work! No story! I mean, yes, there was better material than maybe they’ve ever had at the Oscars, what with Brody kissing the girl like that, what’s her name?”
    “Halle Berry.”
    “Of course he couldn’t resist the chance, everyone saw that immediately. And all the stuff with Michael Moore, and then, when they got everyone onstage for the portrait, even Luise Rainer, that was significant