Heart to Heart

Alice Drives a Hard Bargain.

Sometimes people are the most honest when they’re really, really angry. Really.

Synopsis (Spoiler Alert!)

Alice, having stolen his keys, races ahead of Brooke to their apartment, and locks him out.

Brooke tries to get Alice to let him in, but she has other plans. She lights up a joint – Brooke’s joint. That’s a real slap in the face.

Alice dials Brooke’s cell phone. She’s pretty upset that suddenly Brooke is her boss at work. Brooke figures he can’t talk his way in… so he races Alice around to the back.

But she’s got a lot less fence to hop and beats him easily. She locks the back door, and now Brooke’s running out of options. And cell phone battery.

Brooke tires to calm Alice down, this isn’t a big deal. But to Alice it is a big deal… maybe there’s something more going on with her than even she realizes. Just as Alice says how she really feels… Brooke’s phone goes dead.

Alice cracks open the door. She offers Brooke a deal. Every time she obeys his commands at the office, he owes her a quarter… ounce of pot. That’s a lot. But Alice knows she has Brooke on the ropes, and he reluctantly agrees.

They settle in for a night of head to head Mario Kart. To Alice, everything is back to normal; the balance of power has returned. But Brooke knows that things with Alice have changed forever…

Production Notes

This is the most dramatic episode out of the 12, but still it has some pretty funny moments in it.

This is shot in the apartment where our director, Chris Forrest, was living at the time. It was also where we held our auditions. Our Art Department did totally re-dress it thought, including that big traffic sign on the wall of the living room. Although I do believe Chris left it there until he moved to Calgary.

We were shooting both inside and outside, through a window, which can be difficult. While it took a while to do, I’m glad we did because it looks great.

When we arrived at the apartment, Stephanie Avery was determined that Brooke and Alice, who are obviously heavy pot smokers, would have a full ashtray. Trouble was, she has chosen a huge ashtray to have on the table, and the smokers on the crew were having a hard time smoking enough cigarettes to fill it with ash. Mike, our boom op, came to our rescue. He crammed as many cigarettes into his mouth as he could, and lit them. He calmly smoked seven or eight cigarettes at once, making sure all the ash went into the ashtray. I have a picture somewhere I’ll try to post.

In post production, we faced the sticky question of whether we should only hear the character’s voices through the phone, when we had the window between us and the camera, or if we should just hear them more or less normally, despite the barrier? We settled on erring on the side of audibility, and so we can clearly hear the dialogue regardless of where our point of view happens to be, inside or outside.

If you look at the script, there’s a reference to Alice playing Nickleback, the band. This was a reference to a comment made way back in episode one, where she talks about how she sleeps with Nickleback playing. The intended inference was that Brooke had better deal with her or she’ll just go to sleep. It was decided that to get the rights to a Nickleback song, even one of their less popular ones, would be way more trouble than the joke it worth. Not to mention the fact that most people wouldn’t make the connection to a throwaway line so long ago.

This scene was the last one of the shoot. We were all exhausted, and crammed into Chris’ apartment. We needed to get some shots of Mario Kart, so we turned the “B” camera on the TV while people played. Although, I’m sure that we didn’t need to play quite so much as we did. Mario Kart can be quite addictive. My fav is Donkey Kong, although he doesn’t go as fast as some of the others.

If you’ve never experienced it, the feeling of the last day on a film shoot has so many contradictions. As Alice says, “Mixed feelings are so under-rated.” You have worked so closely with these people, that at one time you’re already starting to miss them, while at the same time you’re pretty happy to not be around the same faces for 18 hours a day. You’re filled with a sense of accomplishment, and you’re numb from exhaustion. You can’t wait to get back to your life, but you can’t wait for the next shoot so you can do it all over again.

Because if you’re anything like me, the exhilaration of the last day is absolutely nothing compared to the rush you get on the very first day.