Day 13

Winnipeg, Manitoba - Day 13 of 20. Not a shoot day I was looking forward to at all.

In the film production business, there are INTERIOR shots, as indicated in a script by a line like "Int. Assembly Hall Arena - Day," and there are EXTERIOR shots, like "Ext. Knight Home, suburban Bloomington." Interior shots are done inside on a set or sound stage, in a toasty, warm environment, and exterior shots are done outside, exposed to the elements.

If you've been following these diary entries, you'll know that we are shooting in Winnipeg, Manitoba, just a few short kilometers south of the Arctic Circle. If you read Day One of the diaries, you'll know that it gets really cold in Winnipeg. As a point of reference, we are nine hours north of Minneapolis - and you know how cold it gets there. In the winter, it's nothing for Winnipegers to have two or three consecutive weeks of temperatures averaging -20° or -30° (Celsius). It's the kind of cold that hurts your skin the minute you walk outside.

So, knowing how cold it is, I wasn't all that excited when I read on the schedule that Wednesday would be "Ext. Indiana Woods - Dawn." That could only mean one thing: We were going to be driving out to some Winnipeg forest and playing a scene, for hours on end, in the snow-covered woods. And it would be cold.

Now, as it happens, it was relatively nice yesterday. Note the word "relatively." On Tuesday, the sun came out, and even though the thermometer in my car read -3°, it actually felt mild. (As mild as it probably gets in December in Manitoba.) So I went to sleep last night feeling like maybe, just maybe, Wednesday wouldn't be so bad.

No such luck.

It was cold, overcast and beginning to snow when I awoke to meet the Wednesday gloom.

We were playing a scene today where Coach Knight and his assistant coach, Kohn Smith (played by Duane Murray), go duck hunting. It's during this moment, away from the team and basketball, that Knight reveals a bit about his strategy in dealing with players. He talks candidly to Smith about his frustration with Daryl Thomas, the player he had been riding the hardest in practices and in the locker room. There is a scene that precedes the duck hunting sequence, where Knight rips into Thomas and threatens to throw him off the team. You can see that Daryl (played marvelously by Michael James Johnson) is just destroyed by this ridicule.

Knight reveals to Kohn (and to us in the audience) that he has been intimidating Daryl Thomas because it "sets up the best conditions for teaching." It plants a seed for us that perhaps all of these insults and harsh criticism are part of a sophisticated mind game that Knight plays with his players. But is it? Is Knight in control of his emotions and is the rage just planned theater to create an environment for coaching, or is this a rationalization for behavior he can't control and needs to justify?

I'm not sure. It's probably a little bit of both. Knight is both Jekyll and Hyde - most often combined. He's a lot more complicated than the 20 seconds you get of him on a TV news clip.

The duck hunting scene went well and the crew and I braved the snow - and the 11° weather. Fortunately, we broke for lunch before nightfall and were able to thaw out. Even better than that though, the scene after lunch was "Interior Rotary Club Fundraiser."

More on that tomorrow...

Past Diaries

Day 1
Day 2
Day 3
Day 4
Day 5
Day 6
Day 7
Day 8
Day 9
Day 10
Day 11
Day 12