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It’s not even ten in the morning yet, and it is already shaping up to be the worst day of Yuuri Katsuki’s life.
He paces the rug in the living room anxiously, careful not to knock over any C-stands, or god forbid, the tripod on which the far-too-expensive camera (how on earth did his producer manage to get his hands on an Alexa?) is currently sitting. The crewmembers in the room, who have been setting up lights and adjusting props, watch him curiously, as if expecting him to have a meltdown on the first day of shooting because the actors and the sound person are all late.
“Have you heard from JJ and Guang-Hong yet?” Yuri Plisetsky asks Mila Babicheva, who elbows him.
“They’re on their way!” she hisses. “And don’t give me that look!”
“I know,” says Yuuri, not even looking back at where she’s standing. “We’re behind already.”
“Well, they should’ve been in HMW thirty minutes ago,” agrees Mila, the pages on her clipboard ruffling as she checks. “I’ve called them both. They said the traffic to this place is bad.”
Yuuri pinches the bridge of his nose. “What about sound?” he asks.
“Leo’s also stuck in traffic, but even farther back. JJ and Guang-Hong are going to get here before he does.” Mila pauses. “At least the actors are sharing a cab?”
Yuuri sighs, looks around at the set. Some of the lights are set up, but others can’t be until the actors are on set so that they can get the proper exposure. He looks over at his cinematographer, Phichit Chulanont, who shrugs.
“We could do some b-roll while we wait?” he suggests.
“Yeah, you do that,” says Yuuri. “I’m going to get something to eat.”
“You just had something to eat,” Yuri Plisetsky points out. Mila elbows him again.
Yuuri walks out of the room with the set and into the kitchen, where craft services has set up a light breakfast for the morning. Christophe had delivered over several boxes of doughnuts and bagels, as well as what looks like an entire cask of coffee (if coffee could come in casks) and little bottles of water. He grabs a doughnut and fills a cup with coffee, before dumping no less than three packets of sugar into it, and stirring with a ferociousness he wishes he didn’t feel.
They have this flat for two weeks, because the majority of the film takes place in this sad little prefabricated flat in Prague. But all the shots have been lined up so that every hour of filming time is being utilised, and now he’s being stymied by something as stupid as traffic. Typical.
The rumble of a tram goes by. Yuuri crosses the dining room and heads out to the balcony. Some of the other crewmembers are out here on a smoke break. Yuuri is almost tempted to join them, but then he remembers he quit almost as soon as he got out of film school, and for perfectly logical reasons such as ‘not wanting to get cancer because he was burning through five packs a day to calm his nerves on set’. So he sips his coffee and bites at his doughnut instead.
From up here, he can look down and see the grip truck, as well as the trailer for hair, makeup, and wardrobe. The catering truck that Christophe used to bring breakfast isn’t here right now, but hopefully he’ll be back soon. Thank god for his producer’s connections. Yuuri wouldn’t have known anything about finding anything in this city, where the only thing he knows of the local language is ordering beer.
The street below is filled with chattering pedestrians, some of whom are looking curiously at the equipment trucks and the signs posted about filming occurring nearby for the feature On Love. A couple of people are taking pictures of the signs. Yuuri tries to tamp down the queasiness in his stomach as snippets of excited Czech come drifting up to him.
“They’re saying that the film sounds like something from Hollywood,” says his gaffer Emil Nekola, as he drops his cigarette to the ground and grinds it with his heel. “They’re excited about it.”
Yuuri takes another sip of his coffee. “I’d be excited, too, if there wasn’t bad traffic preventing the actors and our sound guy from getting out here on time.”
“Cheer up,” says Emil. “This is just Prague 5. I’ve seen FAMU students dragging crews out to Prague 10 to film in sad little farmhouses in the middle of the night.”
Yuuri frowns, but says nothing to that. As he finishes both his coffee and his doughnut, a cab pulls up to the curb, and two people pile out of it: Jean-Jacques Leroy and Guang-Hong Ji, the two actors co-starring in the production. And based on the loudness of their conversation, they’re already off to a great start.
“I don’t think you should be changing the lines!” Guang-Hong is insisting. “The director wrote them, so he probably has them there for a reason!”
“But this isn’t the way I usually speak!” Jean-Jacques retorts, and then looks up — Yuuri quickly averts his eyes, so as not to make unnecessary eye contact — and asks, “This is the place, right?”
“Yeah,” says Guang-Hong, also probably looking upwards. “Reminds me a bit of the newer apartment buildings in Tonglu, honestly.”
“It’s ugly,” says Jean-Jacques. Yuuri wants to shout at him that they wouldn’t be able to get a sound stage at Barrandov until next month, and besides, it’s not like this building is going to be the exterior shot for the location, so why does it matter? But he doesn’t.
“Where’s the director?” asks Guang-Hong suddenly, and Yuuri almost winces in response. He doesn’t even need to turn to know that Emil is smirking at him.
“They sound like, what’s the phrase? Like you’ve got your work cut out for you,” says Emil, and Yuuri makes a low groaning noise as he steps back into the flat to head down and meet the actors.
Jean-Jacques and Guang-Hong are all apologetic grins when he comes out of the doors of the building. “There was a bit of traffic on the highway,” says Guang-Hong. “Probably should have taken public transit, but we had thought it’d take longer based on the schedules…”
“So we’re still ending at 8, right?” adds Jean-Jacques. Yuuri bites his lip.
“Well, we’re all still waiting on sound,” he begins, “but we can see what we can do in the meantime to get you out on time.”
“Cool,” says Jean-Jacques. “I have a gig at a bar in Zizkov with my band tonight so I can’t be late for that. I have to be out at 8.”
“We’ll see about that,” replies Yuuri, trying to exude a cool he definitely does not feel. “Just get into HMW and report up at the set as soon as that’s done.”
He turns and heads back up to the set before they can protest, and tracks down Mila as soon as he’s back in the flat. “Where’s Leo,” he demands. “The actors are here. Where’s Leo.”
Mila has a bit of a pained expression on her face at that. “He left something in his hotel room and had to go back and get it,” she says.
Yuuri wants to sink into the ground. Everything is late. Everything is disastrous. It had never been this bad when he was filming shorts like “Lohengrin” in Japan. He misses that. Phichit had been the only crewmember from “Lohengrin” carried over onto On Love, but now Yuuri sorta wishes he’d brought everyone over. Even the cast.
Clearly this already-disastrous first day just goes to show he should stick to shorts. That he’s not cut out for feature-length productions. That he should just keep doing things like filming silly videos of his old dog Vicchan on his phone and uploading them to YouTube. He’s not cut out for this, he’s not —
“Yuuri?” Mila puts a hand on his shoulder. “Do you need another doughnut?”
“I shouldn’t,” says Yuuri, though the doughnuts still look extremely tempting.
“Do you usually stress-eat?” she asks.
“It’s better on my lungs than smoking,” replies Yuuri, wringing his hands, which are already shaking slightly from the caffeine.
She pauses. “Should I call him?” she asks.
Yuuri freezes. “Um,” he says.
“He said he’d be on call for us, if we needed him,” she reminds him.
Yuuri makes a pained noise. “Can he use his producer powers to make Leo show up?”
“I’m sure he can figure something out,” she reasons.
Yuuri sighs, shrugs. There’s a knock on the door; it’s probably the actors. “Your call,” he says, and he goes to get the door.
Guang-Hong and Jean-Jacques are invited onto the set moments later, and the grips are running around under Emil’s direction to reposition some lights and set up some new ones, as well as adding some flags to change the quality of the pre-existing lights. The sun has risen higher in the sky, after all, and the colour temperature is changing with the progress of the day. Yuuri watches from the back, one eye on the feed from the Alexa displayed on his tablet. Phichit is treating the camera like it’s a newborn, which is probably the right amount of caution that it deserves, considering that the damn thing is insured for thousands of USD, but it also means that any movements with the camera are being done much slower than he’s used to. Yuuri grits his teeth and tries to quell the uneasy feeling in his stomach.
“Should we change the order of the shots?” he asks Mila. “The callsheet has them doing the longest living room scenes today, but until Leo shows up, we don’t have sound.”
“The only silent living room scenes I can think of right now are ones that we need to wait for night to do,” replies Mila.
Yuuri groans. “Really,” he grumbles.
“Yeah. There are longer silent scenes in the bedroom, though. But then we’d have to set up again.”
Yuuri looks at the framing. Phichit looks over at him, raising an eyebrow. Yuuri bites at the inside of his cheek, hoping his internal screaming isn’t obvious to his cinematographer as he walks over to him.
“There’s a possibility we might need to do other scenes while we wait for sound to arrive,” he tells Phichit.
Phichit groans. “Really? I went to all that trouble of getting the perfect shot and now we might need to move everything?”
Yuuri runs a hand through his hair. “Look, I don’t like this any more than you do, but we need to get something done today, or else I’m just. I don’t know.”
“Breathe,” offers Phichit.
“I need a doughnut,” says Yuuri. In a louder voice, he adds, “Can the two of you run your lines? We want to rehearse as much as we can before we roll.”
“But we don’t have any mics,” Jean-Jacques Leroy points out helpfully.
“The sound person is running late,” says Mila.
“We just want to see the scene with blocking,” says Yuuri.
“Is it alright if I change a couple of lines?” asks Jean-Jacques.
“Then I would want to hear the changes before I tell you if I think it’s fine,” replies Yuuri, not without a little bitterness. It’s his damn film project; he’s the one who wrote it and begged the internet to help him fund it. On Love is supposed to be a work of love, not a work of anxiety-fuelled frustration.
Said bitterness seems to fly right over Jean-Jacques’s head. “Okay!” he exclaims. “So on page three, instead of saying ‘that’s a nice scarf’, I say ‘I like your scarf’, and then —”
“Just run the scene,” snaps Yuuri. “Action on rehearsal.”
“Temper, temper,” says a sudden voice from his left, and Yuuri nearly jumps out of his skin at it. Turning, he sees none other than five-time Academy Award-winning director (and now somehow, impossibly, his producer) Viktor Nikiforov looking at him, one eyebrow quirked in amusement.
“Viktor,” he hisses, “what are you doing here?”
“Checking up on you,” replies Viktor. “Mila said you were close to a meltdown. Is everything alright?”
Yuuri casts a wary glance towards where the actors are running their lines and the crew is watching. The room is getting a bit hot, with all of the lights and bodies. He takes Viktor by the wrist and leads him out of the room instead.
“I would be a lot better if I had my sound person,” he says as soon as they’re out in the hallway. “It’s the first day of shooting and everything’s going to hell.”
“Is it?” wonders Viktor. “Seems fairly standard to me.”
“Don’t be so smug,” chides Yuuri, before he catches himself and feels his ears go aflame. “I — I mean — there’s no way to make that nicer, is there? I’m sorry. I’m having a very bad morning.”
Viktor hums, tapping at his lips. Yuuri feels like he’s being dissected by the man’s piercing blue gaze, and it’s all he can do to just stay calm and not spontaneously combust at the smell of Viktor’s cologne, at the fine cut of his charcoal grey suit, at the impeccable part of his hair. A part of Yuuri really wants to mess him up. Most of him is too busy cowering in awe.
How on earth did he swing this? How on earth did he even attract the man’s attention, let alone get him to completely fund his project and become his producer? How much money did the guy even have, to get him a fucking Alexa and practically everything else? He’d anticipated having to do something low-budget like “Lohengrin”, though that particular short had gotten into the shorts selection at Cannes and Berlin and Venice for some ungodly reason. But he hadn’t anticipated any of this. And it’s driving him mad.
“Do you know why I decided to become your producer?” wonders Viktor, as if he’d read Yuuri’s mind.
Yuuri purses his lips and shakes his head.
“I thought there was something beautiful in the way you filmed ‘Lohengrin’,” replies Viktor. “The fluid way in which the story unfolded was almost like music in images. You have the potential for being a real auteur, Yuuri, and I think this project could really bring that out.”
Yuuri stifles a snort. Viktor’s latest film, Stay Close to Me, had been hailed by whoever was currently ghostwriting as Roger Ebert as a “lush cinematic masterpiece screaming out to the universe for love”, and had earned him his fifth Academy Award for best director. Everyone in the industry knows about his controlling tendencies on set, where not a single feather or fruit could be left out of place. Yuuri could never even hope to come close to that level, even if a part of him secretly hopes to surpass it someday.
“Do you have any advice for my current predicament, though?” he asks drily, nodding towards the doorway into the living room, where Jean-Jacques and Guang-Hong are still rehearsing their argument.
Viktor smiles. “Does your script really even need dialogue, Yuuri?” he wonders.
Yuuri gapes at him. “You’re saying you want me to do a silent film?”
“Silent cinema is a bit of a lost art these days,” Viktor muses. “It’d be surprising, for one. And it’ll give you a chance to get really visual with your storytelling. You can use your sound person to record ambient noise, or record a voiceover later if you really want audible narration.” He pauses, and smirks. “Besides, it stops that Canadian actor from butchering your lines.”
Yuuri chuckles, feeling just a little lighter at this proposed solution. “We could do a couple of takes,” he agrees, “and see how the two of them change their performances.”
Viktor’s eyes gleam. “That’s the spirit,” he says, and gestures to the door. “Try it for a bit, at least until Leo shows up. You can make them talk later if you don’t like how it goes.”
Yuuri nods, feeling an inordinate amount of something towards Viktor that he’d rather not dissect right now. Turning back towards the set, he tosses a smile at Viktor over his shoulder and gestures towards the doorway.
“You want to sit in?” he asks.
Viktor beams at him. His mouth takes the shape of a heart when he smiles, Yuuri notes, and it makes something warm and fuzzy erupt in his stomach.
“With pleasure,” Viktor replies, and follows him onto the set.