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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Our correspondent reports from behind the scenes of Leonardo DiCaprio's new movie.
May 4, 1999 | I'm sitting at a bar on Kata Beach pretending to mind my own business, when -- ten seats down the bar from me -- Leonardo DiCaprio suddenly flies into a rage. Leaping up from his chair, he shoves a frizzy-haired blond guy out into the rain. "Get it right, asshole!" he yells after him menacingly.
Fidgeting on my barstool, I stifle a yawn.
Granted, I'd never expected to witness this sort of spectacle when I first came to Thailand -- but as of right now I've seen Leonardo call the frizzy-haired guy "asshole" no less than 14 times in the past three hours. Judging from the intense, vaguely frustrated look on DiCaprio's face, I'm about to see it for the 15th time.
Peter, a very tall and fat South African who's been my sidekick all evening, is decidedly more enthusiastic about everything. "I think I know just what this scene needs," he whispers to me cheerfully. "The next time that guy walks up to Leonardo, I'm gonna jump in with a body-block."
"Sure," I whisper back. "Rough him up a little. Shove his face in the mud. Leo will thank you for it. Save him the trouble."
Like most of the other 100 or so people crowded into the open-air bar complex, Peter and I are background extras for a much-anticipated, controversy-riddled movie about backpacker culture called "The Beach." Unlike DiCaprio, who is said to be pocketing $20 million for his starring role in the film, Peter and I are currently chalking up $1.75 an hour for our efforts. Thus, suggesting different ways to spring forth from the background and irrevocably alter the plot of the movie is our chief method of both glossing over our sweatshop-plebian status and staving off boredom.
Despite Peter's brilliantly nihilistic schemes, we have yet to dog-pile any principal actors, walk in front of the camera without wearing pants or spontaneously choreograph a Sharks-versus-Jets-style background knife fight. I get the feeling that Peter -- who is working as an extra for the sheer hell of it, and hasn't been legally sober since sundown -- would happily do any of these acts if properly inspired.
I, on the other hand, am not quite ready to get kicked off the set. This is because my presence here is inextricably tied to an event some two months ago when -- in the name of adventure -- I attempted to infiltrate this very movie by hiring a longtail boat out to the closed filming set on Phi Phi Leh island. When that mission (while masochistically entertaining and strangely epiphanic) ended in failure, I immediately scrounged up some personal photos, fabricated an acting risumi and mailed them off in the hopes of scoring consolation work as a movie extra.
However, since the account of my abortive Phi Phi Leh adventure later ran as a Salon cover story entitled "Storming 'The Beach'" (and implicated me in such transgressions as petty theft, insobriety and trespassing), I figured the odds of my landing a legitimate extra slot would be roughly comparable to the odds of my becoming a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.
Thus, it was no small surprise when, a mere two weeks before filming on "The Beach" was scheduled to wrap, I checked my e-mail to discover that I had not only been accepted as an extra for three days of shooting at Kata Beach and Phuket Town -- but that I was also under consideration for the role of Traveler No. 1, a small speaking part that I never even knew existed.
Sitting here, pretending to sip from a Heineken bottle that went dry an hour ago, I feel a mixed sense of confidence and dread about tomorrow's auditions in Phuket Town: confidence that I can pass myself off as a convincing Traveler No. 1; dread that, in the midst of my audition, the producer will recognize me as the guy who showed up half-drunk at the cast hotel two months ago and stole his screenplay binder.
Ten seats away from me, Leonardo DiCaprio leaps up from his barstool and shoves the frizzy-haired blond guy out into the rainstorm.
"Get it right, asshole!" he yells for the 15th time.
