I woke up on Wednesday morning feeling brave, so I searched Google for open casting calls near San Francisco. To my delight, I found one looking for a Middle Eastern man. I applied, feeling excited all day and that afternoon I got called by the director telling me that I fit the part and I got giddy.
As we chatted, however, I started noticing some odd things. He asked me to add him on Facebook so that he can send me one of his previous videos, which had 5 views on YouTube and was a strange video of him walking around and staring out to sea. I checked out his acting resume and found a lot of broken links. Then I spent a frustrating 30 minutes trying to join a Zoom meeting with him because he couldn’t figure out how to send a meeting invite. Once in the meeting, we ran through the lines fine, but he kept wasting time despite the actress telling him that she had to go to bed early. He was also slightly condescending to her. We asked him for the address of the shoot the next day, but he kept giving us the name of the place instead. After the Zoom meeting, at 11 pm, he wanted to call me on the phone and run through the script again. I refused and started wondering if I had made a big mistake.
I considered bailing, but I figured that it would be unethical to quit after having made the commitment, especially considering that he had a deadline of that Saturday, so on Thursday morning the next day I marked my work calendar as “out of office” and drove to the shooting location.
First, I went to pick up the cinematographer. This was not unusual, in my opinion, because a lot of people in the acting business are “starving artists” without their own transportation and we have to help each other out. What I didn’t expect is that she would get motion sickness and I would spend the rest of the ride on edge, driving at half the speed limit, terrified that she would get sick all over my car. It might not have helped that she was getting large blasts of cold air to the face from the windows that I had opened to circulate the air as a precaution against the Coronavirus.
I reached the shooting location 20 minutes late and found that the director still hadn’t arrived, but the actress was there, upset, and threatening to walk off the set. I started airing my own frustrations and that encouraged her and the cinematographer to let loose a barrage of grievances against the director. In a sudden and surprising moment of camaraderie, the three of us decided that we had lost all faith in the project and were going to walk off the set.
I volunteered to make the call on behalf of the group. The director, unaware that he had a full mutiny on his hands, answered to confidently tell me that he had just arrived. As I broke the news to him, I saw him running up to us in a panic along the sidewalk. My heart sank, knowing that we had failed to make our escape in time.
He started throwing excuses at us, including that he had stopped to pick up a dozen red roses as an apology to the actress for being late. She refused to accept them, but he insisted, so she carried them as she argued with him about everything that’s wrong and who’s fault it was. Every time I tried to speak, he interrupted me to tell me to wait because he could only “deal with one person at a time.” Finally, the unappeased and very uncomfortable actress handed me the flowers and walked away. That’s when the director turned to me.
First, he ranted about the actress. Then I was blamed for not convincing her to stay. Then he ranted about the cinematographer. Then he tried convincing me that he can find another actress within an hour and we can finish the shoot. Then he tried selling me his mission to create content that positively portrays Muslims in the media. Then he tried warning me that if I walked away he wouldn’t work with me again.
I thought of his deadline in two days. I thought of the commitment that I had made to him, even though it had been less that 12 hours ago. I thought of how hard it would be for him to find another perfect fit. However, I couldn’t handle it. The last thing on Earth that I wanted to do was to stay and shoot this film. For the first time in my life, I literally turned my back on someone and walked away.
I felt scared. I felt bad. But, above all, I feel free. Nobody should spend their time in an uncomfortable situation that their gut tells them is wrong for them. Trust your gut when you’re seeing flags that are as red as the dozen roses that are now in a vase in my living room as a reminder that sometimes you just have to walk away.
Living, Learning, Meditating 