John Schimmel

I was between jobs and Hollywood was in a strange time, so you took what you could get. And I was about to go to work with somebody who is written up in more than one book about Hollywood as the worst person in the world to work for. And I had met a guy named Hawk Koch. He was the line producer on the Schwarzenegger movie Collateral Damage that I helped produce. And Hawk called me up and said, 'You can't do that.' And he had just become a partner in Ascendant Pictures, which was Chris's film company, which was the venture that he did between the Wing Commander stuff. And so I met Chris and his partners at the time, and he brought me on as president of production at that company. It was a really interesting company. We were somehow the American agents for a German tax fund. And for anybody that knows about filmmaking, we had 20% first money in, last money out to contribute to movies, which made us incredibly valuable. And we did Lord of War and we did Outlander and Lucky Number Slevin and a bunch of interesting films. And then that company went the way of production companies. The distribution deals make it really hard to survive. And then after that went away, Chris and I had lunch once a month for a while while he was putting this together. Chris and me and his giant dog, Paddington, who we would walk to lunch and then feed bread, his favorite bread from the restaurant we always ate at. Anyway, at some point, Chris said he had put this together and asked me if I wanted to come run narrative. And I said, 'Yeah, sure.' That was 10 years ago.

That shoot was like nothing I think anybody has ever encountered. Actually, the first role I had on that shoot was that from Los Angeles I decorated a house in Ealing for Chris and Dave Haddock and myself and Hannes Appel to live in. So we had this sort of communal house. We had turned the living room into the face scan place, and I turned the garage into a clubhouse with a giant television in it. And we were about a block from the studio. So that was pretty wonderful. The conceit of that shoot was, it was 2015 and we were going to release the game in 2017. So we were in sort of a hurry. It was a 90-day shoot. We had, I think, three days of pre-production meetings, maybe. And we had, I think, seven out of what eventually became 21 or 23 scripts written. And so Hannes and Dave and Phil Meller and I basically built a schedule together based on an outline. We would go, 'Well, this is what's going to happen in this scene. Well, that'll probably take three days,' right? Insane. And then started making these giant cast deals, because we had that spectacular cast, but we were sort of guessing about how much time we were going to need for it. So it wasn't exactly relaxing, that process. I started there with just me and a production manager, and then Chris brought on this amazing line producer, Philippa Knott, and I'm going to say her name because she's amazing and she deserves employee appreciation. And the three of us ran the production office, and it was on fire most days, a metaphorical fire. And the goal was to not allow that fire to touch the set, so that Chris could have a relaxed set. But we were juggling actors and trying to make deals and script pages. I don't know why Haddock or Weissbaum are alive. Dave especially was on set all day, because he was valuable to Chris as a creative partner on set, and then he'd go home and write scripts, and then he'd show up in the morning with the pages they were going to shoot that day. It was nuts. But it was really fun. At the time we didn't really have much of an in-house mocap crew, so the Imaginarium crew were sort of half of the control area, and they were wonderful. And our side was Will and Dave and Chris and myself and Hannes and this completely irreverent script supervisor, whose name I will leave out, who would say anything to anybody. And we laughed for 90 days, basically. It was enormous fun, and we got great, great stuff. It was still early in the mocap technology life. So many of our actors, especially the name actors, had never done it before. And what they discovered was a kind of democracy on the set, because everybody was wearing the same not flattering suit, the jumpsuit with the buttons on it. There are no real sets on stage. Sometimes we would pull up a set from the game, but mostly you're working with plywood and two-by-four timbers, because the motion capture cameras don't see anything on set except the balls. So it doesn't matter what they look like. They just need to match the measurements in the engine so that people aren't leaning through a bar or sleeping in the middle of a bed or something. So they variously described it as kindergarten, as black box theater. But it required tremendous imagination on their part. And they mostly loved, not everybody, but mostly loved it.

It's a lot like doing a play, or rehearsing a play rather, because the audience isn't in the room.

It's a lot like doing a play. Well, and the other thing is that if you're doing a movie or you're shooting a television show... and this is part of the challenge of shooting it, of acting it, and of writing it: you don't have a focus. You're playing to the world, because everything in the environment is visible and possible. So you're playing for big, you're playing for small, you're playing for next to you, you're playing for somebody across. It's very interesting.