When X asked us to film him doing something called the sun salutation on the roof of his apartment I was hesitant - pictured X raising a tin of Tuborg at sunrise. Plus that meant getting to his place by 7am. Turned out the Sun Salutation is like the opening sequence to Yoga. What I thought was really beautiful here was the trance-like concentration on his face as he glided cat-like through the various movements, the breathing (more on that later), and the snow. When finished X told me he had learned the basics of yoga from a girl called Dashan from California. She has a self improvement youbube site.
Unfortunately due to time constraints we had to cut a nice scene of X as instinctive musician, looking to record the sound of crunching snow underfoot with Myles’s microphone. Also the roof scene really wants to end with the finale of the salutation, any more roof action would have been like white noise, and image.
For three years X called Brendan’s Cafe his home. Not so much home, but where he always had breakfast. Brendan’s is a beautiful setting to my mind. It is small, linear, steamy, greasy and serves a wonderful fry that kept the whole team going until midday. It also has something that I call the Wim Wenders Factor. When you look around the cafe you feel like you might be in one of his movies. Maybe “Paris, Texas” or one of his other ones with cafe scenes in them.
We hoped a trip to Glendalough would result in some breathtaking snow laden scenes with X going through his “high altitude training”. Instead we shot the half frozen lake at Roundwood, pushing the car stuck in the snow, and X took a few photos for his blog. All in all it was a miserable affair. The road to Glendalough was impassable despite X’s insistence that they were grand. I did what I could with the footage that we had. My mood had gone through the floor when I saw the greeny-grey expanse of lake. It reminded me of childhood trips to the chemical plant where my uncle worked where they had a similar lagoon of foul smelling waste out the back. But back in the cutting room I saw afresh the unearthliness of it and the wonder in X’s eyes as he tried to leap over the edge onto it.
The other title I had in mind for this episode was “The Hitch-hiker”. Many of my favourite films are named in this way: The Godfather, The Shining, El Mariachi, The Streetcar Named Desire, the list goes on. Having already named Part 1 Road Trip meant I had to move away from road related themes. This is not On The Road for the web. Occasionally in filmmaking a chance encounter, a freak occurrence, brings untold richness and meat to a possibly somewhat floundering piece. In the case of High Altitude this came in the form of a hitch-hiker. To be fair to X, if it weren’t for him we would have bombed past her. She looked into the car and I looked out. That face, those bangs, that leopardskin coat. She was made for this movie.
There were some shenanigans in the car as we hurtled back towards Dublin. I concentrated on the driving while Ian caught the action. All I can say is the girl (Karolina) was charming, if quite loud.
Back in X’s place we were treated to a musical musing on his Nord Lead synthesizer. Seemingly there is a function to set up a meandering melody that keeps going without having to touch the keys. We could have stayed there for hours to watch the creative process in action but Karolina rang X. Such is film.
X’s neighbour lent us an interesting viewpoint. She told us a few facts about X to do with loud music late at night, about graffiti in the hallway, about leaving the front door open for every Tom, Dick and Harry to come in. She seemed nice enough.
For some reason X got it into his head that only he was going for dinner with our leading lady. And who am I to argue.
