The cast and crew begin swatting themselves again. They climb into her car and prepare to leave but as the car lights come up suddenly Sinclair is there, expertly pumping a shotgun one-handed (she had never held one before this film).Ĭassar calls cut and prepares to do another take. He is the center of the scene we’re watching Cassar work through, a slow walk out to a parked car where he reunites with Hall.
“She took it to me, too,” Chestnut says as he has his fake blood reapplied. At the moment it’s covered in broken glass (sugar glass, we’re told) and furniture, further signs of the back and forth which has been going on, primarily between Sinclair and star/executive producer Morris Chestnut. We tour the lake house itself in between setups, a fantastic modern affair with a giant kitchen which segues directly into the living room without missing a beat.
In part because the fake blood the cast is covered with appears to be an incredible bug attractor.įake blood which attests to the level of action Cassar has been bringing to the film’s climax (“A film like this requires so much physicality,” Sinclair says).
The instant cut is called, the itching and bug slapping returns. It’s a testament to the cast’s professionalism that they never break character (characters immune to bug bites, apparently) while the camera is rolling. In between takes, cast and crew dance around like they’re possessed, slapping exposed limbs. The humid summer air has given birth to a legion of mosquitos and the luminous set lights (the only lights visible for miles around) have drawn them all to this one area. The worst creatures roaming the set aren’t snakes or lizards, they’re bugs. What it’s achieved on the evening we arrive is to light up middle of the night, middle of nowhere Louisiana to allow stars Morris Chestnut, Regina Hall and Jaz Sinclair – the trio which pulls the film in different directions for two hours – to confront each other around an idling car and a baby car carrier (filled with rubber baby) on the location’s sole road. “It’s amazing what even a middle-range budgeted movie can achieve,” a studio publicist says. The production has rented all of the houses on the small street out in the middle of nowhere, using the houses on end of the street as base camp and filming at the other end. “The thing that really attracted me to this was putting characters in a situation that has a moral choice, a choice to be made and for the audience to play along and go ‘what would I do?’ That was a ’24’ thing,” Cassar himself opined during shooting.ĭespite spending most of its shooting time within New Orleans proper, particularly a large old house in the Garden District, Cassar has come to the outskirts of the city for the conclusion: a row of high-end boat and lake houses sitting right on the water. Taking some acknowledged inspiration from well-known thrillers like Fatal Attraction and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Cassar has eschewed guns and explosions (mostly) for something else he’s known for – tension and tightening screws. The crew has spent the last 30 days on location in New Orleans working on the tense film called When the Bough Breaks.