Every time something bad happens, like we lose a day because of weather or an actor gets injured or anything else happens, the schedule has to change. It's the most challenging Tetris puzzle.
Engineers love to optimize problems. Now I optimize logistical problems. I ask: 'What's the goal? What are our constraints? What is the optimal, elegant way to get to that goal within those constraints?' I break it down in terms of a data funnel: 'Where in the funnel are we inefficient?' That analytical background really helps.
I remember one of my first international trips to Poland. After a long, tortuous journey, we arrived at the hotel exhausted but without the team management, who had gone ahead of us from the airport in cars, checked into the best rooms, and left us with what was left.
Well, in terms of the filming with the car, you always wanted to be on the side which the cameras weren't, because - and it sounds ridiculous, but getting in and out of that car, all in leather, in the heat, was a problem.
As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.
A journey of four hundred and thirty miles can be made in any part of the United States, but in Turkey it takes as many days.
All too often on film sets, what happens is everybody gets worried about an actor being sick, a car not turning up, or the weather not being right rather than what we're ending up with onscreen.
With 'Gerald's Game' in particular, we didn't have enough money or time and it was really hard.
At several such places we landed, but always found the ascent to the interior so covered with large loose rocks that it would have been impossible to have disembarked stores or stock on any.
I had very clever producers, who scheduled it brilliantly, but scheduling it was a nightmare.
There were the usual types of things that happen, in a production, like logistical bullshit, and this and that and the other. That's the sort of stuff that happened. But I never felt, in a creative sense, that we were ever veering into a place that I hadn't signed on for.
We have a lot of systems here on board the space station, and we can't call a repair man when one of them breaks.
