Charlize Theron, Jennifer Lopez, and more share their reservations with V.F., as the industry scrambles to reinvent the rules of filmmaking
“I don’t know if I personally will go back to work anytime soon,” she told“I have two small kids. I’ve had these recurring dreams—or terrors, I should say—that I somehow stupidly got it and brought it back to my kids.
I don’t want to mess with this stuff. I feel like there’s a sense of responsibility on everybody’s part to just realize that.”to make casts and crews as safe as possible from the coronavirus. The up-side is clear: firing up America’s filmmaking machine again, restoring tens of thousands of jobs in an important economic sector while creating new movies and TV shows for a world that could use the escape. But right now, the questions and doubts are still overwhelming, and getting A-list talent back to the set is far from assured. Stars big enough to attract an audience can afford to wait out the virus, and many projects can’t move forward without them. That’s created immense and conflicting pressure—livelihoods vs. actual lives. It’s not about being a diva. Actors, as well as directors, interact constantly with workers from virtually every department, making them not just susceptible to infection but also potential super-spreaders.“We all live under the same tent and it could be really, really dangerous. We’re just going to have to be really careful.”Theron, who runs the Denver and Delilah Productions company, which coproduced her new Netflix film,is still preparing projects for when principle photography is safe to resume. “We have writing rooms open and stuff like that. So there’s that kind of creative development going on. But I don’t know about actual physical production. I really don’t know when that is going to [return] in the way that we used to know it.” While guilds and studios work on “white papers” with social distancing procedures, testing guidelines, and quarantine practices, some talent are simply opting to wait indefinitely. “I’ve talked to some who are like, ‘You know what? I’m taking a year off. I’m just sitting it out,’” said producerwho is also a former executive with 20th Century Fox and New Regency. “It’s particularly some older actors who don’t want to put themselves more at risk. Others seem a little bit more confident and a little bit more eager. It does feel to me as we all watch the news and monitor what’s going on in different parts of the country, that you’re seeing the same diversity of reaction in our industry as we’re seeing in the country at large.” Devising a one-size-fits-all approach that satisfies the concerns of everyone on the call sheet will obviously be an immense challenge. “All these great actors and folks that we’re working with have their own individual thoughts about coming back. But we’re building a plan that puts as much protection around them as we possibly can,” said producerreboot for Disney+ when the quarantine hit, as well as on the“Nobody wants to go into an environment that’s going to be risky and that goes for crew members too. It’s not just talent. It’s everybody involved on set,” he said. “There’s a nervousness and that’s natural and understandable. In the plans that we’ve discussed, they’ve certainly taken that into account and we’ll see when we get there, I guess.”didn’t have to worry about theaters not being open for his upcoming Vietnam war drama,—the movie debuts on Netflix in June—but he was supposed to begin shooting a new film with Legendary Pictures based on the graphic novel“It’s Romeo and Juliette during the age of hip-hop. It takes place in the People’s Republic of Brooklyn, New York. I was supposed to be shooting that this summer in New York,” the filmmaker said, then added matter-of-factly: “Not this summer…”“They ain’t doing a thing until the vaccine,” said Lee. “I know I’m not going to a movie theater. I know I’m not going to a Broadway show. I know I’m not going to Yankee Stadium.” He urged caution on resuming productions, despite the economic hurt: “Corona is aplaying. You fuck around, you’re going to get killed, you’re going to die. I’m not ready to go.” As a producer and director, Lee’s been thinking about ways to make production safe, but doesn’t see a feasible solution. “How are you going to do a love scene anymore, or an intimate scene? I mean, are you going to do a movie by remote, likeJennifer Lopezopposite Colombian singer“It was remote moviemaking with social distancing, with people in your house and on Zoom and Maluma in Colombia and us reading the scene together,” she said. “And then somebody [was] on his side shooting his [lines] and they set up a camera in my house that was static and shooting me.”It worked, said Lopez, because it was a simple scene: “I wouldn’t recommend this is how we do movies from now on." But she’s not expecting a return to normal anytime soon either. “At the end of the day, it's safety first,” she said. “You would hope that there’s a vaccine, but I think that’s not something that pops up overnight. That’s going to take time for people to figure out.”Masks, temperature checks, and daily COVID tests feel like a certainty. And even then, a positive test could upend the whole production, so producers believe that even more isolating measures are necessary. Among the most likely proposals is a new modular structure to crews. Construction crews do their work and leave. Then lighting crews come in and set up for the next day. The actors have their private makeup and costumers. The camera crews keep their distance from the actors. At the end of the shift, everyone would also be sequestered from any social interaction outside their pod, for the duration of the shoot. It’s not a perfect system, and it could sap some of the flexibility and morale from the crew, but it may be the fastest way to get them back to work in a way that’s safe. If someone gets sick, the whole pod might be out of work and need to be replaced. But the rest of the crew could go on.
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