GOING BACKWARDS – PART III

So I’m running a little late with my 2nd anniversary retrospective. Guess what? Most of that Saturday, July 21st, was about me running up and down all over town. All of the outdoor running scenes were filmed that day. But first things first. Our schedule began at 10am with the crew coming to my place for the interview part. As I was soon to learn, filming schedules end up never being followed as originally planned, but somehow everything seems to work out right in the end. So filming at my place wasn’t over that day. In fact, in everyday we started at 10 am by doing some extra shots at home.

It was the hottest week of the year. The crew was so huge I had to keep the apartment door open. My dog enjoyed making surprise visits to the neighbors, even when they weren’t so thrilled about it. The crew picked the shirt was wearing. If you have a keen eye for Depeche Mode merch, it’s an original (and quite worn out) “The Singles Tour” T-shirt. Something I bought on ebay some 20 years ago, my very first DM shirt and it’s not something I’d wear when going out, but it made it to the final cut of the film.

Once we were done with the interview part, we went out for what I called “the Nike ad filming”. They really had the sunlight timed out perfectly the previous day. We spent hours doing some 6 or 7 takes of me running under the Gleimtunnel (which is only 130m long). Between each take, they’d check the playback, adjust something on the camera, do a take from the front, another from behind, another running along. It felt like we spent some three hours doing that. Then we moved on to Kreuzberg where most of the running scenes were made. All I had to do was run after “action” and stop whenever they decided they had enough material. That actually got me sweating since I only knew when to start running, but no idea when to stop. The part under the U-Bahn was particularly challenging because they were filming from across the street and I couldn’t listen to their commands without turning my head as well. But the light was sensational. I think we must have filmed roughly between 20h and 22h.

We still had one more scene they wanted, which didn’t make it to the final cut, sadly. They wanted some indoors running scene as well and since they couldn’t find a gym that would agree on letting us do it on such a short notice, they figured they would use their guest privilege of the sister hotel that they were staying. The work-out room of the sister hotel just so happened to be on the 1st floor, on the corner of the building that had full glass windows. I got in with the producer and the rest of the crew was parked outside discretly pointing their camera at me running on a treadmill from across the street. The producer was in charge of relaying the instructions. The whole thing didn’t last much and I never got to take a peek of how it came out, so maybe it was totally rubbish from a visual perspective. It’s the sort of crazy thing I wish they had used, but maybe it could have caused them legal fun later on. Oh well, another day going to bet around 1am with a 10am schedule to get going the next morning.