Game Night: Things I wish I'd done differently

Yesterday I watched the rough cut of Game Night. So far, so good. There are some parts that really work and some parts that need help.

I've learned some things. First, we have to do some voice over. There's one section of voice over built into the script so I have to call in an actor to do it. He was recommended to me by one of my actors and she promised he'd be cool. He has to play her dad, shouting at her from outside the door. On a normal day I'd have been able to pick any one of my actor or even non actor friends and make them do it, but I had to be miss fancy pants and hire a Chinese girl to play Sheila so her dad has to be Chinese too, and picking someone who sounds like Mickey Rourke in Breakfast at Tiffany's is not an option. I just hope this guy's okay with doing an hour's work for no face time.

Without his voice over the story is completely confusing. Even with his voice over, it may be a bit confusing. So I decided to change one line. Lead Actor says at one point Nobody's leaving until we get what we came for," but it's not clear what they came for. So I'm going to have him come in and say "Nobody's leaving until we get our money." Problem solved. Just changing that little bit will fix the confusion completely, I think. I just hope we can get the audio to match. We're doing the VO at editor's studio where we have professional equipment, so that should help.

Watching the finished product makes me both happy and annoyed at myself for not seeing more problems while we were filming. Former Writing Partner never stops making a cringing face. Like, every single scene he's cringing. And in the end when he's supposed to be manly and take on the other guy by staring down the barrel of a gun, he's still cringing. On set I even mentioned that he needed to butch it up, but he said the other actor was pushing the gun too hard into his head. So ever shot, he's still cringing. Editor had to keep the shots on the other guy almost the entire time, which makes it difficult to get the intensity of the scene.

And the big reveal at the end, where we see - well, we see a big bulge in his pants because he is a man now - the reaction from the girl who's supposed to be impressed is not significant enough. I wish I'd lingered longer on that and let her ad lib some stuff.

But you live, you learn. I still think it will be a solid first film when all is said and done, and I'm proud of it and the people I worked with.