Poplarville, Mississippi

I’m back in the city after a three-week stint in Poplarville, MS as the assistant director on a low-budget feature. It’s strange to be back. Here my cell phone works and I can check my e-mail. No one asks me where they are supposed to be or what they are supposed to be doing. I’m not even wearing a watch.

It feels like summer here and I’m slightly disappointed that I missed spring in New York, though a friend who was here for the past month says she feels the same way.

It was hot during the day in Mississippi and I spent almost the entire three weeks outside.

The heat is different there; it’s thicker and I can feel the moisture in the air.

Most of the film takes place in the woods and I find it refreshing to be traipsing around in rubber boots climbing over rocks and wading into the water. It reminds me of childhood adventures on Grassy Swamp Road in Narrowsburg.

At times, we have to rig a boat across a small river to transport equipment to and from a set that we are unable to drive. The key grip stands shirtless, pulling the boat back and forth, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Wildlife in the swamps of Mississippi is unfamiliar to me and I am terrified by the first few snake sightings. I cover up my fears for the actor who has to run through the brush over and over again, take after take.

Despite spraying high-powered repellent on my arms, legs and face, I am absolutely covered in mosquito bites. I chose many times to keep a long-sleeved shirt on through the heat, to cover my forearms, but find eventually that the mosquitoes adapt and start biting me through the fabric.

In the beginning, I neglect to wear socks with my boots because I don’t want them to get wet; though the costume designer twice warns me about blisters and offers me some cheap clean socks. I don’t listen and now have large painful red marks on my ankles and feet.

We are understaffed on the shoot, which makes everything more challenging. We don’t have enough vehicles and we are moving from location to location quickly. We get lost multiple times. I try to keep a sense of humor about it.

We are staying in the middle of absolute nowhere. It’s an hour’s drive to buy alcohol or food, 30 minutes for cigarettes and gasoline, which is hard on a film set where those things are of equal necessity.

We pass many Confederate flags driving around the neighborhood and a few of our extras make KKK jokes when they think no one is listening. The people who are helping us scoff at me when I explain that we won’t be firing a real gun on set, even though the characters are shooting in the scene. “Ya’ll afraid of guns?” they ask.

We are all called “Yankees,” and I get stared down by a strange-looking guy at Wal-Mart as I stand with one of the actors and the producer in the make-up aisle, trying to figure out what “concealer” is and what shade matches the actor’s face.

We grow close to a family whose property we are using for many locations. They are incredibly sweet, though I don’t think they like me very much, not understanding that my lack of patience and shortness of conversation has nothing to do with them and is based solely on my stress level.

They despise cursing and a certain f-word in particular. The eldest of the family is extremely offended and close to tears when he hears it come out of someone’s mouth in front of his wife. I apologize profusely, trying to explain briefly that we are fighting the sun to get a very complicated shot, and race off, back to the set yelling, “Quiet please!”

The next day, he makes the entire crew jambalaya, which is incredible. We shake hands and all is forgiven.

His son’s girlfriend visits us on the last day, bringing with her deep-fried Oreos and Snickers Bars.

“I didn’t know you could deep fry a Snickers Bar.” I say.

“Oh yeah,” she says, “You can deep fry anything.”

Zac Stuart-Pontier