Abyss

(Directed by Kelly McCommons)

I was insanely sick when I went over to Kelly's house to shoot this. High fever, sinuses packed with mucous and all sorts of other horrid stuff...but the project was due, and I loved the idea, and, you know, suffer for your art. I've always loved working on this sort of thing: artistic, surreal, dark, difficult. I have a deep, secret love of experimental cinema, Arthouse films, true independent pictures, Cinema Pur, and the Dadaist films of Man Ray. This felt like that in a lot of ways. Besides, it was Kelly McCommons. I'll be in anything Kelly wants to direct and shoot.

Here's what I remember about the shoot:

1) When Kelly filled the brand-new, never used before white bathtub with Marquette City water, the water was blue, from all the chlorine in it. Not just a little blue, either: think "all the ice melted in my blue cool-aid" blue. Think swimming pool blue.

2) Putting your head underwater is easy. Tilting it back means water pours straight up your nose into your sinuses, which hurts like hell, hurts worse when the water is packed with chlorine, and hurts worst of all when your sinuses are horribly inflamed and hurt already. On one of the early takes, when I went underwater, a bunch of blood and snot came out of my nose in a big clot. Kelly was shooting under the surface at the time, and somewhere, allegedly, there's footage of this monstrosity floating in slow-motion in the peaceful silence of the hot chemical water of Marquette, but I've never seen it.

3) The next day, I wasn't sick anymore. These are the curative, restorative powers of bathing in milk for hours.