The actor was able to ascertain the potential for all these benefits a few days later when he read the screenplay they sent him. He read it in the enormous living room of his house, reclining in an armchair, with a large Portuguese water dog sleeping on the rug at his feet, in that light sleep animals enjoy: each time a page turned, there was just enough noise to make the ears of his loyal Bob twitch. I could picture the scene perfectly when I was describing it to my friend, and much better when I relived the conversation at night — so much better, that I no longer heard the words: I just saw what they evoked.
That screenplay, I continued, was “fictional,” which meant that it told a story that had never taken place. It hadn’t taken place in reality, the proof of which was that at the moment it was being written, it could still have turned out to be something else: the story of a failed marriage, a robbery, an invasion
of extraterrestrials, the life of the pope, or the inventor of the microwave oven. But, no: out of the almost infinite combinations of possible situations, the one that had come into being was that of a goatherd. . And we already knew the rest. This was the plot of the movie that was made. The production team traveled to Ukraine to find the right locations, and when everything was just about ready to be filmed, there went our heartthrob — in the meantime he had had time to let his hair and beard grow and to conscientiously study his role.
It’s not that they couldn’t have filmed it in a studio in Los Angeles. Everything can be reproduced on a set with the right staging and a few editing tricks. If they wanted the real mountains, all they had to do was send a cameraman there and then insert those takes where they belonged. But the decision to film on location was the result of the producers’ well-reasoned policy, which took into account several concurrent factors, the first being financial, for the cost of living in Ukraine was exponentially less than in the United States, and the salaries of the people they’d hire in situ would allow them to significantly reduce their budget; moreover, the Ukrainian authorities showed interest in the project, which fit in with their own policy of attracting strategic investments; with the Ministry of Culture’s cooperation, they would be allowed to shoot interior spaces normally off limits to the public, thereby exhibiting to the world the country’s unknown artistic and architectural riches; finally, there was the famous quality of light in the mountains, which would give the film its own, unique atmosphere, which could not be reproduced by artificial means.
In any case, there went the actor. Needless to say, he did not go alone; he took his secretary, bodyguards, assistants, a coach, and a personal trainer. Nor did he pack his own bags, also needless to say, for that’s what he paid his servants to do, but he did choose certain objects or items of clothing that he wanted to take with him. One of those objects was the watch. He opened his dresser drawer where he kept watches and jewelry, quickly thought out what he would need and what would be convenient to have (this was not the first time he had traveled to film in exotic locations), and he chose his solid and reliable gold Rolex Daytona. This reliable timepiece served various purposes. In the first place, a watch — which he had little use for in the course of his pampered life — was indispensable during those frenetic days of shooting out in nature, as he well knew from experience: risings at dawn, constant moves from place to place, last-minute changes of plans, urgent meetings. Moreover and by the same token, the watch for such circumstances should be water and shock resistant, for he didn’t know what ordeals it would have to endure. At the same time, he wanted it to be elegant, an expression of his stature as a sex symbol and a man of success, for the shooting of the film would entail more than just acting: there would be parties, outings, and they had even planned ahead for public relations events with the Ukrainian authorities, who — he could bet on it — would want to have their pictures taken with him.
I was putting a lot of my own into all this, but it is natural to put into any story, along with a lot of what one has seen and heard, assumptions of cause and effect, without which there are too many loose ends. I was a little ashamed to expose how much I knew about the life and work of movie stars, for it might lead one to think that I was especially interested in the subject or that I wasted my time reading “special interest” magazines. But, as I already said, knowledge of these popular subjects is in the air, and an effort must be made to not acquire it rather than to acquire it. And, as I also already said, nothing human is alien to me. Knowing does not occupy much room: information about actors or singers does not take space away from Plato or Nietzsche. I’ve always distrusted those intellectuals who have never heard of the Rolling Stones. My friend and I saw eye to eye on this; just a few minutes earlier, he had talked knowledgeably about the “star system,” by way of example.
Our actor did not travel directly there. He stopped off in Paris, where he met with his co-star and the producers, and together they gave a press conference to announce the project. This event took place in the ballroom of a large hotel in the French capital; he was besieged by flashes from photographers, eager to publicize his change of “look” (hair and beard): he was beginning to turn into the primitive herdsman of the movie, even though he was still himself. And he was so much himself that he wound up getting annoyed at the journalists’ insistence on asking about his recent divorce and the beautiful actress who had precipitated it. Nor was he pleased with their political questions about the collaboration implied by his participation in this movie with the governments of the countries in the ex-Soviet Bloc, governments he had criticized during his period of environmental activism.
The order of my reasoning was implacable. One by one I was introducing all the elements for a proof of reality, which I could then use when I contrasted it with fiction. While I was reconstructing the conversation (and there, also, I was implacable in not skipping a single word, and I might have even added a few), I realized that the “actor” was already the “character” in a certain sense: not the character that he would soon embody during the shooting of the movie, but the character of the story that I, marginally and for the rhetorical imperatives of the demonstration, was recounting. And the more details I added in order to round out the figure of the “actor,” the more of a “character” he became. This was inevitable, for fiction, in order to express itself, adopts a narrative structure that is the same as the one used by reality to make itself intelligible. Inevitable or not, however, I had to admit that it weakened my argument. It would have benefited, for instance, from a stronger contrast, from the positing of a reality that my friend and I would recognize as more real — for example, our own reality or something equivalent. The reality of a Hollywood star was colored by unreality and not easy to take seriously.
Even so, I believed I was on the right track, and I continued: we were already in the Desert Mountains, and here all we needed to do was take a quick look at the process of making the movie: the long days of filming when the lighting was good, the changes of location for scenes that took place in villages or the city, the endless repetitions demanded by the director who was a perfectionist, the inevitable interruptions due to rain or problems with the team or the local extras not keeping to the schedule. We might also pass over the no less important editing process carried out in studios back in Los Angeles. We then came to what we had watched the night before on our television sets: the story of a goatherd who was a victim of circumstance. That character didn’t exist and never had. The identification between him and the actor who had given him body and voice was momentary and functional. Once the movie was made, the actor could forget about him forever. The goatherd (the “character”) was a fantasy created for artistic and commercial purposes — much more the second than the first in this case — a fantasy made of images and words, whose precarious reality was at the mercy of the movie lovers’ voluntary suspension of disbelief. A fundamental difference resided in the fact that the life of the actor was biological, it had a long “before” — as seen from his screen career, his divorce, his dog Bob — and would have an “after” that would last as long as Destiny provided; whereas the goatherd would continue to repeat that illusory fragment of nonbiological life, made of light and electronic impulses. They had coincided only in representation.